January 2025 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the January 2025 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I’ve read and rank them from worst to best.
I’ve had a bit of a slow start to my reading year. I started the month with a lovely vacation to Barcelona and ended it with a trip to Houston for school. Both trips were excellent, but slowed down my reading to the five books I’ve written about below. In this month’s round-up you’ll find two mysteries, a gorgeous mother daughter story, a book about a comedy school, and the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize.
I’m in the middle of two books - one a history of the AR-15 in America and the other a portrait of an Irish village as electricity is installed - that I thought for sure (and was wrong) would be finished in time to make it into this month’s round-up. The reviews for those will just have to wait another few weeks. Until then, happy reading!
5. Long Bright River - Liz Moore
Fiction/Mystery, 482 pages, published in 2020
Mickey Fitzpatrick is a patrol officer in Kensington, a struggling neighborhood in Philadelphia. While Mickey won’t admit it openly, part of her motivation in working as an officer in this neighborhood is to keep an eye out for her sister Kacey, who has struggled with addiction since they were teenagers. When Kacey goes missing at the same time as the dead bodies of young women are discovered in the area, Mickey begins to fear that the two might be connected. Her superiors at the police department aren’t as concerned as Mickey would like, so she takes it into her own hands to figure out what’s going on.
Liz Moore is the author of The God of the Woods, one of the buzziest mysteries of 2024. Many of the qualities that made that book so good are on display here: complex characters, a great sense of atmosphere, and good pacing. While these elements are well done, Long Bright River fell a bit short for me on the margins. For example, Mickey has a four-year-old son who speaks and acts like he’s at least double his age; the narrator’s comments that he’s “advanced” don’t quite make up for the incongruence. In another scene, Mickey mentions that she has to go to court to testify in a trial for a domestic violence incident that she responded to a week before. In reality, a trial - if there even was one - would never happen that quickly. This inaccuracy isn’t a massive deal, but it did make me start to doubt the credibility of some of the other elements of the police work that serve as the foundation of the story. If you’re willing to let these inconsistencies slide, Long Bright River is a well-crafted mystery that finds uniqueness in Moore’s ability to tackle hard issues.
Rating: 7.5/10
4. The Material - Camille Bordas
Fiction, 278 pages, published in 2024
Told over the course of one day, The Material follows six students in a Chicago MFA comedy program as they attempt to hone their craft. The book begins with a stand-up critique session and ends with an open-mic competition. In between, a false alarm about a school shooting sends teachers into hiding, an ill-fated trip to the airport results in a student stealing a comedic bit from the other, and a professional comedian attempts to make a comeback by accepting a teaching position in the program. The book is satirically funny - somehow I was laughing out loud when a teacher and student find themselves unexpectedly sheltering in place in a bathroom - but also deals with the heavy issues impacting the lives of this ensemble cast of characters. The amount of issues and characters can make the book feel a tad overstuffed for its 278 pages. The book is obviously about more than just a group of comedy students - it takes clear inspiration from comedy’s attempts to turn experiences, even dark ones, into jokes and stories - but I struggled at the end to grasp what the author was ultimately trying to achieve. Beyond this, it was clear that Bordas, a French author writing for the first time in English, is a talented sentence-level writer with interesting ideas.
Rating: 8/10
3. The Secret Place - Tana French
Fiction/Mystery, 480 pages, published in 2014
There is no doubt in my mind that Tana French is the best mystery author writing today. For me, what sets her books apart is that she gives just as much time and attention to her writing and character development as she does the structure of the mystery itself. Because of this, I’m willing to let the resolution of the mystery take a backseat as I watch French lay out the setting, flesh out the characters, and let her writing take me where she will.
This skill is on display with impressive finesse in The Secret Place, French’s 2014 book set at a girls’ boarding school outside of Dublin. The book begins when Detective Stephen Moran, a young detective stuck in the cold case unit, finds sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey sitting on a couch outside his office waiting to speak with him. Holly has come to bring Stephen a clue that she thinks might help him solve the murder of a boy found on the grounds of Holly’s all-girls’ boarding school a year earlier. With the new clue in hand, Stephen pairs up with the case’s original detective, spiky and ambitious Detective Antoinette Conway, to reopen the case with the hopes that a solve will give his career a boost. The chapters in The Secret Place alternate between one day on the school campus as the detectives interview the students they think might have been involved and flashbacks from a year earlier of Holly’s close-knit group of friends. What follows is a nuanced portrait of teenage friendship and the complexities of relationships that lead here, ultimately, to murder.
Rating: 8.5/10
2. Blue Light Hours - Bruna Dantas Lobato
Fiction, 192 pages, published in 2024
In this semi-autobiographical novel, a young unnamed woman moves across the world to start her freshman year at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Under the glow of a blue lamp she scavenged in the dorm, she calls her mother on Skype to tell her about her days. The mother lives alone in a coastal town in northeastern Brazil. She does not speak English and has never been on an airplane. Every detail of her daughter’s new life is exotic and interesting, even if its mundanities - going to class, eating in the dining hall, writing a paper - seem uneventful to the daughter. Blue Light Hours is told mostly over the course of the daughter’s first year in America as the daughter grapples with the dual realities of loving her new life and feeling guilt over leaving her mother so far behind. It is a beautiful, earnest, and at times heartbreaking story of the enduring strength of a mother-daughter relationship in the face of life-altering change.
Rating: 9/10
1. Orbital - Samantha Harvey
Fiction, 206 pages, published in 2023
Orbital is a book about perspective. Set on the International Space Station, Orbital takes place over the course of one earth day, or sixteen rotations around the planet. Six astronauts from five different countries are living in the station, each having been selected for their temperaments and skills. 250 miles above the earth, these astronauts have an extraordinary view of the planet below. During the day, countries and borders, let alone human life, are indistinguishable from the massive landforms viewable from their windows. At night, however, with the help of city lights, they can see population centers and evidence of the humanity that awaits them at the end of their nine month deployments. While the astronauts have a series of experiments to conduct over the course of a day, on this day, they are also asked to take pictures of a typhoon approaching the Philippines any time their orbit gives them a view. They can see that the typhoon is gathering in size and ferocity, but the astronauts can do nothing but relay this information back to meteorologists on earth in the few minutes they have while they pass over this portion of the world.
Although it is set in space, Orbital does not deal in the fantastic. No tragedy or emergency will befall the astronauts, no contact with aliens will be made. Instead, it is simply a beautiful book about a single day in a group of people’s lives. This group of people, however, happen to have an extraordinary physical and intellectual perspective on humanity and its position in the universe. This quiet and singular novel is fully befitting of the Booker Prize, which it won in 2024.
Rating: 10/10
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Want to see past months’ round ups? You can find those here. You can also check out my most recent posts below.
I agree with you about Tana French, I think her Dublin Murder series are some of the best mysteries I've read. Have you ever tried Sharon Bolton? I love her too. And I read and loved Blue Light Hours in January, such a beautiful story
I thought Blue Light Hours was so quietly beautiful.