January 2024 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the January 2024 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I’ve read and rank them from worst to best.
I wish it could be winter break forever. I’m writing this with nostalgia for the one week in early January I spent in Florida where I read one near perfect book after the other. Never mind that I came down with bronchitis hours after landing. I got to read in the warmth and on the beach for hours on end. I discovered some new-to-me favorite authors and gave three books 10/10s. By mid-January school began again in full force, and I’m back to my diet of sneaking in pages with my breakfast and listening to audiobooks as I commute.
January 2024 Reading Stats
Number of Books Read: 12
Genre Breakdown: 17% non-fiction (2 books), 83% fiction (10 books)
Average Rating: 8.95/10
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12. Pomegranate - Helen Elaine Lee
Fiction, 344 pages
Ranita has spent the past four years in Oak Hills Correctional Center serving a sentence for opiate possession. As her sentence comes to an end, Ranita, a recovering addict, is determined to stay sober so that she can regain custody of her two children. Upon leaving prison, Ranita experiences the sudden shock of readjustment. She needs to find a job, stay sober, fight for custody of her kids, and regain their trust. Each of these challenges on its own would be enough to derail a person, and yet, although she grapples with each, they are all resolved somewhat tidily. Ranita is lucky to have family members who provide her with housing, give her leads on jobs, and take care of her children. When Ranita does relapse on her sobriety, she limits herself to one drink and immediately recognizes her mistake. This is not to say that this is not a realistic depiction of one women’s experience, but I found the way that Lee solved the problems a tad contrived, especially when she chose to spend fifty pages describing a few days of Ranita’s life in detail - say the days when Ranita was sleeping on her aunt’s couch - and then would jump forward in time abruptly to Ranita moving into a basement apartment without spending much time on how any of this came to pass.
I had a chance to see Helen Elaine Lee speak on her book tour at Books Are Magic back when Pomegranate was released in 2023. Lee, who teaches at MIT, drew on her experience with PEN’s Prison Creative Writing Program when writing this book. I appreciated the message that Lee was trying to send - that of humanity and individuality, the idea that we should not be defined by our worst behavior - I just struggled with some of the execution.
Rating: 7.5/10
11. Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution - Tania Branigan
Non-Fiction/Chinese Cultural Revolution, 254 pages
Tania Branigan, a British journalist, spent seven years in China writing for the Guardian. At the start of this book, a piece of investigative journalism cum history, Branigan tells the reader that contrary to most experiences, the longer one stays in China, the harder it is to write about the country because of how complicated it becomes. Branigan is particularly interested in the impact that the Cultural Revolution - a decade of Maoist fanaticism, extremism, and brutality between 1966 and 1976 - had and continues to have on Chinese society writ large. Although Branigan interviews people who lived through the period, many of whom were active participants, she is also met by resistance from individuals and the state itself. Much like the coordinated suppression of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in the near half-century that has passed since the Cultural Revolution the government has worked hard to ensure that the events that transpired, if talked about at all, are sanitized and compartmentalized. At the heart of the Cultural Revolution was neighbors who turned on neighbors, resulting in countless deaths. Ultimately, this undergirds all of Branigan’s reporting and the central question that runs throughout: what happens to the people in a society trained to not trust each other? Is it possible to shape a collective memory, or, despite best efforts, is it ever possible to truly forget?
Rating: 8/10
10. How to Love Your Daughter - Hila Blum
Fiction, 273 pages
As How to Love Your Daughter opens, the narrator, Yoella, stands outside her daughter’s home in the Netherlands. For six years, Yoella’s daughter Leah has only been in touch sporadically; calling every once in a while through an intermediary to share her whereabouts in one exotic location after another. By the time Yoella tracks Leah down she knows that she was never traveling. She was in the Netherlands the whole time, married, and had two children who Yoella has never met. Readers and Yoella alike are left to wonder: what went wrong? And how did this separation come to pass? Readers and Yoella, however, might come to different conclusions about the answers to these questions. In an attempt to understand the chasm, Yoella recounts her daughters life and the minutiae of their relationship. But it is clear from early on that Yoella might not be the most accurate narrator of her own faults, leaving readers squinting in order to read between the lines. Even after this psychological book came to an end, I’m still left wondering if it was one big break or the little things along the way.
Rating: 8/10
9. Let Us Descend - Jesmyn Ward
Historical Fiction, 300 pages
Let Us Descend, set in the American South in the years before the Civil War, follows Annis, a girl sold by her enslaver father as she is marched from the Carolinas to the slave market in New Orleans. She is accompanied on her brutal journey by the lessons taught by her mother as well as an ancestor’s memories, spirits, and hauntings. Upon arrival in New Orleans she is sold to a woman who imposes new forms of cruelty on Annis, prompting her to consider a path for escape. There is no doubt to me that Jesmyn Ward is a talented author. However, certain elements of the book felt underworked. The book opens with her mother teaching Annis how to fight and defend herself, yet Annis never has a chance to use these skills. This is either a narrative error or an act of defiance against Chekov’s adage that if there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first chapter, it will have to eventually go off.
Let Us Descend was left off some of the notable 2023 prize and best-of lists. Although Jesmyn Ward is a two-time winner of the National Book Award and a MacArthur Genius, Let Us Descend didn’t even make the long-list. Although Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing made The New York Times top 10 books of the year in 2017, Let Us Descend didn’t even make its top 100. That’s not to say that the establishment critics are always right. I heard lots of outrage about this snub by podcasters and bloggers whose opinions I respect, including in this conversation between Traci Thomas of The Stacks and Sara Hildreth of Fiction Matters. They believed that the critics were too harsh and that they didn’t like Let Us Descend because it didn’t fit the “proper” format for what a slave narrative should be. Maybe they have a point. For what my two cents are worth, I think that Jesmyn Ward might have been a victim of her own success. People are going to have high expectations for anybody who has won one, let alone two National Book Awards, and while I thought this book was good, I didn’t think it was amazing, let alone phenomenal like some people did.
Rating: 8/10
8. Chain-Gang All-Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Fiction/Dystopia, 384 pages
Released in January 2023, Chain-Gang All-Stars was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award and one of the top 10 books of the year for The New York Times. The book is set in a slightly altered version of the United States where fans religiously consume death matches like we do football. Criminal Action Penal Entertainment enlists (or entraps) prisoners to compete in fight-to-the-death battles in arenas on live TV in exchange for the elusive promise of freedom. Highly successful Links, the prisoners who fight and have won (i.e. killed) in many matches, are elevated to “All-Star” status. Every season Links are assigned to a “chain,” or team, that lives together in between matches. Thurwar and Staxxx, the central protagonists of the book and two legendary all-stars, live and compete alongside each other on the same chain, and when the cameras turn off, they are also lovers. Thurwar is only a few matches away from earning her freedom when a rule change dictates that two all-stars cannot be on the same chain. Instead, they must fight to the death for supremacy.
If you don’t enjoy violence in your books, this is probably not the novel for you. For obvious reasons, violence occurs constantly and is described in great detail. However, it is definitely necessary to the story’s plot and is rarely gratuitous. In this slightly altered version of our current reality, the violence acts as a constant reminder of the brutality that we live with, see, and implicitly accept. By turning prisoners into fighters, humanity is diminished and profited from, turning the camera that streams the lives of the Links back onto the viewers and the readers themselves.
Rating: 8.5/10
7. The English Experience - Julie Schumacher
Fiction, 240 pages
The English Experience is the third book by Julie Schumacher starring Professor Jason Fitger of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement fame. In this book, Fitger, an English professor at mediocre Payne University, reluctantly leads a group of students on a winter session study abroad trip to London. Fitger, who was certainly not the administration’s first choice to lead the trip, acts as therapist and confidant to his increasingly needy students while also dealing with his own personal issues back home. Harkening back to Dear Committee Members, which was told through a series of meandering letters of recommendation, this book intersperses his students daily response papers with Fitger’s narration to tell the larger story of the trip and the students’ lives. Just like Schumacher’s previous two books, The English Experience is extremely funny and a creative piece of academic satire. You could read any of these three books on their own, but there is something special about reading them in tandem and getting to experience Professor Fitger in all his ingloriousness.
Rating: 9/10
6. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Fiction/Psychological Thriller, 557 pages
The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s magnum opus (if you ignore her 2014 Pulitzer winner, The Goldfinch), likely needs little introduction. After a friend told me that this was one of her favorite books and lent me a copy, I decided it was finally time to read this 1992 classic. Richard Papen decides to apply to transfer to Hempden College from his community college in California based on the idyllic images on the brochure. Located in rural Vermont, the college hosts a small and insulated Greek department, headed by one charismatic and bizarre professor who accepts students on the condition that they only take classes taught by him. After Richard proves his way into the inner sanctum, he is greeted by a close-knit group of five other students, each with relative wealth or privilege that Richard lacks. They are all drawn to the Greek course out of a desire to be different than their peers; they each believe that the classics will bring them a step closer to enlightenment. The group, reluctantly at first and then wholeheartedly, accepts Richard as one of their own, including when they turn on a fellow student and decide to kill him.
Readers know from the first few pages of the book who will die and that no one will go to jail. What readers don’t know is what motivates these students to commit such a heinous act and why. The Secret History is a literary psychological thriller. Topping over five hundred pages, Tartt takes her time developing each of the characters and slowly spooning out the plot. Rather than feel excessively long or overwrought, the narrative left me engaged and on the edge of my seat for much of the book. As a bonus, Tartt reads the audiobook herself.
Rating: 9/10
5. Happy All the Time - Laurie Colwin
Fiction, 214 pages
A while back I was listening to The New York Times Book Review podcast when one of the critics mentioned that he had recently been on a Laurie Colwin kick. Never having heard of Colwin before, I looked her up and saw, much to my excitement, that Katherine Heiny, one of my favorite authors, credits Colwin as a major literary inspiration. Colwin, who tragically died at age 48 from an aneurism, was known in equal parts for her food writing and her novels about the triumphs and tragedies of ordinary upper middle-class life.
Happy All the Time, published in 1978, is one of Colwin’s earlier works and tracks the lives of two couples living in New York. Guido and Vincent are best friends and distant cousins who grew up together in Connecticut. After college and with their future careers in New York largely set, they each unexpectedly meet and marry different, yet well-suited women. Guido meets Holly in Boston, who every few years when she senses complacency in their marriage ups and leaves for an unset period of time. Vincent meets quirky Misty in the office at work, who fights off his advances with her dry sense of humor and refusal to accede to expectations until finally accepting their obvious compatibility.
The book continues in this vein. Not much happens plot-wise, but the development of the wonderful characters pushes the story forward. In this way, Colwin is writing the most ordinary and extraordinary of books; that of the messiness and unexpected joys of life, love, friendship and family. The last three pages of this novel are as perfect as they come. For no good reason other than that, they brought tears to my eyes.
Rating: 9.5/10
4. So Late in the Day - Claire Keegan
Fiction, 118 pages
So Late in the Day is a collection of three phenomenal short stories by Irish author Claire Keegan, who writes here about the subtle tensions between women and men in relationships, professional lives, and power struggles. The first, So Late in the Day, follows a young man over the course of a weekend as he agitates about his engagement that was recently called off. In The Long and Painful Death, a writer arrives at a weeklong residency at the idyllic home of Heinrich Böll, only to be interrupted by an academic who insists on seeing the house as a way of assessing the deservedness of the writer. In the final story, Antartica, a married woman travels to the city to see what it is like to sleep with another man, and ends up in a precarious situation.
In keeping with the length of Claire Keegan’s previous works, Foster and Small Things Like These, the three stories in So Late in the Day are short and crisp; you can easily get through this small collection in a few hours. Despite their brevity, Keegan has a gift for distilling complex, previously unnameable feelings into a few sentences. Indeed, this is why her writing has so much power. I am still thinking about a line in The Long and Painful Death, in which the narrator reflects on how her whole day has been subsumed by unexpected plans placed on her calendar at 8pm; how even though she still has the rest of the day open ahead of her, that one event will become the focal point of her day. I can’t recommend this collection enough. I only wish there was more.
Rating: 9.5/10
3. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs - Kerry Howley
Non-Fiction/National Security, 227 pages
I hadn’t heard of this book until The New York Times listed it as one of its top five non-fiction books of 2023. When I requested it from the library, I thought it would be another book about far-right conspiracy theorists and their notions of the deep state. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a fascinating look at the ever growing American national security apparatus in the post-9/11 era, the burgeoning surveillance state, and the disaffected insiders who leaked information and paid the price. The book is a piece of narrative non-fiction, and yet it reads like no non-fiction that I’ve ever read before. Howley’s writing defies traditional composition. She doesn’t shy away from the passive voice, she uses abstract metaphors, and subtly inserts her own opinions. Despite this, however, everything about this book works. I was engrossed from page one and am still pondering the central quandary: in our technological age we are data about data, ever accessible by the powers that be. Without context, however, and the fuller picture that comes from assessing someone as an individual, the government is prone to make fatal mistakes. But how can these mistakes be rectified, if no one is allowed to know about them?
Rating: 10/10
2. Brother of the More Famous Jack - Barbara Trapido
Fiction, 256 pages
Brother of the More Famous Jack traveled from aunt to aunt, across the Atlantic Ocean from England to the U.S., and then to my mom before it made its way into my hands. Originally published in 1982, the book centers around Katherine, who is an impressionable eighteen year-old from the suburbs of London when she meets the eccentric Professor Jacob Goldman and his large, rambunctious family. Katherine arrives at the family’s home as the date of a much older friend of the family and leaves besotted with the much more age appropriate eldest son. She is a guest in their home many more times, becoming an adopted daughter of the family until her heart is broken and she leaves to strike out on her own in Rome. Ten years later, she returns to England having experienced unspeakable tragedy and the obvious maturity that comes with age. Falling back in with the Goldmans, her life expands like it couldn’t before in this wonderful, brash novel of found family.
I fear no description that I write accurately describes the uniqueness and freshness of Trapido’s writing. I laughed out loud at times and ached at others. This book was published over forty years ago and yet Trapido’s descriptions of adolescence, doubt, and discovery couldn’t feel more modern. Since finishing the book I have come to discover that Trapido is not widely in print in the United States. I’m on the lookout for any way to get my hands on everything else that she has written.
Rating: 10/10
1. The End of Days - Jenny Erpenbeck
Fiction, 238 pages
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Germany, and her inheritance of the complicated legacy of Germany’s tumultuous 20th century is present in her writing. The End of Days draws on this experience in five parts, following the same protagonist and the different paths her life could have taken in each. In the first section, the protagonist dies as a baby in the early twentieth-century Habsburg Empire. The daughter of a Jewish mother and gentile father, her ancestry has been marred by pogroms that her mother sought to avoid (unsuccessfully) by marrying a non-Jew. In the next chapter, this same girl survives and moves with her family to Vienna where they suffer through World War I until her life ends in her late-teen years. In the third chapter, she lives through the war and moves to Russia as a dedicated communist with her husband just in time for Stalin’s first purge. In the fourth, she waits out the Second World War in Russia while the rest of the members of her family are murdered by the Nazis. And in the last, most moving chapter, her son looks for a present to bring his mother from Vienna and brushes unknowingly against family heirlooms looted by the Nazis and now left to the anonymous ether.
Not only is The End of Days a structurally ingenious way to view the 20th century in Germany, but it is also an incredibly moving story of the impermanence and unpredictability of life itself. So much of life is left to chance; deftly illustrated in a fascinating scene in Chapter 3 in which the arbitrary shuffling of the protagonist’s file from the desk of one Soviet official to another results in a death sentence in one version of her life and an illustrious career in the other. I started The End of Days at the tail end of my trip to Florida and read the bulk of the book while sitting on the tarmac of a Spirit airlines flight with endless delays (and two arrests, which is a story for another day). I finished the final pages in my apartment, which I then had to immediately re-read and then re-read aloud in order to savor how absolutely beautiful and profound they were.
Rating: 10/10
All of the books written about above are available on my January 2024 Reading Round-Up Bookshop page, or you can click on the title of the book itself to be routed to the shop. Every book I’ve ever recommended, sorted by post, are also available on the general shop page.
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Want to see past months’ round ups? You can find those here.
Ahhh yes, Colwin!! Her Home Cooking memoir is delightful, too. I’m glad to see you loved the Trapido, I hear her mentioned a lot alongside Heiny and Colwin but haven’t read it yet ☺️
Incredible reviews. Thank you for the great backlist title.