Issue 106: Everything I read in January

Slow reads, strange books, and talking to myself like I am 7 years old

A heartfelt welcome to all the new faces around here! I think you'll quickly see that you're among friends – book people really are the best!

January felt important to me as a reading month – I knew it would set the tone for the year ahead. Reading is that rare space in my life that does so much heavy lifting: it keeps my mind alive, pushes back against the daily grind of midlife, and helps me resist getting swept away in the algorithm currents. But I'm careful not to turn it into another optimization project. I won't let myself burn out on the thing that brings me the most joy by trying to be some kind of perfect reader. And with that spirit in mind, three exciting things happened in my reading life this January.

1| I kicked off my 19th Century Wives Under Pressure project — in 2025 I will be reading Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, and The Portrait of a Lady — by joining

Henry Eliot

’s slow read of Anna Karenina. Those of you who've been here a while know I usually read based on mood, but last year's month of Joan Didion – while it kicked my butt – showed me something different. There's something profound about going deep with an author or theme. So while The Wives Project continues my 2024 journey of reading about women pushing against social boundaries, I'm also planning some focused author deep-dives later in the year, with Rachel Cusk Month coming up in March.

2| I read my first poetry collection of the year – something that's always intimidated me and honestly still does. I've felt so insecure about poetry, partly because English is my second language. But now I tell myself what I tell my 7-year-old: when you're new at something, it feels hard and uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean you can't figure it out. You just need practice. So I'm practicing with poetry, focusing on what speaks to me instead of getting stuck on the parts that don't.

3| I started keeping a commonplace book. After sharing my annotation practice months ago, I mentioned I was still searching for a way to collect my favorite quotes. Many of you suggested trying a commonplace book. After falling down research rabbit hole, I'm happy to report that my first month of commonplace booking has been a revelation. I'm hooked! And I'll share all the details about that journey on Thursday.

But for now – here's everything I read in January. It was such a rich and slightly strange month! I can't wait to dive in with you!

Books mentioned:

• The Anthropologists — Ayşegül Savaş

• Walking on the ceiling — Ayşegül Savaş

• Pond — Claire-Louise Bennett

• In Thrall — Jane DeLynn

• Elena Knows — Claudia Piñeiro

• Simple Passion — Annie Ernaux

• Didion and Babitz — Lili Anolik

• The Hurting Kind — Ada Limón

• Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy (in progress)

📚 The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş was my first time reading Savaş, and I must say—I’m a fan. It’s a lovely, quiet novel, a low-key story about a pair of expats/immigrants living in an unnamed city (which, let’s be honest, is clearly Paris—its anonymity irked me a bit). Feeling the pressure to live “the correct way,” they set out to buy an apartment. As they navigate their search, trying to reconcile their idealistic expectations with their limited budget, Savaş gradually excavates their perfectly normal relationship, their semi-successful attempts at making friends in adulthood, and the "unremarkable grace" of their daily life.

What I loved most about this book—aside from the refreshing break from stories of marital dysfunction—were the scenes featuring Asya and Manu's parents. Asya and Manu meet as international students and later build a life together in a third country, striving to balance the values of their childhoods with the singularity of their relationship. At the same time, they wrestle with a familiar fear shared by so many immigrants: the need to conceal just how different their lives are from those they left behind.

I won’t lie—there were tears.

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📚 Walking on the Ceiling by Ayşegül Savaş—After loving The Anthropologists so much, I immediately wanted more Savaş. This is her debut novel, and I found it just as beautifully written and quietly profound. She has a gift for capturing the significance of life’s small moments—the rituals of childhood, the trees that evoke memories of our parents, the poetry of a walk.

In this story, we meet Nunu, a twenty-something Turkish woman who arrives in Paris on a student visa, ostensibly to study writing, while grieving the loss of her mother. She never makes it to class but instead forms an intimate friendship with an older, well-known writer famous for chronicling her native Istanbul. Their connection is built on a shared love for the city and unfolds through long walks across Paris, where they reveal deeply personal details about their lives—yet keep so much hidden from each other.

“Stories are reckless things, blind to everything but their own shape. When you tell a story, you set out to leave so much behind,” Nunu observes. And as you read, you can’t help but wonder: Who is lying? Who is telling the truth?

With its many walking scenes—set in both Paris and Istanbul—the novel reminded me of Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse and brought back vivid memories of my own twenties, of wandering unfamiliar streets with older men I probably shouldn’t have been walking beside. What a strange kind of bravery it is to be young, heartbroken, and searching for something steady to hold onto.

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📚 Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett was the strangest—and my favorite—book of last month. I’m honestly at a bit of a loss for how to describe it, which feels like such a cliché thing to say… but in this case, it’s true.

Here’s what I know: the unnamed protagonist is a young woman who seems to have left a PhD program in English Literature after making some questionable romantic choices and has settled in a small cottage in the Irish countryside. There, she contemplates the charm of bananas and oatcakes for breakfast, the pleasures and anxieties of throwing a party ("Isn't a party a splendid thing not only because of the people there but also because of the people who aren't and who suppose they ought to be?"), and imagines a man trying to assault her while on a walk (he doesn’t).

She is funny, odd, misanthropic—utterly magnetic—but the true star of this book is the narrative itself, which is wholly and fully its own. I know all of this sounds evasive, but that’s how the book feels too—strange, amorphous, plotless, without crescendo. Just the thoughts, longings, and desires of an eccentric mind, with you, the reader, dropped right into the middle of it. If you like your books on the weird side, this one is for you. I adored it.

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📚 In Thrall by Jane DeLynn – This book was a gift from the publisher, Semiotext(e), the force behind some of the most interesting, offbeat writing out there. Originally published in the ’80s, it’s considered a queer lit classic—and yet, somehow, I had never heard of it. How?!

This is a coming-of-age story about a high school student growing up in 1960s New York City, grappling with her sexuality, navigating friendships, and witnessing the casual violence of high school heterosexual relationships. The protagonist, Lynn—funny, sarcastic, and awkward as hell—falls for her 37-year-old English teacher, writes her a letter confessing her feelings, and, to her surprise, ends up in a strange, loving, sad, and (obviously) problematic relationship with this closeted lesbian teacher.

The novel is both honest and unsettling, a throwback to a time before Stonewall, before GSA clubs, before social media—when discovering yourself meant doing so in the dark, with no role models, no guideposts, no safety net. It’s lighthearted and supremely readable yet delivers gut-punching insights on adolescent sexuality, queer identity, and the bittersweet wisdom that comes with age.

It also reminded me that no amount of money could convince me to relive my high school years. Nope.

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📚 Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro – This thriller-esque novel by one of Argentina’s most celebrated contemporary authors reminded me that every book is a historical artifact, shaped by the time and space its author inhabits. I learned that Piñeiro is not only a renowned writer but also a fierce political activist, particularly for women’s rights and abortion rights in Argentina. Knowing that, I felt the simmering anguish and frustration beneath the surface of this book even more acutely.

At its core, this is the story of a mother, Elena, who has Parkinson’s disease and is desperate to understand the apparent suicide of her only adult, unmarried daughter. The novel unfolds like a whodunnit, pulling me into its mystery with breathless anticipation, only to reveal something far deeper: a meditation on the choicelessness of female existence and the entrapment of our own bodies.

Following the story from Elena’s perspective—her aching body, her stiff neck, her uncooperative legs—filled me with such anguish and compassion that at times, looking down at the book, I felt as if I were inhabiting her body, a ghost moving in and out of both of us. It was an experience I won’t forget.

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📚 Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux – So many of my favorite writers (most notably Rachel Cusk and Lauren Elkin) cite Ernaux as an influence, so reading my first book by her felt like a momentous occasion.

This slim novel is a fictionalized account of Ernaux’s affair with a Soviet diplomat—an experience she later lays bare even more fully in Getting Lost, her diaries from the same period. The book reads like a fever dream: a smart, accomplished woman losing herself, completely restructuring her life around sporadic encounters with a man who is more compelling as an idea than in reality.

As an Eastern European, I can never resist a good Cold War story (I’m writing one myself), so between the torment of the affair and the undercurrent of political tension, this book felt just about perfect.

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📚 Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik — For a change of pace, I picked up Lili Anolik’s much-discussed book about Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. It’s a fun, gossipy dual biography of two truly iconic women, and Anolik argues that rather than seeing them as opposites, we should consider them foils for each other.

Anolik—who is largely responsible for the Eve Babitz renaissance—does not hide her allegiance to Team Babitz. She builds the book around an unsent letter Eve once wrote to Joan, in which she asks:

Could you write what you do if you weren't so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren't physically so unthreatening? Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it weren't that he regards you a lot of the time as a child so it's all right that you are famous. And you yourself keep making it more all right because you are always referring to your size.

Meow.

The book paints Didion as ambitious, driven, obsessed, calculating—determined to be as successful as the male writers she admired. Babitz, in contrast, is portrayed as a bumbling free spirit, a raw talent, a party girl who refused to play the game. It made me think a lot about what it took for a woman—especially at that time—to become a successful writer, and I appreciated the closer look at Didion’s romantic life and personal choices. Anolik’s version of The Didion Origin Story suggests that Didion was in love with a man (conservative journalist Noel Parmentel) who wouldn’t have children with her, so she married the man who would (John Gregory Dunne), despite not particularly caring for him—and who, according to Anolik, may have been gay.

But the book’s central Didion-vs.-Babitz contrast turns both women into caricatures, and I wasn’t fully convinced that they were as essential to each other’s development as Anolik wants us to believe. The whole thing has a Jackie vs. Marilyn vibe that I can’t quite accept—why are we still pitting women against each other, even in death?

That said, the book is undeniably catty and fun. I did chuckle at many of the anecdotes—Didion breaking up with her college boyfriend by telling him she liked being spanked after sex? Harrison Ford as everybody’s drug dealer?—but the feminist in me couldn’t get on board with its core premise.

If, like me, you haven’t read Babitz yet, Anolik (a Babitz superfan) recommends Slow Days, Fast Company. I might.

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📚 The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón – My first poetry collection of the year, and I’m still having to hype myself up to read it, despite my lingering feeling that I "don’t know what to do with poetry." But Limón is a crowd-pleaser, and her poems have a way of reaching even the most literal heart.

She’s known for her nature writing and environmentalist sensibility, but the poem that completely wrecked me—tore me into a million pieces—is this one

Joint custody
— by Ada Limón

Why did I never see it for what it was:
abundance? Two families, two different
kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two
creeks, two highways, two stepparents
with their fish tanks or eight-tracks or
cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or
reading skills. I cannot reverse it, the record
scratched and stopping to that original
chaotic track. But let me say, I was taken
back and forth on Sundays and it was not easy
but I was loved each place. And so I have
two brains now. Two entirely different brains.
The one that always misses where I'm not,
and the one that is so relieved to finally be home.

I read it as a poem of immigrant life and cannot even begin to tell you how accurate those last two lines felt to me. I also wondered what other two brains this might apply to.

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📚 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy — Finally! As many of you know, I started Anna Karenina and made it through the first 80 pages. My strongest first impression? How contemporary it feels.

The novel opens in the Oblonsky household, where Stiva and Dolly are in the midst of a marital crisis over his infidelity. The portrait of a relationship on the rocks feels strikingly relatable, and Tolstoy does a remarkable job of throwing us straight into a world of drama, gossip, ambition, and an overwhelming yearning for love and validation.

I’m still early in the book, but what I’m enjoying most so far is the characterization. The main characters are rendered with incredible depth and nuance, but Tolstoy also sprinkles in these sidebar comments from secondary characters that add a lightness and humor to the story. And speaking of characters—I am completely obsessed with Konstantin Levin. I recently learned that Tolstoy modeled him after himself, which makes me even more intrigued to see where his arc goes.

I’m finding an unexpected sense of peace and joy in reading this novel. Every time I pick up my copy, I can literally feel my shoulders relaxing. It’s not just the immersive quality of the story but also the reminder that whatever personal or professional struggles we’re navigating today—love, jealousy, ambition, existential doubt—have been with us for hundreds of years.

❤️❤️❤️ Favorite books of 2025:

• January - Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

And some questions for you:

• Is your reading year off to a good start?

• What are your main reading intentions for 2025?

• Thoughts on my reading list? Have you read Claire-Louise Bennett?