January 2026 Reading

It is always good to start the year with books you enjoy and so in December I decided to save for January a number of books that I wanted to read. It worked. I started the year off on a good reading foot.  

I finished my read of the 2025 Booker Prize short listed novels. I read a book of poetry that I enjoyed (which was a relief after not finding enjoyable poetry last year). Surprisingly I also read three nonfiction books this month, all memoirs. That puts me half way to my goal of reading 6 nonfiction books this year. 

I also carried through on my resolution to write more, individually, about books I read. I didn't do a "Short Take" for each of the books I read but I have provided a link for where I did.  

These are the books I finished in January. 

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovitz

The last of the 2025 Booker short listed books that I read, I enjoyed this one.  After learning of his wife's affair Tom Layward makes a decision. He will leave her but only after their youngest child leaves for college. Years later the time has come. Tom considers his options as he drives his daughter to college in Pittsburgh. Once in Pittsburgh he decides to continue the drive cross country to Los Angeles to see his son, stopping along the way to visit old friends. He is in ill health, suffering from what his doctor has said was "long COVID". Told in the first person, we are in Tom's head the entire novel. This is a character driven novel that focuses mostly on the one character.  My Short Take is here. Recommended.

My Beloved: A Mitford Novel by Jan Karon

Yes, yes, yes. Jan Karon's Mitford series is kind of hokey but that's ok. Sometimes in dark times you need to read the heartwarming hokey books. How great that she published her 15th Mitford book now. This one takes place at Christmas time and I read it during the 12 days of Christmas. My Short Take is here. Recommended only if you have read and are a fan of the other Mitford novels. 

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley

A memoir of loss, grief, joy and finding calmness through surrounding yourself with beauty. In his twenties Patrick Bringley quit his job at the New Yorker after his brother died and took a job as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he worked for ten years. This memoir is a love letter to the Met but also a story of how he dealt with his grief by surrounding himself with beauty and stillness.  Another book to read during hard times. My Short Take is here. Highly recommended.

The Snow Lies Deep by Paula Munier

The latest in Paula Munier's Mercy Carr mystery series, this one takes place at Christmas time and where better to celebrate Christmas than in Vermont's Green Mountains? But someone is killing Santas, which puts a crimp in the local holiday festival. Former Army MP Mercy and her husband, game warden Troy Warner, just want to celebrate their daughter Felicity's first Christmas in peace. Instead they are called on to help solve the mystery with their dogs Elvis, a retired bomb sniffing Malinois, and Susie Bear, a search and rescue Newfoundland. In addition, they have to deal with both sets of grandparents who have their own ideas about how to celebrate the holidays. I really like this series because the author clearly understands dogs and the dogs are integral to solving the mysteries. But the mysteries are also usually good and Munier does a good job developing her characters. And you can't beat the beautiful location. This one had a fairly convoluted plot but it all came together at the end. You can read this as a stand alone mystery but as always I recommend you start at the beginning of the series.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

I know that some people dislike when an Ian McEwan novel has a twist that reminds the reader that s/he is reading fiction. But I don't mind it. This novel is set in a dystopian future in the year 2119, and the humanities are still under siege at the university level. Thomas Metcalfe specializes in the literature of the early years of the 21st century, specifically  the poetry of the poet Francis Bundy (a sort of lesser Seamus Heaney). Bundy is reputed to have written a long poem for his wife Vivien and given the only copy to her. Thomas is determined to find it even though the geography of the world has changed immensely. Through the archive of emails, text messages and social media posts, he traces Vivien's days, especially the date of her birthday when the poem was given to her, and draws what conclusions he can. Through this research he creates a narrative that seems to fit the facts. But does it?  There are always things about people that remain unknown because neither the person nor anyone in the person's life ever refers to it in any kind of writing. The novel is divided into two parts:  the search and Vivien's actual story. Truthfully, I thought the second part, the shorter of the two, dragged a bit. Too much narrative, not enough action. But on the whole I enjoyed this novel.  My Short Take is here.  Recommended with reservations.

Doggerel by Reginald Dwayne Betts

After a disappointing year with poetry in 2025 I was glad to start off 2026 with a collection I enjoyed. I admit I would have understood it better if I had read a bit of the poet's biography before finishing the collection. When he was 16, Betts, otherwise an honors student, committed armed carjacking and was sentenced to 9 years in prison as an adult. While in prison he began to write poetry and after his release and receiving his GED he went to graduate school and received a number of degrees. It would have been very helpful to have known that in prison he received the name Shahid because through the collection he refers to Shahid. This collection examines his life both in prison and after prison using primarily (but not exclusively) his relationship with dogs. Sometimes as a person puts their lives together only their dog is a witness. Sometimes their dog reminds them to live in the here and now. Sometimes other people's dogs allow connection with other humans. This is not necessarily a light hearted collection and, as with most modern poetry, it is very personal and therefore not always understandable to a third person (my major complaint about modern poetry). It is a tribute to man's best friend although in the acknowledgements he thanks "Fiesty, the cat, a rescue, that circles my legs whenever I sit near her, & purrs that doggerel is kind of incomplete without a cat." Recommended.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

This memoir has been on my TBR list since it was released more than 10 years ago. Since there is a feature film of the book being released this month it seemed to be the right time to pick it up. Helen Macdonald tries to deal with her grief over the sudden death of her father by retreating from the world and raising and training a goshawk she names Mabel. Helen was an experienced falconer but goshawks are supposed to be difficult to train. Over the first year with Mabel she learns as much about herself as she learns about Mabel. The memoir is interspersed with memories of her father (who seemed to have been a lovely man). She also becomes somewhat obsessed with a memoir by T.H. White in which he describes how he (badly) tried to train a goshawk. Although filled with information about birds of prey and the woods around Cambridge, this actually reads more like a novel than the usual memoir. Macdonald seamlessly integrates facts into her narrative so that it doesn't feel like a digression but an essential part of the narrative. My Short Take is here. Highly recommended.

Honey, Baby, Mine by Laura Dern and Diane Ladd

I listened to this joint memoir on audiobook and I'm really glad I did. The book arose out of a series of walks that Laura Dern forced her mother to do when her mother was diagnosed with a life threatening illness. The doctor said that increasing her lung capacity by walking would be good for Diane. To distract her mom during the walks Laura asked her questions. That led to Diane asking Laura questions. The book is a transcript of the conversations (clearly also edited) but in the audiobook each of Laura and Diane read their own "parts" and, being actresses, that makes the whole book sound like it is taking place in real time. There is a lot of interesting information about working in Hollywood but the personal parts (especially when they disagree over their memories) are equally entertaining.  My Short Take is here. Recommended.

The Last Children of Mill Creek by Vivian Gibson

Six months after she retired, Vivian Gibson joined a creative writing class and began writing about her childhood. That turned into this memoir of her life growing up as a Black child in the 1950's in segregated St. Louis. Vivian lived in a segregated area called the Mill Creek Valley, a section of the city containing over 5,000 buildings and inhabited by 20,000 citizens, 95% of them black. My book group picked it for next month's discussion and the Missouri History Museum currently has an exhibit called Mill Creek: Black Metropolis which runs until July 12.  The Mill Creek Valley neighborhood was demolished in 1959 for "urban renewal". Almost no trace of it remains today.  Vivian remembers the community that lived there and the details of her life. This book was not only informative but nostalgic for me. Even though Vivian is black and I am white and I did not grow up in Mill Creek I remember many of the things she remembers including the Charlotte Peters show on television that my mom watched at noon every day, going to Soulard Market for fresh fruit and vegetables, making cornbread (with my grandma) and being allowed to play in other kids' backyards but being told not to go in their houses. I did not, however, grow up in a house infested with rats. I enjoyed this book. I'm not sure it would have the same effect on someone who wasn't from St. Louis. 

Moby Dick or The Whale by Herman Melville

This was a month long read-along with my usual BlueSky reading group. I think most of the people in the group (at least the ones that were posting the most often) had read it before but I hadn't. You might expect more "action" in a book about a whaling ship searching for and trying to kill the Great White Whale but most of the book is more like a treatise on whales, whaling ships and whalers. Fortunately Melville writes with humor, and his descriptions are vivid and every time I would think that I was bored out of my mind he would pop in with some quip that made me laugh. Also, the sections on whales and whaling included most of the "deep thoughts" that Melville had (or seemed to have). While I'm glad I read this book (finally) and I appreciated the writing, it was my least favorite book that I read this month. I don't need a novel to be plot-heavy (this isn't) but I do like my novels to be character-driven and through most of this novel (really, until the last part) it isn't. Even though the plot (such as it is) is driven by Ahab's obsessive search for the White Whale, Ahab himself isn't really much in the novel until toward the end. I will say that Melville created a good sense of place - being on a whaleship hunting for and processing whales - which is usually a plus for me but I found that I really wasn't that interested in whaling ships and whales.  My Short Take is here.

In some ways it is a shame I chose to read "Moby Dick" and "H is for Hawk" in the same month. "H is for Hawk" could be read as a treatise on hawks and hawking but Macdonald's digressions into hawks and hawking were integrated into the greater narrative and were necessary for her character arc (even though it was a memoir and not a novel). On the other hand Melville, who was ostensibly writing a novel, did not integrate his information about whales and whaling into his narrative but put them into (many) separate chapters. This was, I think, partly because of the age in which the novel was written but also the digressions may have been his way of showing how time slowly passed on a whaling ship where you might have nothing to do but reflect on life. Either way, I have to say that in my opinion those sections went on much too long.  

Moby Dick or The Whale

 

 

The Book:  Ishmael, who already had a sea career on a merchantman vessel, decides he wants to join a whaling crew. He chooses to join the crew of The Pequod without meeting its captain first. What he doesn't know until the ship sets off is that the captain, Ahab, is on an obsessive quest to find Moby Dick, the great white whale who took off Ahab's leg on an earlier voyage. While Ishmael (and the crew) wait to find Moby Dick, Ishmael (or maybe it's the author) fills the reader in on the biology of whales, the politics of a whaling ship, the character of his crewmates and what it is like to kill a whale and process the whale oil.  And along the way there are digressions about life in general and critiques of other authors who have written about whales and whaling. But is this really a book about the search for a whale or is the white whale a metaphor for ... well, your choice.

The Author: Herman Melville

Genre: Fiction (Classic)

Length: 625 pp (paperback Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition); 24 hours by Audiobook (read by Anthony Heald).  About halfway through the book I picked up the audiobook and switched back and forth between the two. 

One good thing:  When they finally find Moby Dick the story becomes quite thrilling. And by that time you have been told so much about whales, whaling ships and how to kill and process a whale in the mid 1800's that it all makes sense and adds to the tension.

One not-so-great thing:  As DH Lawrence said: "it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, and of considerable tiresomeness."  It really can get tiresome if you aren't in the mood to know every detail about whales and whaling. 

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":

    Story: While reading this, I heard someone I follow on YouTube say that he read Moby Dick last year and hated it. He called it a short story padded to be a really long novel. If you are a plot oriented person who needs a page-turner, who requires fast pacing, you probably will hate this novel too. 

    Characters: If you are looking for a deep examination of the inner lives of characters this is not the novel for you. Captain Ahab is, of course, a famous character although, surprisingly, he isn't really much in the novel until the end. In fact most of the characters other than Ishmael, the narrator, aren't much in the novel. And Ishmael disappears into a third person narrator for much of the book. We don't even see Moby Dick until toward the end. You can go for many chapters without any real reference to any character. On the other hand, Ahab's madness drives the plot of the novel. 

    Setting:  If you have ever wanted to know what it is like to be a whaler on a whaling ship, this is the novel for you. Even if you never wanted to know, this novel will tell you. By the end you may feel that if you were magically transported back to the mid 1800's onto a whaler, you would do fine. 

    Writing:  This is an odd novel because it doesn't really follow any of the normal rules of novel writing. It is more like a treatise with a story hidden within it. Fortunately, Melville is surprisingly funny, often intentionally but sometimes unintentionally.  His descriptions are specific and even I, who have a difficult time visualizing things described in novels, pretty much understood his descriptions. I feel like most of the people who like this novel like it because of Melville's "turns of phrase" which can be very vivid. Be aware that this is a novel of its times and includes all the prejudices of its times. 

    

Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding)

 

The Book: When actress Diane Ladd developed a life threatening illness the doctors said that she could  possibly prolong her life by increasing her lung capacity with long walks. Her daughter, actress Laura Dern, set up a regimen of walks which Diane resisted at first. But Laura would distract her mom by asking her mom questions about her life and career, including her divorce from Laura's dad Bruce Dern and the death of their first child. Then Diane turned the tables on Laura and asked her questions about her life, children and career including her divorce. The conversations are fun to listen to especially when they intensely disagree about their memories. They were determined to leave nothing unsaid. And they even include a few recipes for favorite foods they discuss. 

The Author: Laura Dern and Diane Ladd 

Genre: Non-Fiction (memoir)

Length: 8 hours on audiobook

One good thing:  The book is written as a transcription of their talks but since this is an audiobook and they are reading their own "parts" it is especially effective because they recreate their actual conversations and each of them, being an actress, is very good at that. Even their arguments sound like they are occurring in the moment. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook for this book.

One not-so-great thing:  If you listen to the audiobook version you apparently miss out on the photos that are included in the hard book. 

H is for Hawk

 

The Book: When Helen Macdonald's beloved father unexpectedly dies of a heart attack Helen tries to deal with her grief by raising and training a goshawk that she names Mabel. Helen is an experienced falconer but goshawks are known to be very difficult to train. Helen tells of her successes and failures both in training Mabel and in dealing with her grief. Her memories of her father, who seems to have been a lovely man, are strewn throughout the memoir. She also evaluates previous writings about the training of goshawks especially a memoir by T.H. White (the author of The Sword in the Stone). Unlike Helen, T.H. White had no experience and made a mess of his attempt to train a goshawk but despite that Helen is drawn to the memoir and compares her own experience with White's experience.  By the end of the year Helen has learned much about Mabel and about herself.

The Author: Helen Macdonald

Genre: Non-fiction (memoir)

Length: 387 pp (e-book on my mini ipad)

One good thing:  This beautifully written memoir reads more like a novel than most memoirs.

One not-so-great thing: There really isn't anything not great about this book but I suppose if you are completely uninterested in either birds, woods or T.H. White you might be a bit bored with parts of it. 

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":  Although this is a memoir, it reads like a novel so I feel it is appropriate to discuss this. 

    Story:  Obviously, since this is a memoir, the story is dependent upon reality. And yet there is a story arc as Helen trains Mabel and moves through her own grief.  This is not a page-turner but a book to be read slowly and savored.

    Characters: Because of her grief, for much of the book Helen has mostly withdrawn into a world that is just she and Mabel. But she makes Mabel a character without anthropomorphizing her. I definitely ended the book wanting more of both Helen and Mabel.

    Setting: Most of the book is spent in the woods and fields of England in and around Cambridge.  It's nice to read a book set in this locale that isn't about the university. 

    Writing: This is a beautifully written book. All of the information about birds, especially goshawks, could have been very dry but isn't. And all of the information about White could have been seen as a distraction from the main story but instead is well integrated into Helen's story. 

    

    

What We Can Know

 

The Book: The year is 2119 and the earth has suffered a series of cataclysms due to global warming and AI. What was previously the island of Britain is now an archipelago. But universities still exist and the humanities are still under siege. Thomas Metcalf is a scholar who studies literature from the early 21st century. He is primarily studying the poet Francis Bundy (a sort of minor Seamus Heaney) and his wife Vivien. Back in 2014, at a birthday party for Vivien, Francis presented her with a long poem said to be one of his greatest. She possessed the only copy. But what did she do with it? Metcalf wants to find out everything he can about Vivien and Francis but especially wants to find that poem. If this premise sounds similar to A.S Byatt's prizewinning novel Possession, it is. Both involve long dead poets and a scholar's search for information about their private life. But, in fact, it more resembles her much less acclaimed novel The Biographer's Tale which seemed to say that in the end all biography owes something to the creative ideas of the biographer - and wouldn't they just rather write fiction? In all three of these novels the premise is that scholars in the future can only know a limited amount about the life of someone in the past even when, in the case of Francis and Vivien Bundy, there are digital archives of every email, text and social media post they ever made. 

The Author: Ian McEwan

Genre: Literary Fiction 

Length: 301 pp (hardback)

One good thing:  McEwan creates a very believable 2119 which is similar and yet different from the early 21st century. Although he explains how the world ended up the way it did, he doesn't dwell on the "why" but focuses on how things are at that time. 

One not-so-great thing: The novel is divided into two parts. The first part, the longer of the two, is the story of Metcalf's research while at the same time the story of his relationship with his lover and colleague Rose. Metcalf creates a believable story about Francis and Vivien and their friends out of the information he has reviewed although Rose warns him that some of this story is just his own speculation. In the second, shorter, part we go back to the 21st century and learn what really happened. That section is very much a narrative with little dialog and action and in my opinion it went on too long. 

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":

    Story:  There is a story arc, although not a lot of action. This is a very cerebral novel.  And yet, as long as you are in the mood for a cerebral novel, the story does move along keeping the reader in suspense. 

    Characters: We see the character of Tom Metcalf through his first person narrative and while he has a bit of a character arc I don't feel that at the end of his story he is significantly different than he was at the beginning. The more interesting characters are the other "historical" characters that Tom is researching and they are interesting partly because Tom has made them interesting. If you are someone who dislikes when Ian McEwan reminds the reader that novels are FICTION, this might bother you.  

    Setting: McEwan is good at describing the world of the future where English people must travel by boat from island to island. But this isn't a true science fiction novel in which he creates a whole new world.  

    Writing:  As usual, the primary reason to read a McEwan novel is the writing itself. Even though there isn't a dynamic plot, he moves it along (until the end) and even though we are seeing characters through Tom's eyes, and therefore we cannot rely on it, they are interesting. And the world of the future is very cleverly created. 

Avoid Reality With YouTube

In these days when every morning we wake up to news that is bad or crazy or both, I think we are all looking for diversions. One of my diversions is YouTube.

I often listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast which features, among others, Linda Holmes. Every Friday the group talks about what is "making them happy" that week. Last week Linda pointed listeners to a YouTube channel called "Anti-Chef" which features an ordinary guy named Jamie who has been teaching himself to cook. Linda said that she finds it super relaxing.

And I agree!  I've been watching Anti-Chef for a few years now. At first Jamie really didn't know what he was doing but he's pretty good now. And the best part is that he always shows all his mistakes. It's very relatable. Here he is making a rolled cake for 2025 Christmas but flashing back to his attempts in other years.

Anti-Chef is actually the only cooking channel that I regularly watch. (Sometimes I watch the America's Test Kitchen channel.)  But I got to thinking about other YouTube channels that I watch to relax and thought that I would share them.  

Reactors

One genre of YouTube Channel that I find relaxing in the evening before bed is the reaction channel where the hosts watch movies or TV shows for the first time and react to them. Because of copyright law they can't show the whole show on the channel, they can only show selected scenes. So I only watch reactions to movies and TV shows that I've already seen. 

The last couple of months a lot of channels have been reacting to Robert Redford movies, for example, and I could always watch reactions to The Sting by people who have never seen it.  Madison K. Thames reacts to movies on her channel and last week she reacted to The Horse Whisperer (which I hadn't seen in years, I need to rent it). I anticipate a lot of reactions to Rob Reiner movies in the coming months. 

I also sometimes watch reactions in the middle of the day when I'm eating lunch. One of my favorite channels is "Watch This! With Joe and Kevin".  They are two smart guys who always "get" what is going on in a scene (some reactors are not so smart).  Right now they are working their way through, among other things, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (on Mondays) and The Gilmore Girls (on Wednesdays), so I usually watch when I'm eating lunch on those days.

Another favorite channel is Jen Murray who is working her way through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on Sunday mornings.If you watch a couple of Reactor Channels Youtube will recommend more through their algorithm. On really bad days I just randomly pick one and watch it.  

Big Historic Houses

For some reason I'm a sucker for videos about big historic houses. This House is a good channel for that with the added benefit that the videos are short. The subjects are usually American mansions, many of which have unfortunately been torn down. 

American Countess is Julie Montagu's channel. Julie is an American, born somewhere outside Chicago. But now she's the Countess of Sandwich. On her channel she travels around to British great houses and shows them. Being a Countess gets her into a lot of houses (plus the owners want to drum up visitors because those houses are expensive to maintain). She also shares her research into her husband's great grandmother who was also an American countess (sort of like Cora in Downtown Abbey). 

Being a Countess, Julie and her husband Luke (the current Earl of Sandwich) have their own great house called Mapperton. So they have their own channel  called Mapperton Live on which she and Luke share all the trials and tribulations of trying to keep a great house in good repair. It makes you think twice about any dream you might have about living an aristocratic life. And it's good for a weekly escape from reality.

Miscellaneous

Sometimes I search for travel Vlogs because I like to think about being other places. There are lots of them. Tyler Braun has two channels, including one called Disneyville Podcast which is all things Disney and I've always been fond of Disney World.  He is slowly moving all Disney related Vlogs over to that channel from his other channel which is just called Tyler Braun.  (He owns a travel agency and travels a lot with his family but also sometimes does daily-life Vlogs where he repairs things or talks about books or the holidays.)

I also enjoy beauty blogs when I want to get really, really mindless.  I look for older women but it's hard to find beauty channels that cater to older women (mature skin is 35 to these people).  So I also look for makeup artists who do weddings because they work on different aged people (i.e. mothers and grandmothers of the bride). A few that I like are Angie Hot and Flashy (Angie is in her 60's), Mandy Davis MUA (she's a makeup artist who lives in Nashville), Pampered Wolf (she's in her 40's but she regularly has on her "mum" who is over 65) and Risa Does Makeup (she's a 50 year old makeup artist lving in Las Vegas).  And then there's Tati, who is generally over the top (more is more!) but somehow very soothing. 

I hope this gives some ideas about escaping from the daily bad news. 

All The Beauty In The World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

The Book: When Patrick Bringley's brother died of cancer in his twenties, Patrick quit his job at The New Yorker, where he worked in the public events office, and took a job as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He wanted to assuage his grief and "applied for the most straightforward job I could think of in the most beautiful place I knew".  As he says "My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I wanted to stand still awhile." This is a beautiful memoir of grief, joy, and love of art. It is also a love letter to the Met. In a world where bad things happen every day, it's nice to know that the Met exists. And it is nice to have books like this.

The Author: Patrick Bringley

Genre: Non-Fiction (Memoir)

Length:  321 pages using my iPad mini as e-reader. But note that the last 13 pages are a bibliography of books about art and the preceding 40 pages are "Art Works Referenced in the Text".  At the beginning of that section is a link to the part of Bringley's web page containing the same list with links you can click that will take you to an image of the art.

One good thing:  Bringley writes in a very accessible way about the art in the museum, so don't be afraid to pick this up even if you know that you have little background in art.

One not-so-great thing:  In later chapters occasionally Bringley does not tie the art he is describing into events in his own life or the lives of the visitors to the Met and he tends to go into "art instructor" mode. I kept waiting for him to get back to his own life. 

Personal Memory: Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways" are meant for fiction and aren't applicable here. Instead, I want to bring a personal memory. One of my favorite paintings is Jan Van Eyck's "Marriage of Arnolfini". In March 1991 I visited London for the first time. My travel plans were made during the First Gulf War, although the conflict had ended by the time I arrived. Due to that war, there were almost no tourists in London (a rarity). One day I visited the National Gallery by myself. This was before the Sainsbury Wing had opened. It was morning and the museum was almost empty. I either didn't know that the Arnolfini portrait was held by the National Gallery or I had forgotten. I was wandering through various galleries, just me and the guards, when I happened upon that painting. I know my face lit up and I'm pretty sure I said aloud "Mr. Arnolfini!".  Then I stood in front of it for a good ten minutes, knowing I would never get this chance to be alone with it again.  Just me and the guard.  After reading this memoir I regret that I didn't share this with the guard, but I'm sure he watched and knew.  The next time I visited the National Gallery the Sainsbury Wing had opened and Mr. Arnolfini had been moved there. The room was packed with visitors and I missed having him all to myself.