Mid-Month Reading Update: Chaos Mode
Plus this month's big link roundup.
Hi, book friends.
I hope your year is off to a less chaotic start than mine. To make a couple of long stories short: The baby started daycare and, naturally, immediately caught a nasty virus — she’s fine, but it wasn’t fun for anyone. Also, our hot tub stopped heating during a week-long lake-effect snowstorm where the temps were in the teens. That’s a very first-world problem, but also, it was an expensive purchase that we love and use all the time, and if its pipes had frozen, it would have been a total loss. We managed to save it, but it meant two days of emergency chaos while the baby also happened to be at her sickest, and then we had a space heater running in the backyard in a snowstorm for five more days. On top of all that, I’ve had a stressful and frustrating few weeks at work.
All that to say, I didn’t get much reading done in the first ten days or so of January. My brain was far too tired to follow a narrative, so I ended up spending my evenings catching up on my podcast backlog (recs included in the link roundup below) while finishing the baby blanket I was crocheting for my daughter.
Thankfully, things have calmed down, and I took tomorrow off from work to recharge a little. I’m going to send the baby to daycare and have a whole day off alone in my house for the first time in over six months! The plan is to lay on the couch and read all day long. Friends, I cannot wait.
So. Whew. Here’s where my reading life stands heading into the long weekend.
What I’ve read so far this month
(Full reviews coming…eventually!)
Tartufo by Kira Jane Buxton 📖🎧*†: This fun, heartwarming, hilarious romp of a story was the perfect thing to pick up once my brain was ready to start reading again. Buxton’s books are just delightful; there’s no better word to describe them.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder 📖: This teeny little book packs a punch. I’m looking forward to recapping it for you this weekend for this month’s Conversation Pushers column.
The Pale Dreamer (The Bone Season, #0.5) by Samantha Shannon 📖: My friend Kelly (@marbelousreads) told me to pick up this short prequel novella ahead of book two, and it was available on Libby, so I gobbled it up. She was right; it was fun and fast-paced and really helped me get to know some important characters better.
Currently reading
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab 📖*: This was going to be my first book of the year, but alas, chaos. I ended up pausing until I could give it the attention it deserves, and that time is now: This is how I’m planning to spend my day off on the couch tomorrow!
Mirrored Heavens (Between Earth and Sky, #3) by Rebecca Roanhorse 📖🎧†: Since I have a library ebook and the audiobook, this has been my treadmill read. That means I’m chipping away rather than binging, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it! I expect to hit the halfway mark during my run tomorrow, just in time to chat about the first half with Tyler (@bibliomanicured).
We Do Not Part by Han Kang 📖🎧*†: I’m about 25% of the way into this book, but I’m already struck by how visceral and affecting it is. Not an easy read, but I can already tell it’s going to be a rewarding one.
Still on my January TBR
A little bit of shuffling here: I DNFed the content marketing book for work (I should have known, tbh; content marketing changes too fast for books to keep up). I also took Heavenly Tyrant off the list — I still want to read it, but apparently the planned duology is actually going to be a trilogy, and I should really reread Iron Widow because I don’t remember it very well, so I’m just going to do all of that whenever the third book comes out. Since I added The Pale Dreamer into the mix unexpectedly, that left space for one more (in theory). So I bumped Onyx Storm up to January — although I preordered it online, so we’ll see if it gets delivered in time. That nets out to:
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor*
The Mime Order (The Bone Season, #2) by Samantha Shannon
How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton
Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3) by Rebecca Yarros
*print copy gifted to me by the publisher
†audiobook gifted to me by the publisher
All those links I promised you
Podcast recs from my backlog binge:
On The Stacks:
’ interview with Adam Higgenbotham about Challenger and her interview with Kaveh Akbar about Martyr!.“Can We Vote Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?” on Second Nature
House of R’s coverage of the Wicked movie (starts about an hour in).
Culture Study’s mini-series on the romance genre: “How Romance Novels Center Marginalized Joy,” “How Romance Writers Rewrite Publishing’s Rules,” “What It’s Really Like to Run a Romance Bookstore,” and “The Expansive World of Queer Romance.” And, for good measure: “Is Booktok Actually About Reading?”
Some lingering but worthwhile 2024 wrap-up content:
Lit Hub’s annual ultimate list of the best books of the year, in which they read all the other lists and tally up which books were mentioned the most
- ’s recap of the most beautiful sentences she read in 2024
A list of all (or at least many of) the books that won awards in 2024
“Most anticipated” content for you:
Lit Hub’s annual giant list (nearly 300 books this time!)
A smaller list from them on sci-fi and fantasy books to look forward to
Finally, very late but at long last, The Millions’ great winter 2025 book preview
This very good guest essay on
about how one English teacher is working to not only teach the curriculum but also inspire teens to become lifelong readers.In case you missed all the drama with the Fable app over the past few weeks, here’s a gift link to a New York Times write-up.
I loved this essay ruminating on Ursula K. Le Guin’s style of activism.
Sutton Foster is narrating Pippi Longstocking!!
A thoughtful and fascinating new-to-me substack that I think anyone, parent or not, would absolutely love:
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Fun stuff you might have missed on Instagram
As always, thanks for sharing your corner of the internet with me! It would mean a lot if you were to take a second to like this post. I’d love to hear how your January reading is going in the comments, too.
Finally, if you like this newsletter, please send a few friends my way.
Until next time!
— Deedi (she/her)
This baby blanket though!! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽