January is my heavy reading month. The weather keeps me inside, work is slower, and I have time to actually finish books rather than collect them. This year I finished 12 (and abandoned five others). Here's the honest report on what worked, what didn't, and what I'd recommend.
The standouts
1. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (fiction)
650 pages of an Irish family slowly imploding. The structure shouldn't work — four perspectives, each in a wildly different prose style — but it absolutely does. Murray writes the teenage daughter's sections in run-on sentences without punctuation; the father's sections in tight third-person; the mother's in nostalgic past tense. Each voice feels true to the character.
It took me about 100 pages to settle in. From page 100 to page 650, I was completely held. The ending is divisive — some people hate it, some love it. I loved it.
Verdict: if you can commit to a long literary novel, this is the year's best one I've read. Skip if you don't want to live with a book for two weeks.
2. The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green (non-fiction)
Reread. I'd read it once before and wanted to revisit. Holds up better the second time. Green reviews everything from CNN to staphylococcus aureus to the hot dogs of Bagger Vance. Sounds like a gimmick. Isn't. The essays accumulate into something like a quiet meditation on what it's like to be a human in this specific moment.
The "Velociraptors" essay made me cry both times. The "QWERTY Keyboard" essay is somehow both funny and heartbreaking. This is the rare book I press on people without qualifications.
Verdict: recommend without hesitation.
3. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (fiction)
I came to this late — it was the book everyone was reading two years ago. I got it at a holiday gift exchange and read it grudgingly, expecting hype-disappointment. The opposite happened. The novel is about two friends who design video games together over decades. It's about creativity, friendship, the way ambition cracks people, and the unique grief of a relationship that never becomes romantic.
The middle dragged for me. The first third and last third are extraordinary.
Verdict: recommend, with the warning that the middle slump is real.
The competent middles
4. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (fiction)
Pulitzer winner. Modern Appalachian retelling of David Copperfield. Beautifully written. Difficult to read — opioid epidemic content is heavy and unrelenting. I'm glad I read it. I would not have picked it up if I'd known how heavy. The craft is extraordinary; the experience is hard.
Verdict: recommend if you're in the right headspace; postpone if you're not.
5. How to Know a Person by David Brooks (non-fiction)
Brooks on the art of really paying attention to other people. The arguments are sometimes obvious, sometimes genuinely useful. The chapters on grief and on being a good listener were the strongest. Some of the early framework chapters felt like they were stretching to fill pages.
Verdict: worth reading the strongest 60% of it; the rest you can skim.
6. The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff (fiction)
A debut novel set in rural India about a group of women who form a microloan group and end up plotting to kill abusive husbands. Funny, dark, sharper than the premise suggests. The pacing is uneven — some sections drag — but the central character work is excellent.
Verdict: recommend if you're looking for a novel with bite.
The disappointments
7. A buzzy literary novel I won't name
I had high hopes. The reviews were ecstatic. I found it stylistically self-conscious in a way that distracted from the story. I finished it but only because I had committed to the goal. I would not recommend.
Verdict: the consensus reviews and my actual experience diverged significantly. Trust your own response.
8. A self-help book about productivity
Same point as the title and one example, repeated for 240 pages. I do this with self-help books too often. The good ideas in these books usually fit into a long article. The book version is the article plus 200 pages of restating it.
Verdict: would have been a great essay; was a mediocre book.
The one I'd recommend to anyone
If I had to pick one book from this month that I'd hand to a wide range of readers — not just literary readers, not just fiction readers — it's The Anthropocene Reviewed. It rewards almost every type of reader. It's funny. It's short enough that the commitment is reasonable. The chapters work as standalones. And it has that rare quality of making you feel slightly more alive while reading it.
The five I abandoned
I gave each of these between 50 and 150 pages before stopping. Some were structural problems (couldn't track the story), some were tonal mismatches (the voice didn't click), some were cases of "this is well done but not for me." Abandoning books got dramatically easier once I gave myself permission to do it. Life is short and book lists are infinite. The book that's wrong for you is wrong for you.
The lesson from this month
Reading a lot in a short period clarified something I'd been avoiding: my reading is most rewarding when I match the book to my actual mood, not to my reading goals. I tried to push through three of the abandoned books because I "should" want to read them. I shouldn't have. The hours I spent struggling with them would have been better spent rereading something I love or starting something I was actually excited about.
February's plan: less ambitious reading list, more honest book selection. I'll let you know how it goes.
