...And here we are in February. People will talk about how January is such a garbage month, the Monday of the new year, but friends, I freaking loooooove January. The emptiness of it. The blissfully free evenings and weekends that no one is quite up to filling with social events this soon after the bacchanalia of the December holidays. SO. MUCH. FREE TIME. Honestly it just makes my little introvert heart glow.
Of course, this means more quiet winter nights for curling up with an actual paper book, which inevitably gets harder for me as the year goes on. I read four count 'em four full paper books this month! Unbelievable.
Also totally by chance, I had no work travel this month, which meant more time for running, particularly longer runs, which meant the audiobook count was also up there this month.
Check out this month's list and see if anything calls to you! (Also, I've decided to start starring my favorites every month just to make it easier to scan for which ones I particularly liked.)
(1) 📚🎭✨ The Magus by John Fowles (656 pages, 1965). Audiobook. In 1950s Britain, a disaffected and aimless young man takes up with an Australian girl, then breaks up with her when things get too serious. Soon after he pursues a job teaching English at a boys' school on the Greek island of Phraxos, where he meets the enigmatic and eccentric millionaire Maurice Conchis, who may or may not have been a nazi collaborator in the second world war and who is soon engaging our young protagonist in what I can only describe as a kind of dreamy LARP involving a pretty girl who is first introduced (impossibly) as Conchis's young lover from back in 1915 and also a lot of Greek mythology cosplay. It only gets more bizarre from there!
⭐️ (2) 📚🎭🔍🗡️ Reef Road by Deborah Goodrich Royce (306 pages, 2023). Audiobook. This book opens with a group of kids finding a severed man's hand washed up on on the beach off of the fancy Palm Beach neighborhood of Reef Road during the 2020 pandemic lockdown. From there, we're treated to two alternating stories: the life story of a lonely writer obsessed with the unsolved murder of her mother’s best friend, and the story of a panicked Reef Road wife whose Argentinean husband has taken their children back to his home country without her permission. Over the course of the book, we learn how all three stories are related and what it means for the different characters.
(3) 💎🔍🗡️ Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie (256 pages, 1973). Paper Book. Retired couple Tommy & Tuppence Beresford move to a new home called The Laurels in an English resort town. In an old book in the house’s library, Tuppence finds a message left by a fourteen-year-old boy over sixty years ago: “Mary Jordan did not die naturally.” The Beresfords become obsessed with solving the mystery of Mary Jordan and her death, and in the course of their amateur sleuthing uncover some intriguing history about their new home and village. But it seems that Mary’s old enemies are somehow, impossibly, still out there, and ready to do whatever is necessary to keep the Beresfords quiet. I think this was the last book Christie ever wrote and it’s definitely not her best or most interesting.
(4) 🎭🔪 What Lies Between Us by John Marrs (379 pages, 2020). Audiobook. Oof this was a dark ass book. It’s maybe not that unusual for an adult mother and daughter to live together, but it is perhaps a bit more unusual for a daughter to keep her mother chained in the house while the outside world all believe she’s gone to live in a care home after a stroke. We learn chapter by chapter what Maggie has done to deserve this treatment from Nina–as well as the secrets she still keeps from her daughter, and why.
(5) 🎭🔍🔪 The Family Game by Catherine Steadman (400 pages, 2022). Audiobook. British novelist Harriet Reed is newly engaged to Edward, heir and scion of the Holbecks, descended from a legendary robber baron contemporaneous with the Carnegies and Morgans of the early 20th century. Though Edward had been somewhat estranged from the family, the engagement and Harriet’s move to the US has the family inching back into his (and Harriet’s) life. But one red flag after another has Harriet on edge about joining the family, including a grisly holiday tradition, a revelation about a family tragedy, and Edward’s father giving her a tape recording which seems to be a murder confession. Now Harriet is beginning to worry if joining this strange, immensely powerful family may come with much higher stakes than she realized.
⭐️ (6) ℹ️🖋 You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir by Maggie Smith (313 pages, 2023). Audiobook. Renown poet Maggie Smith (you may have read/heard of her most well known poem "Good Bones") tells an introspective and reflective story about the disintegration of her marriage and subsequently doubling down on herself. Ostensibly the story is a memoir but through the pages what we're ultimately treated to is a larger interrogation of some of the biggest themes that underlie marriage and honestly all of society, including family, work, gender norms, and patriarchy.
(7) 🧨🔪🎭 The Guest House by Robin Morgan-Bentley (320 pages, 2022). Audiobook. With just a few weeks to go before the due date of their first child, Jamie and Victoria take off for a long weekend at a country guest house operated by a retired couple. But the next morning the couple find themselves locked in the guest house, their phones and car keys missing--and Victoria going into early labor. When the guest house owners return, it becomes clear they have their own plans for Jamie and Victoria's child. The story cuts back and forth between the trip/birth and immediate aftermath, and the months that follow.
(8) 🔍🗡️🧨 Five Bad Deeds by Caz Frear (416 pages, 2023). Audiobook. Suburban wife, mother, former teacher, and part-time tutor Ellen Walsh is, like most of us, basically a good person. Not flawless, but no horrific skeletons in the closet, either. But some anonymous person out there has decided that Ellen has ruined their life, and it’s time for her to face the consequences. The timing simply could not be worse as one tiny thread after another begins coming loose in her life.
⭐️ (9) ✨🪐🔍🧨 The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (454 pages, 2007). Paper book. Eric Sanderson wakes one day unable to remember anything about his life, though via regularly arriving letters from “the first Eric Sanderson,” he comes to understand that his fiancé drowned mysteriously several years prior, and he periodically wakes with no memory of his self or past. But Eric soon learns that he is being hunted by a relentless “conceptual shark,” and if he wants to survive long-term, he’ll need to figure out the truth about his former life and what really happened to “the first Eric Sanderson”. Post-modern in some ways but still super readable and entertaining with a hell of an original premise!
⭐️ (10) 📚🎭✨ Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro (240 pages, 2022). Paper book. One of the sweetest, most touching and beautiful books I’ve read in a while. The story opens with a fateful night in 1985 the life of a teen brother and sister that sets us up for the rest of the book, though the rest of the story jumps around from time periods ranging from 1970 to 2020 and episodes told from the perspective of several different characters. Of course I’ve read many, many books that use non-chronological storytelling for excellent narrative effect, but in one it actually becomes more than just a narrative device, though to say more risks spoiling one of the book’s major themes. Be prepared to be a little messed up emotionally by it, but also to finish it feeling like the world is actually kinda sorta okay sometimes and by and large the vast majority of us are basically good people just out here doing our best for each other.
(11) 🔍🗡️🧨 Two Dead Wives by Adele Parks (368 pages, 2023). Audiobook. So, I didn’t realize until after I finished this book that it’s actually the sequel to another novel by Parks, Woman Last Seen. Oops! If that matters to you, you might want to seek that one out first before this one. In any case, we learn as this book opens during the 2020 British lockdown that police are investigating what they assume to be a murder–except that there’s no body. Alas the missing/presumed dead woman is not the most sympathetic victim, as she’s recently been revealed as a bigamist who has been carrying on two completely separate relationships, unbeknownst to her two husbands, for several years now. Simultaneously, we follow the story of a middle-aged woman quarantining with her father in a seaside village while she recovers from brain surgery and also attempts to recover her missing memory. Over the course of the book we learn how the two different stories are connected and what really happened to the missing woman.
⭐️ (12) 🔍🎭👻 Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (318 pages, 2023). Audiobook. In 1990s Mexico City, talented but marginalized sound editor Montserrat and her best friend/washed-up soap star Tristán are muddling through. Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, who believes he's cursed due to a film he worked on decades ago never being finished. Urueta strides a deal with Montserrat and Tristán: If they help him finish the last unfinished scene and lift the curse, he'll do an interview about the magical film that could help Montserrat out financially. But soon eerie things start happening, and the pair begin to wonder if Urueta is right about the curse after all.
(13) ℹ️💭🎨 Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer (256 pages, 2023). Audiobook. In this relatively quick nonfiction read, the author asks the eternal question, "Is it possible to ethically consume the art of problematic artists? And if so, how?" Unfortunately it didn't seem to me that she had anything new or particularly revelatory to say on the subject and the book felt more like a journal reflection of personal musings (often on topics only tangentially related to the topic) than a particularly nuanced and insightful take on an age-old question.
(14) 💎🗡️🔍 One Of The Good Guys by Araminta Hall (288 pages, 2024). Audiobook. 43-year-old Cole Simmons is restarting his life out on the rural English coast after his marriage fell apart in the wake of several failed rounds of IVF, and soon connects with local artist Lorena “Lenny” Bard. But when two young women walking the coast to raise awareness about male violence towards women disappear under suspicious circumstances, Cole becomes a person of interest. The story starts with Cole’s perspective, then shifts to that of his Lenny, his wife Mel, and various other snippets from news shows, Twitter, online articles, group texts, and so on. A promising start, but Cole’s character quickly devolved into kind of a boring trope. Before too long I found myself agreeing with a reviewer who wrote that you get the sense the book is preaching to the reader about things that seem obvious to anyone who has paid any attention whatsoever to gender politics in the last twenty years. It’s not that I don’t 100% agree with the agenda Hall is pushing here, just that “agenda” novels rarely work, I think because the main priority is so clearly something other than telling an interesting story.
(15) 💎🗡️🔍 The Wintringham Mystery by Anthony Berkeley (236 pages, 1926). Paper book. Originally published serially in The Daily Mirror with a £500 prize for the first person to solve it and apparently stumped everyone, including Agatha Christie!. Young Stephen Munro, former army officer, takes a job as a footman for elderly Lady Carey at Wintringham Hall in Sussex. His first task is to welcome a gaggle of eccentric guests for a weekend house party. When Lady Carey’s nephew suggests an after-dinner séance rather than bridge, another of the guests really does disappear! Theories abound–Is Cicely’s disappearance a juvenile prank? Extortion? Kidnapping? Something *actually* supernatural?Naturally Stephen and his love interest Pauline take it upon themselves to investigate. I’ll go on record that I did not figure it out.
⭐️ (16) 📚🗡️🔍🧨 The Change by Kirsten Miller (470 pages, 2022). Audiobook. In the speculative world of The Change, postmenopausal women sometimes find that with “the change” has come a kind of superpower – as one character puts it, “The gift arrives after the curse ends.” One woman is able to find the bodies of those who have recently died; another, when it really matters, can summon superhuman strength; another has become a kind of dark mistress of flora. Something has brought three such women–Nessa, Jo, and Henrietta–together to investigate a series of murders which may have much bigger implications than they realize. To be honest (speaking as an almost-43-year-old woman!) it’s kind of refreshing to see middle-aged women and that era of our lives presented as interesting, relevant, and powerful rather than as something to be resigned to now that the “good part” (ugh) is over, which is how it’s so often presented.
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