january reading wrap-up

the horrors persist, but so does my tbr

Given the extenuating and reverberating Circumstances, I am a little astonished that I was able to focus long enough to make it through one book, let alone seven of them. The price of this accomplishment is that I didn’t really manage to focus on anything else¹—I didn’t watch a single show or film, and I didn’t translate a single line of Latin—but we’re trying to focus on small victories, so I’ll take what I can get. I was lucky, too, to read so many excellent books, a welcome distraction from the anxiety-driven vice grip clamped around my sternum for the past thirty-one days. It’s really Pete Campbell-coded over here, folks.

But some things WERE great: three of this month’s books were five-star reads, and nothing dipped below a three-star rating (and as a reminder, I do not share ratings for nonfiction). Here are the goods.

FICTION

Private Rites by Julia Armfield ★★★★★

I really liked Julia Armfield’s previous book, Our Wives Under the Sea, and Private Rites is full of the same lush prose and watery themes. For some reason, the summary gave me the impression that the setting was historical, but it takes place in an unnamed modern future: cities are becoming increasingly flooded and society is trying to cling to traces of normality in the wreckage. This backdrop feels especially timely in our current era, and especially the way in which the novel’s protagonists, three sisters, acclimate and adapt to their waterlogged surroundings: they look to their past with nostalgia but as if through a foggy mirror, trying to recall scenes and patterns that seem to have happened to someone else living in a different world entirely. Beyond this, the beating core of the novel is the death of their father, which felt timely for me specifically as I approach a big anniversary of my dad’s passing. The prose was so beautiful throughout—the kind that you need to slow down and savor—but some books earn their five-star rating right at the end, upon reflection, and this was that type of book for me.

Conclave by Robert Harris ★★★

I’m going to hurt feelings with this one. I didn’t like it. I loved Conclave (2024), the film adaptation, and I really loved Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy, so this book should have hit it out the park for me—but it just didn’t. I’m usually the person screaming that the book is better than the film, but the reverse was true in this case. Cinematography and score aside, Ralph Fiennes made the protagonist Lawrence (counterpoint to the novel’s Lomeli) immensely more likeable and interesting, the book was generally kind of boring, and there was a weird prevalence of fatphobia within the narration (I say weird because this was not my experience with Harris’s other books). If Conclave had been my first Harris read, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to try out the Cicero trilogy, which is a terrible shame because it is masterfully written and still my favorite entry in the “Roman historical fiction” category of books. However, I did really enjoy the part in Conclave where Tremblay pulled out what appeared to be a prayer book but it was actually his smartphone in a similar-looking case.

Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel ★★★★★

I read Wolf Hall, the first book in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, in late December. I’m combining book two, Bring Up the Bodies, and book three, The Mirror & The Light, into one review here since they feel so inseparable—if you haven’t read this trilogy yet, I do recommend reading them back-to-back so you can really soak in the prose and the atmosphere. I’m a little embarrassed that it took me so long to read these, but the reverse of that coin is their immediate rocketing into my list of All Time Favorites: for the vivid, sprawling, beautifully crafted world; for the exquisite prose; for the bittersweet celebration of Cromwell’s victories even as history says he’s doomed. Bring Up the Bodies was my favorite of the three; The Mirror & The Light dragged slightly in the middle, but the ending completely erased any misconceptions I had. It’s still haunting me, and we all know I love to be haunted by doomed and long-deceased men.

MEMOIR

Lifeform by Jenny Slate ★★★★

I absolutely loved Little Weirds and I’ve reread it several times, so I had high hopes for this one. They were somewhat dashed—there are some genuinely strange essays in here, abstract to the point of making my eyes glaze over—but Jenny Slate just has such an easy, beautiful, vivid way with words and I found myself highlighting a ton of phrases and passages, a dead giveaway that I was enjoying what I was reading. Some of them cut me to the quick:

The loneliness in me felt metallic. I was a big empty bell clanging around looking for what I was supposed to be attached to. If the bell is not around the neck of its animal, the animal gets lost.

Jenny Slate, I think I’m devoted to you.

NONFICTION

Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition by Owen Beattie & John Geiger

I’m not sure what else I can say about this book that hasn’t been said before: it’s such a cornerstone of the Franklin expedition history that I feel as if I have finally earned my novice pass by getting through it. Some of the history itself I had already absorbed, either by friend osmosis or through other reading I’ve done, but I found the excavation sagas incredibly interesting and, in their own way, incredibly touching. With all of the new discoveries that have come out in the years following this publication—the locations of Erebus and Terror, and the use of DNA identification for human remains—it makes me so excited for what other discoveries might still be in our future.

A First-Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole by Diana Preston

This was my first book about the Terra Nova expedition. Ever since reading Julian Sancton’s Madhouse at the End of the Earth about the Belgian Antarctic expedition last year, I have a problem called “nobody else writes polar histories as well as Julian Sancton writes polar histories,” and that hypothesis proved true here. I appreciated the use of diaries throughout, but Diana Preston is clearly really pro-British sentiment and pro-Scott—it’s a sympathetic, heroic portrait, and Scott’s mistakes and uninformed decisions are only fully discussed in the last chapter instead of being woven into the larger narrative. I learned a lot and I didn’t dislike reading this, but I was never eager to pick it back up in the way of Madhouse.

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Please let me know your thoughts if you have read any of these books, or tell me what books you read and enjoyed in January! As the horrors grow, so must my TBR. I’m always on the lookout for new forms of distraction.

1. This is not strictly true: I’m not willing to admit how many hours of Stardew Valley I clocked, but my farm looks really nice.