What I read in January 2026
I can't believe I forgot to do the one post I for sure do every month! You may have noticed, January was a very intense year.
Before I get to the books I read, let's do other fun news. First, I had an essay in the Pittsburgh Review of Books, where I used close reading techniques on a photograph from Minneapolis then turned to my old friend Barthes and his theory of myth to analyze the photo. Don't worry, it ends on an optimistic note: https://pghrev.com/meaning-in-minneapolis/
Second, Patricia Haim has won the Feathered Quill Book Awards silver award in the historical category for Lifelines: A Viennese Family's Letters from Home and Exile 1938–1947. This book was a true labor of love for Pat; she worked on it for I think nearly twenty years before she handed me her manuscript to begin editing. She had so much fantastic material, and we wrangled it into a narrative form that shined a light on her family's experiences during World War II. She was an absolute perfectionist all the way through the process and a meticulous archivist. She definitely earned this award. I couldn't be happier for her. Affiliate link to Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9798218455477
Third, I'll be presenting a historical fiction session at the Terroir Writing Festival in Dayton, Oregon (that's wine country) in May. They're still gathering details, so check the website for more info: https://aaycor.org/terroir-writing-festival
On to the reading!
Starting the year with the first book of Dungeon Crawler Carl was for sure the right move. I had a lit RPG-genre editing test coming up (that's where a publisher makes sure you're the right fit for a project), so my friend bought me the book that defined the genre so I could be ready. I'll be honest, as a highbrow literature fan, I was not sure at first that this was going to be my thing. But it was! This book is so much fun! I get it now. I have read a certified popular book and liked it. Princess Donut forever.
But you knew that couldn't last. I did not in fact pick up book two next, or ACoTaR or something. I read a short biography of Isaac Newton by one of my favorite essayists, James Gleick, that I picked up on sale at the local used bookshop, and it was as good as I expected. (Shoutout to Arches! https://www.archesbookhouse.com/) Come for the exploration of the properties of light and gravity, stay for the blinding hatred of Robert Hooke. An excerpt from a letter Newton wrote about Hooke to a mutual friend:
Should a man who thinks himself knowing, & loves to shew it in correction & instructing others, come to you when you are busy, & notwithstanding your excuse, press discourses upon you & through his own mistakes correct you & multiply discourses & then make this use of it, to boast that he taught you all he spake & oblige you to acknowledge it & cry out injury and injustice if you do not, I believe you would think him a man of a strange unsociable temper.
SICK BURN
Affiliate link: https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9781400032952
Gleick also wrote a book about Richard Feynman that I liked called Genius: https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9780679747048
I listened to The Mattering Instinct after hearing the author, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, on Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. I was intrigued enough by her idea, and her background in the philosophy of science, to get the audiobook from the library. I was not disappointed. My only critique is that this is clearly a "big idea" book, and it seems like her editors said, "This big idea is great! But can you make it more like self-help? Can we have takeaways?" And she said sure, because that is how you get a paycheck and feed your pets. Luckily, her big idea and her intelligence survive the takeaways. Affiliate link: https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9781324096856
The last book I finished in January was part of a bundle of books that won prizes in France's big fall award season. FrenchBooksOnline.com put together a little stack of winners and then put them on sale, so I couldn't find a reason to say no. I had no idea going in what Passagères de Nuit was about; I chose to read it first because it was reasonably sized while the others are doorstops. Lucky me: it's really good. Yanick Lahens is a Haitian writer, and this book takes place first in nineteenth-century New Orleans and then Haiti. It's kind of two books in one, with different voices and styles from different generations of women in different countries. Even if I had known what to expect, this was unexpected. This novel isn't translated to English yet, but it looks like Lahens has other books that have been translated, and they have won awards too. I'd say give those a go if you're inclined.
KHG’s latest translations, Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion, Volume 2: Spectacle, and Volume 3: Luck, are available now. Volume 4: Payback will be published January 27, 2026.
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