January has a very specific kind of grief. A patient one. It’s always felt less like a month and more like a mental state. Like standing barefoot in a cold room, holding last year’s memories in a soggy grocery bag you’re afraid might split open at any second.
Through the books I read, most of which felt like they’d been written with their teeth clenched, I lived so many lives I forgot which one was mine. A woman rewriting myth from her Tennessee porch swing. A ghostly playwright whose menace still lingers at the back of my neck like the smell of an old house. A boxer, a jealous ex, a poet-priest.
I didn’t mean to read books like these. I never really do. I didn’t wake up thinking, What I need right now is a sharp essay about the bodily wound of language. But here we are.
What I wanted, I think, was to get closer to the edge of myself. To lean over the railing and see what was still there. Books can do that when they’re good. They sneak up behind you and quietly unbutton something you didn’t realize was fastened.
If there’s a micro-theme this month (and there always is, even when I pretend I’m not looking for one), it’s proximity and distance, the emotional math of what it means to be close. To another person. To your country. To your past. To a word you can’t translate but carry around anyway. These books taught me that closeness is rarely comforting. Sometimes it’s a wound. Sometimes it’s a refusal. Sometimes it’s the whole story, left unfinished on purpose.
Some books asked me to be still. Some asked me to laugh. Some refused to explain themselves, and I forgave them. And some made me feel seen in a way that was borderline rude.
So here they are, my January ghosts, laid bare. And if you’re new here, welcome. You’ll catch up.
Helen of Troy, 1993, Maria Zoccola, Scribner UK, 2025
I started the year with Helen, but not the kind with ships and armor and gods, thankfully. Zoccola’s Helen lives in Sparta, Tennessee, in the 1990s. She married too young, had a child before she was ready, and then, like in every version of this story since forever, her life imploded. But there were no epic battles, no burning cities. Just domestic suffocation, and the slow realization that your life has already hardened into something you didn’t actively choose.
What I loved about this collection is how casually it dismantles grandeur. The Trojan War becomes a marital crisis. Destiny becomes a bad decision made on a Tuesday. Myth is reduced to the quiet ache of being a woman who wants more than what she’s been handed, but has no clean way of asking for it. And somehow that makes it feel more universal, not less. The stakes are lower, but the pain is sharper. No one dies dramatically, but everyone is quietly disappointed in themselves.
There’s a playful anachronism running through the whole book that really worked for me. Helen scrolling through versions of herself across centuries, but always landing in the same emotional place: trapped between desire and duty, between wanting to be seen and wanting to disappear. Zoccola writes her with real agency, which I greatly appreciated. This Helen is not just acted upon, she actively makes choices, even bad ones, even selfish ones. Especially selfish ones. It’s giving: “Girlhood is when you want to be loved, womanhood is when you want to be left alone.”
The tone surprised me, too. It’s witty and whimsical, but never flippant. Feminist, but not slogan-y. There’s a lightness to the voice that makes the darker undercurrents hit harder. You feel the loneliness of marriage, the claustrophobia of motherhood you weren’t ready for, the way a whole community can reduce your inner life to rumor and narrative.
And then there’s the meta-pleasure of it: all the little Easter eggs for mythology nerds, the knowing nods to the original story, the way past and present keep bleeding into each other. You don’t need to know Homer to enjoy it, but if you do, it adds another layer of irony. Helen has been rewritten a thousand times, and somehow she’s still stuck in the same emotional cage, just with different furniture.
This felt like the perfect way to start the year: a myth about women who want more, rewritten as a story about women who are told to want less. It reminded me of being 13 and overhearing my grandmother say something about my legs. Not to me, of course. Just to the air. That they were “shapely,” and that this would “cause problems later.” The embarrassment. The psychic tax of growing up girl and having everything somehow be your own damn fault.
More than anything, what this collection did was remind me how angry I still am. About the things I learned too early. About the expectations that shaped my adolescence like wet clay. About the times I said yes when I meant no. Or worse, when I didn’t know I could say anything at all.
Read it if you’ve ever been told you were too pretty for your own good. Read it if you know exactly how deep that compliment cuts. Read it if you want your mythic heroines to be stubborn, tender, furious, and full of ash.
(PS: I would like to register a formal complaint with the gods of myth and fate: please stop giving women high cheekbones and zero exit strategies.)
Long Distance: Stories, Aysegül Savaş, Scribner UK, 2025
There’s a word in Romanian, “depărtare,” which doesn’t only mean “distance.” It means distance that lingers. That you can feel. That pulses, ever so gently. Like when the fridge kicks in at night, and you don’t notice it until it stops and you feel that sudden silence like a thud. Distance is everywhere: physical distance, emotional distance, time stretched like taffy until relationships grow thin and almost translucent.
Some of the characters are immigrants, displaced, trying to reconfigure themselves in new geographies. But others are simply people who no longer understand the people they used to be closest to. Which, if you ask me, is a more chilling kind of exile. And even though they often feel distant from each other, their interior worlds are so vivid, so intimately rendered, that I never felt distant from them. I never felt like I was watching her characters from the outside. I felt like I was peeking from behind their ribs, which is both invasive and somehow tender.
What I admire – and, fine, resent – is how easy it is for her to capture these distances, these quiet slippages in human connection. Maybe it’s the fault of her unassuming but lethal prose. There’s a kind of magician’s poise to it, actually. She’s not trying to impress you. She reveals just what she wants, exactly when she wants, and nothing more. She just opens a door, lets you eavesdrop for a few pages, and then closes it again. No explanation. And somehow this feels like more than enough.
I’m going to be honest with you. This isn’t a book you gulp. It’s a book you nurse like bad coffee on a sad Tuesday morning—when you’re not sure if you’re hungover or just a little too self-aware. I read it slowly. I read it tenderly.
Oh, and one more thing: reading this right after Helen of Troy made me laugh at myself. From mythic poetic Southern drama to minimalist interiority in two days flat. I’m like an emotional truffle pig with bad GPS. But both books, in completely different registers, made me feel the same thing: how hard it is to love, to stay close, to get it right.
Complete Works: Volume 1, Harold Pinter, Grove Press, 1993
Back in 2007, I wrote my Bachelor’s thesis on the theatre of the absurd: Textual Schizophrenia in the plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. I remember wandering the hallways “shopping around” for a professor willing to take me and my crazy idea on. It wasn’t a sexy topic. It required a lot of heavy lifting, not to mention footnotes. But someone eventually said yes, and we started unravelling what it means to write a thesis on the psychosis of that particular kind of language. Started off as cute. I was quite smug about it for the first couple of days. Then all hell broke loose.
To be honest, I cursed myself a lot that year. Why did I have to choose something this bleak? Why do I always have to pick the difficult thing? Why do I keep submitting myself to texts where “emotional fulfillment” goes to die? But it wasn’t my fault exactly. The seed had been planted long before. Back in high school, actually. During a literature class, my then teacher read us a scene from The Birthday Party. I remember how he stopped halfway through, lowered his voice, and whispered: “Do you feel the menace?” He was an odd duck that one. Loved him to bits.
Anyway, back to the present day. I picked this one up because I wanted to reclaim that version of myself – the 22-year-old with undereye circles and obsessive tabs open in her brain, a girl who was waking up and falling asleep inside other people’s language.
I thought it would make me melancholic, but instead it was like inviting a virus back into my body. Because let me tell you, you don’t read Pinter so much as become infected by him. You start questioning your own conversations. You start to notice pauses. You wonder what words are supposed to be doing and why they aren’t doing it. And underneath it all, a familiar kind of dread, thick as ever. Reading Pinter is like trying to navigate a dream while your feet are stuck in rotten honey.
I will admit something, though. His cruelty is part of the charm. The way people in his plays fail to communicate feels less like a narrative choice and more like a diagnosis of modern life. The way he uses silence — not as a gap but as an active presence — remains unmatched. It’s horror-adjacent. Not the kind with knives, but the kind with dull kitchen scissors and a sink full of grey water and a knock at the door at 3:07am.
Why would I recommend this to anyone? I don’t know. I just like feeling disturbed in a contained environment. I like reading something that makes the real world feel slightly more manageable by comparison. And I love a text that lets irrationality bloom without apology.
Final note: I’ve officially started referring to my mental spirals as “Pinteresque intermissions.” I think it adds something.
Death and the Gardener, Georgi Gospodinov, transalted by Angela Rodel, Liveright, 2025
First and foremost, and I mean this gently, no one is immune to the slow horror of watching a parent die in front of them. Some days you’ll handle it like a sage. Other days, you’ll get irrationally angry at a cucumber for being too green. This book sees all of that. Accepts all of it. It doesn’t dare tell you how to grieve. It sits beside you in the waiting room. Not even holding your hand or patting your back.
After reading Time Shelter, I’m proud to call myself one of Gospodinov’s biggest fans. And that’s why when I say there’s something beautifully unremarkable about this book, I don’t mean any shade. Despite the topic, grief here isn’t performed, there’s no trauma porn in sight. Which is brilliant because that’s how grief actually works – slowly, boringly, with flashes of tenderness and the occasional existential tailspin in a supermarket parking lot.
I’ve read my fair share of books on the death and dying of a loved one to be able to discern the difference between those that force themselves on me and those that build their emotional architecture with restraint, holding more than they let on. You don’t paint an accurate portrait of absence through grand epiphanies that tug at heartstrings, but through that unexpected ache that comes when you least expect it – when you’re washing your cup after having your morning coffee and remember how they took their toast.
If there’s a lesson here (and I don’t think Gospodinov is the kind of writer who cares about “lessons”), it’s that death, like love, doesn’t always need to be loud. It can be whispered through not saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Heart, Be At Peace, Donal Ryan, Transworld Publishers, 2025
There’s something about how Ryan writes that makes me feel like I’m walking through a town I’ve never visited but whose people all somehow know my business. I loved The Spinning Heart – I still remember the odd, clunky rhythm of it, like a choir where everyone is a little off-key and it still sounds perfect. But Heart, Be At Peace is something else, though it introduces us to the same characters, ten years later, aged not just by time but by life, by what it gives and what it takes. Drugs have replaced the church as the central religion, and everyone’s kneeling at altars of different kinds: love, fear, addiction, regret.
Twenty-one voices, twenty-one chapters, one tiny Irish village, and the same thick fog of grief, gossip, and old resentments hanging in the air like last night’s fried onions.
There were times I felt like the pages were full of ghosts – not dead people, necessarily, just the kind of spirits you carry around: the child you were, the friend you lost, the version of yourself that maybe turned left instead of right. Everyone in this book is trying to love and be loved and not screw it up too badly in the process.
The magic trick, of course, is that there is no main character. Not really. Some stayed with me longer than others, like faces I passed on the street and couldn’t stop thinking about. Others came and went, and I even forgot their names. Some were violent and infuriating, others were decent and gentle, all were broken in some way. Like us.
Basically the undisputed master of the “Ah, life” genre.
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews, New Directions, 2004
I genuinely believe there’s a right time to read certain books, so sometimes I’ll wait and wait until I know. I’ve been circling around this for a while, always putting it off for some reason, but this month I was finally ready to sit down with it. It’s small but mighty. A single feverish paragraph, the muttering of a dying man – a priest, a critic, a coward – who cannot quite decide whether he’s making a case for himself or preparing his own crucifixion. And in the end, maybe it’s both.
I read it in one dazed sitting and kept thinking: this isn’t historical fiction, this is present tense. The silence, the compromise, the small betrayals disguised as intellectual detachment – all still painfully relevant. Different times, same familiar horror. You look up from the page and realize that we’re also living through a time when the pigeons are being shot down by trained falcons, so the cathedral looks clean. It’s all performative order, an illusion of hygiene. But God knows the difference, as Father Urrutia would say.
Bolaño doesn’t just give us a character – he gives us a mechanism. Urrutia is what happens when someone builds their entire identity out of books and footnotes and clever conversation, only to find that none of it is enough to shield them from the knowledge that they were there when the blood dried. Present, and silent. The man taught Marxism to Pinochet’s generals, for God’s sake, and then went home to write literary criticism. He keeps insisting he did nothing wrong. But Bolaño – in his most devastating move – lets us see that doing nothing was the wrong.
The writing is dark, sinewy, filled with ghostly names and grotesque metaphors (I haven’t stopped thinking about the pigeons). It feels like a fever breaking, like a moral abscess draining.
And still, what’s unsaid is as loud as what’s said. And maybe that’s what hit me the hardest. Not the fascism (though yes, that), not the torture basement hidden behind the hors d’oeuvres (though yes), but the idea that silence is never neutral. That to be quiet in the face of something vile is not passive. That it echoes somewhere. That God – or the page – hears it.
The most damning line in the entire book isn’t shouted. It’s whispered like a sigh: Sordel, Sordello, which Sordello?
Which of us, really?
Stigmata: Escaping Texts, Hélène Cixous, Taylor & Francis, 2005
Reading Cixous after a long break from post-structuralism and discourse theory is a bit like meeting a lover you once broke up with for being too much – too elliptical, too esoteric, too maddening in their refusal to speak plainly – and discovering that all those impossible qualities now seem like magic. She doesn’t come to you with answers. She comes with metaphors, half-spoken truths, and an urge to follow a sentence down its own rabbit hole just to see where it ends up.
This is not a book you read, so much as swim in. You dog-paddle through its waters, hanging on for dear life, sometimes graceful, often not, sometimes swallowing whole gulps of confusion. But there are shards of something profound flickering just beneath the surface. And when one of them cuts you, as they inevitably will, it feels deserved.
I won’t pretend I understood every essay. Sometimes I didn’t even understand every sentence. But there’s something intimate about her confusion – as if you’re watching her think in real time, letting you hover beside her as she stumbles, recovers, argues with herself. There’s no final answer. Just the reverberation of the question, echoing through a hall of mirrors.
I found myself comforted by that. By her refusal to land, to fix things. She writes like someone trying to bottle wind – not to contain it, but to show you how beautiful it is when it moves. “The poison is not hate, it is weak love.” Lines like that knock you sideways. Her logic is emotional, and her emotion is architectural.
Reading Stigmata reminded me how much I hate being told what to think. Cixous never tells. She suggests, she spirals, she contradicts herself, and starts over. She says, “I sense that in each book words with roots hidden between the text come and go and carry out some other book between the lines.” That’s exactly how this feels — like reading two books at once: the one she wrote, and the one you’re slowly, privately assembling as you read her.
The Slip, Lucas Schaefer, Simon & Schuster, 2025
It’s funny how fast a novel can take hold of your entire brain, even when you can’t quite explain how. The Slip isn’t subtle about its ambition – it’s 500 pages, spans more than a decade, juggles at least four timelines, and swings wildly from a boxing gym in 1998 Austin to a phone sex hotline to the bruised nostalgia of a community trying to remember how it all fell apart. You’d think it would collapse under its own ambition, but instead it feels like it’s holding you. In a sweaty, meaty, deeply affectionate chokehold.
Schaefer writes with the kind of narrative confidence that makes you think, “Wait, is this actually going somewhere?” and then, somehow, you arrive – breathless, elbow-deep in character arcs and broken masculinity and an entire ecosystem of beautiful, tragic weirdos. And you realize: oh, this was the point.
If a novel can be Franzenesque without the misogyny, Tartt-ish without the literary smugness, or Flynnian without the stylized trauma porn, this is it. The Slip is queer and furious and tender and hot and weird and good. It’s about men – broken ones, lovely ones, haunted ones, vanished ones – and the people orbiting them like moons or landmines. It’s about boxes we put ourselves in (gender, weight class, national border, last name) and the fight to stay there or get out.
I adored Alexis Cepeda, the lightweight boxer with a fake ID and a real shot. I adored Bob, the uncle turned unlikely detective. I even adored Charles Rex, the awkward, yearning voice on the other end of the hotline – a character so soft and lonely it felt like opening the fridge for the fourth time in one night just to feel something.
Would I recommend it to everyone? No. Some people will be annoyed that it takes 300 pages for the plot to really kick in. But those people probably microwave soup in the plastic container it came in. I’m not here to convert them.
The Possession, Annie Ernaux, translated by Anna Moschovakis, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025
You don’t need to have been possessed to get The Possession, but it sure helps.
I read this with the kind of sick curiosity I reserve for combing the comment section of my ex’s new girlfriend’s Instagram posts, fully knowing it will end in psychic bruises. Ernaux doesn’t just admit to jealousy – she takes it out of its hiding place under the bed, drags it into the kitchen light, and starts slicing it open with the precision of a surgeon who doesn’t particularly care whether you survive the operation. It’s only 60 pages long, but it hits like a sucker punch delivered by your own frontal lobe.
The plot, if you can call it that, is: she left him, and then he got a new woman. And suddenly she’s gone full MI6: logging clues, reverse-engineering timelines, obsessing over a coat detail, a travel story, a haircut. She stalks this woman not in real life (at least not much) but in thought, in language, in fantasy. The Possession is the mental spiral of a woman undone by the imagined perfection of the girl who came after her. You know – the one who probably reads Le Monde and flosses. The one who doesn’t use a tote bag so dirty it could qualify as its own archaeological dig.
Reading this felt like stepping into a confession booth where the priest is just your best friend, muttering “same, girl” between drags of a cigarette. Because who among us hasn’t fixated on the idea of being replaced? Not the man himself – but the concept of what he chose instead of you. Her cheekbones. Her geography. Her silence. Her apparent ease in simply existing without having once screamed into a pillow about the concept of time.
After gulping it down in one sitting, this is what I wrote in my journal – and by journal, I mean the notes app on my phone: Jealousy is a performance of control over something already lost. But that’s not what Ernaux does. She doesn’t perform control. She performs the unraveling. And it’s glorious.
And that’s The Possession in a nutshell – not about love, but about humiliation. About the masochistic art of narrative. About losing the plot and realizing you’re the unreliable narrator in your own obsessive little novella.
It’s like she wrote it with a scalpel in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And when she finally lays the obsession down, still warm and twitching, you don’t feel purged. You feel seen. And slightly nauseous.
Five stars. No notes. Except maybe: don’t read it if you’ve recently been dumped. Or do. Who am I to deny you the exquisite pain of recognition?
The Sorrows of Others, Ada Zhang, A Public Space Books, 2023
I didn’t cry reading The Sorrows of Others, but it gave me the distinct feeling that someone had been crying just before I arrived – and I had walked in, late and uninvited, to a room that had just been aired out. The windows open. The tissue box put away. But the residue of sadness still hanging like a fine mist.
Ada Zhang’s debut is the kind of quiet book that doesn’t reach for you, doesn’t call your name, doesn’t light a fire. These are short stories that end just when you’re starting to feel like maybe you understand what’s going on – which is exactly why they work. Because understanding is overrated. What Zhang gives you is recognition. A wound, mid-scab.
But what stunned me is how wise she is about things that are usually earned through decades of pain. Ada Zhang is in her twenties, and yet writes like someone who has been quietly watching the world break and remake itself for sixty years. She writes like someone who’s had her heart broken not just by people, but by systems. By inheritance. By the strange choreography of loving someone who doesn’t speak your language, literally or emotionally.
There’s a mature softness to her stories, but underneath the gentleness is a very sharp razor. These characters – Chinese-American families, immigrants, people caught in the thicket between past and present – they are steeped in a very specific ache: not quite belonging, not quite recovering. Living in the pause between memory and assimilation.
Read them slowly, one at a time. Let them bruise you a little. And when you’re done, don’t expect catharsis. Expect a silence that feels familiar – like someone who once loved you still thinks of you when it rains.
Final Word
I’ve come out of January feeling… stewed. Tenderized by proximity to grief, to memory, to plain weirdness. I spent thirty-one days rubbing elbows with characters I would not necessarily invite over, but who have nonetheless taken up residence in my head. This was not a month of reading to escape. This was a month of reading to marinate. To slow cook. To let things proof at room temperature.
Which is to say: I wasn’t stagnating, I was becoming gelatinous with meaning.
These books didn’t “help.” They didn’t fix me. They didn’t promise anything would be alright in the end. I’m not better now for having read them. But I am weirder. And that counts for something.
See you in February.
