January 2025 Wrap-Up
I managed to read 10 books this January! I… was not feeling inspired and eager. Mostly did audiobooks to combat this. So much easier for me to plop down and listen than use my eyes.
In order of when I finished them:
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
Birding with Benefits Sarah T. Dubb
Good Material by Dolly Alderton
Lost and Lassoed by Lyla Sage
F is for Fugitive by Sue Grafton
The Afterlife: A Memoir by Donald Antrim
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell
Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix
My standouts:
Good Material!!!! I loved Dolly Alderton’s last novel Ghosts so I was super excited to read this one. I plucked a galley of Ghosts off an overcrowded shelf during my stint as “aggrieved bookseller”. This was mostly based off of cover (SUE ME), but uh I was right that book was so good. It had me carrying the book over to my roommate to read her passages aloud. It was that critical.
I saw Good Material plastered all over a Barnes and Noble window display and was so excited! I think most people know Alderton from her 2019 memoir Everything I Know About Love, but she is Miss Ghost to me and I was so excited for another novel from her. Plus, it’d been getting a lot of buzz and I just love to be a part of the conversation. This is a book about relationships, people, love and heartbreak. In my adulthood I have come to terms with and embraced the fact that I LOVE TO GOSSIP. I love foibles, entanglements, betrayals, timelines. I love having a meeting of the minds with my girls (to date I have not met a man who is a Certified Yapper and Qualified Gossip, but I am open to it) to hyper-analyze people’s actions, thoughts, words, and feelings, specifically around romantic relationships. Love and the pursuit of it turns fools into us all!!! And I will dissect it. And I will have a hard opinion on who is RIGHT and WRONG and how everyone SHOULD ACTUALLY ACT and uh everything would be better if everyone LISTENED TO MEEEEE.
But I digress… Good Material is the story of 30-something Andy in the wake of his breakup from Jen. They were together for years and he did not see this coming! His comedy career is flopping, his friends are busy with wives and kids, and he is going bald! Kick a man while he’s down :/ I enjoyed seeing Andy cope and learn how to exist in this new life. I thought it was an interesting showcase in men’s inability to have deep, emotional conversations and really show up for each other. These men cannot/refuse to talk about the breakup and how it’s affecting him so he just deals with everything in his little dumb head.
Would definitely recommend! Especially for my nosy nosy people <3
I also loved Notes on an Execution. I’ve had this one on my shelf for years and bravely read it instead of just getting something new and shiny from the library. This book is about a serial killer on death row and the women surrounding him. It cuts between his final hours and chapters from his mother, the detective who finally catches him, and his ex-wife’s sister. A character study focusing on the people who get overlooked in our true-crime obsessed culture. I particularly enjoyed how clear Kukafka made it that this guy is no genius! Just a man of average to below-average intelligence with a head injury! He has no overarching plots for killing and getting away with it. He bungles! He is just lucky that he wasn’t caught for so long. His “genius” manifesto that he’s been working on for years is literally- what if it’s more complicated than all good or all evil? what if different stuff happened and the world was different???? Like yeah girl, everything isn’t black and white. Also, literally everyone thinks about hypotheticals like that, you are not special!!
Finally, Horrorstör!!!! I fell in love with Grady Hendrix because of My Best Friend’s Exorcism, so I’m simply obliged to read everything else he has done. A great combination of horror and goofiness and critique of capitalism. The story of an overnight shift at a haunted knock-off Ikea, in the style of an Ikea catalog! Oh so we’re playing with form too! I love. Reminded me of The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada. Having a job is so silly sometimes!!!! Like… what are we all doing here really… and why am I not allowed to leave.
Oh! And I’ve also quit like four books this year. BRAVELY and PROUDLY. They were not hitting and I let them go and free myself up to read something I’ll actually enjoy and look forward to picking up!
In conclusion, I love to read, everyone should read!
