everything i read in january

consumption diaries #31

This is my first consumption diary in a while! I decided to stop in the last one-fourth of 2025 simply because I wasn’t feeling it. Maybe this newsletter is nearing the end of its life, but maybe I just need to try harder, so that’s why I’m here again.

Since stopping, I’ve been reminded of what we all already know: writing is a muscle. I cannot express how difficult it’s been — I’ve forgotten all the words I know!!! — to sit down and write the measly little book reviews below, simply because thinking critically about books is a muscle I’ve let atrophy. This whole thing was actually painful — my brain feels real fatigue, and I found myself literally squirming as if I could physically outrun the discomfort — and that was incredibly eye-opening for me.

I worry often about getting stupider as someone who doesn’t have any spare brain cells to sacrifice, and I’ve been taking stock of my dwindling attention span in the new year. I imagine this is why I’m reading significantly less, too; I am busy, but I also have a lot of free time, and I don’t like how difficult it’s become for me to focus on intellectual pursuits for longer than 30 minutes at a time. The collective internet is worried about getting stupid right now, and I don’t think my fears are unfounded.

So, I’ve learned that maybe I’ll be held captive by substack forever, weakly beating off dementia through my navel-gaze-y musings on the things I’ve read. amazing.

anyway —

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly

I picked up Greta & Valdin because I’ve been struggling with reading for a while now, and I heard it was light and funny and endearing — low stakes, but still with some substance. It really was all of that!

The chapters alternate between the first-person perspectives of titular siblings Greta and Valdin, who are navigating their careers, love lives, queerness, and race. They are but two characters in a big, no-boundaries Maori-Russian family that resides in New Zealand. The perspective shifts didn’t bother me too much because it’s not hard to use context clues, but Greta and V’s voices were quite similar and I thought the structure was a bold choice that wouldn’t have worked if the story had been any heavier. There are a lot of characters too, so thank god the author included a character list I could keep flipping back to. Another Greta? Help us out here.

As there is no dearth of modern-day floundering 20-somethings in literature, I don’t need to be reminded that I was such an insufferable 20-something myself with every book I read. It becomes tiring. However, Greta and V exhibit genuine personal growth, even with the silly, chaotic young person problems, so this actually felt refreshing.

Most notably for me, they come to see the adults in their lives, especially their parents, as real people with the same worries and fears and hopes and dreams as their own. Our parents lived entire lives before we were born. I think this is one of the true markers of maturity: accepting that your parents are imperfect, allowing them to be, and still respecting them. The same can be said about our siblings, whom we often freeze in time rather than let grow with us.

I was also impressed at the ease with which the author balanced humor and heart. I don’t often find funny novels genuinely funny because the humor can seem forced, and when the humor feels forced, any heartfelt components can come across as cloying. The heart cancels out the humor and the humor cancels out the heart. Very Glee. But not Rebecca K. Reilly! The humor simply added to how endearing I found this book, rather than acting as a counterweight that was pushing up against the substance to soften it.

overall tl;dr — a lovely way to start my reading year, would highly recommend to anyone who needs something a little less bleak.

things to research:

• Auckland, NZ

• Māori culture and history in New Zealand

Glaciers by Alexis M Smith

I read this as the January pick for our literhotties book club (if you’re in DC come through).

Glaciers takes place over one day in protagonist Isabel’s life. She repairs damaged books in the basement of a Portland library, where she has a secret crush on one of her co-workers, and is looking forward to a party in the evening, her anticipation infectious. To say the story only unfolds over one day isn’t exactly true, though, as it’s told through vignettes that hop around in time, often back to Isabel’s childhood in Alaska.

I enjoyed the story itself, even though it’s short and only a brief moment in time in which nothing extraordinary happens, but the writing is what elevates Glaciers. The stream-of-consciousness vignettes really resonated with me, allowing the reader to understand Isabel’s inner thoughts, especially her sense of memory and sentimentality — the most intriguing themes for me. The vignettes also cleverly mirror how memory works: a quick flash here and there, always brief recognition before being pulled back into the present.

Isabel loves thrifting and collecting old things, but she cherishes most the stories that well-loved items tell — and the space they give us to imagine stories for them. The meaning we ascribe to an object always matters more than the object itself; that’s simply what sentimentality is. She recognizes that people and their things don’t last, but their stories do. Their memories do too, if they’re shared while they can be.

And Isabel is such an endearing character; she has the kind of attention to detail most of us aspire to, someone who has an innate sense of the world and humans’ place in it. It’s a feat to paint a colorful portrait of your character within the constraints of a slim novel (128 pages), but the author’s prose excels.

overall tl;dr — lovely prose, beautiful reflections on time, sentimental, widely enjoyed by my book club

things to research:

• glaciers calving (watch a video!)

• the Alaska North Slope

• Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon (I’d tell you to go, but anyone who has been or will go to Portland has this on their radar, so this is more for the Maris Kreizman intro in my edition)

• the process of restoring damaged books

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Shaun Whiteside

And another book club-driven read, this time for the inimitable Martha. She hosted a wonderful book club, because of course she did. I wrote most of this before the meeting so that I wouldn’t cheat!

The Wall is about a woman who goes to a hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps for a weekend, only to wake up and realize she’s been fenced in by an invisible wall. On the other side, all life appears dead, frozen in time. The novel is told two years later, through her journal-like recounting of events since then. She briefly speculates on what the wall is and why it’s there, but then quickly shifts to accepting her fate and deciding to survive, mostly for her animal companions’ sake.

This novel isn’t plotless, but not a lot happens either. It drags a bit in the middle as she goes about her daily chores. But it almost always picks back up when the animals are involved, which was enough to keep me engaged. Initially, there’s Lynx the hound dog, the only one from the pre-wall days with her; a stray cat; and Bella, a cow she finds and grows to love.

The monotony and isolation immediately reminded me of the On the Calculation of Volume series, which I always find a way to talk about, but also of I Who Have Never Known Men. In all three, women are not alone in being alone, and they are not alone by choice. But there is a lack of answers in each of their stories, and that absence is maybe the point.

In The Wall, the reader wants to solve the mystery of the wall; in On the Calculation of Volume, you want to know why Tara is stuck in November 18; in I Who Have Never Known Men, you want to know why the women are locked in cages and who put them there. To find answers would lessen the tension and therefore defeat the thought exercise.

I love reading books published well before my time because it stretches my thinking as I’m reading. To some extent, the removal from a modern lens makes me kinder because I’m an unaffected viewer.

The Wall would be very different if it were written today. The narrator’s assumption might still have been that the wall was some government experiment gone awry, but it wouldn’t have felt directly linked to the Cold War in Europe; her gender would still have informed her experiences, but her previous life as a woman and mother might have looked very different. Her survival skills, which she thought were quite rudimentary, were more advanced than those of my generation (generally speaking) because sewing, gardening, and various forms of light manual labor were more common, especially for women expected to keep house.

Her being a woman is essential to the plot. Many reviews and descriptions label The Wall as feminist, and I think it might have been at the time. Now, it definitely feels like a book that could only have been written by a woman, but it doesn’t adopt the typical down-with-the-patriarchy, pro-woman stance that we usually associate with feminist literature. Even still, the reflections on gender were among my favorite musings.

Also related to gender, that there are no answers also feels feminine in a way. Or at least, it feels very stereotypically male to demand answers. But maybe I’m being unfair because nearly every review of the book and also the movie that commented on the “missed opportunity” of presenting a “satisfying” explanatory ending seemed to be from men. Use your imagination, lads! The journey can be the destination!

While reading and since, I have been thinking about the compulsion to extend our empathy to animals before we extend it to humans. Much of the dread that settled in throughout my reading experience stemmed from the animals, not the human herself.

Of course, many people care about both animals and humans, myself included, but there's also subtle exploration here. I think The Wall articulates, or at least attempts to, why some of us feel such deep despair at the thought of animals suffering. We understand that there is no moral sense of right and wrong among animals, which makes them feel more innocent than people and less deserving of injustice.

“The only creature in the forest that can really do right or wrong is me. And I alone can show mercy. Sometimes I wish that burden of decision-making didn’t lie with me. But I am a human being, and I can only think and act like a human being. Only death will free me from that.”

But at the same time, mammals in particular share so many of the qualities we love most about each other — an ability to love and express pain and loss, curiosity, playfulness.

“Perhaps animals spend their whole lives in a world of terror and delight. They cannot escape, and have to bear reality until they have ceased to be. Even their death is without solace and hope, a real death.

overall tl;dr — I really enjoyed this book for the way it made me think, so if you too like extremely reflective books about women without satisfying endings, this is the one for you.

things to research:

• Cold War-era Austria

• Marlen Haushofer’s life

• the movie adaptation

• Shaun Whiteside as a translator

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang

I’m kind of cheating with the inclusion of this book in January’s roundup because I technically finished it on February 1, but I read most of it in January and was simply foiled by the fact that the month ended over a weekend, which is a stretch I usually don’t have enough time for substantial reading. And I make the rules here!

Qianze is living in New York, working a demanding accounting job that keeps her busy enough not to dwell on her childhood in Virginia, which was cut short when her father suddenly and inexplicably abandoned her, and her mother retreated into herself in grief. Then, her father, whom she hasn’t seen in 11 years, reappears as suddenly as he disappeared — except he’s a completely different man than the one Qianze remembers, haunted by memories of his childhood in China and a prophecy he can’t recall.

The novel shifts between the present, where Qianze tries to care for her fragile father through her bitterness and hurt, and various points in the pasts of her father and grandmother. Both experienced inexplicable horrors at the hands of colonialism and authoritarianism; her father grew up during the Cultural Revolution, joining the Red Guard himself as a means of survival, while her grandmother was raised in Manchuria during Japanese occupation.

The red thread that weaves three generations together is brought to life through elements of Chinese folklore and magical realism, symbolizing something sinister passed down as if it were genetic or biological. It is spiritual, in a way. Something else that’s inherited.

I like generational novels because of their exploration of inherited trauma. Their stories are profoundly sad, of course, but what’s left unsaid punches you even harder. Generational trauma is often filled with secrets, not kept out of malice but out of pain and a desire to keep it from the ones you love. Though it kept me turning the pages, Qianze’s pain almost hurts more because she’s missing context that the reader learns first. It endears you to her, makes you hope for more for all children scarred by their family, who were scarred by their family, who were scarred by their family.

My one issue, which is more just a personal itch, is the use of metaphors. I enjoy a good metaphor as much as anyone else, but I think literary fiction can rely on them too heavily when there’s an absence of something more substantial to say. At this point, we have seen nearly everything metaphored. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I don’t think it’s poor writing, but familiar literary devices just don’t stand out — I want metaphors that make me pause and think, and ones I’ve heard a dozen times before are simply distracting.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the e-galley!

overall tl;dr — a solid debut novel! Full of emotion, but you’ll probably learn something or be inspired to learn something too.

things to research:

• the Cultural Revolution

• Manchuria

• Chinese folk tales

• the Japanese occupation of China (and Japanese imperialism in general)

• jackalopes

That’s it! I made it through, somehow. If you did too, huge congrats, don’t unsubscribe.