January 2026
A big month for audiobooks, holy moly.
The lion's share of books this month were audiobooks. I'm still not sure how I feel about that. I'd like to offer concrete learnings and reasons for the sake of "being a newsletter" but also for myself. Alas, I have no shiny answers as to why December was a little disappointing, audio heavy, and ultimately unsatisfying. I also don't love being an unsatisfied reader as a concept. Stories are amazing! Even sometimes the bad ones! But I find myself a little Eeyore-ish about my reading in recent weeks, and that's okay. My main takeaway from that is not jumping head first into some new reading challenge or set of goals. I think it's okay for me (and you) to live in a little bit of reading melancholy without jumping to immediately fix it. Reading has its seasons, and I'll live in mine for now.
This Month’s Books
Book Reviews
If You Must Go, I Wish You Triplets by Virginia Deluca
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Content warnings: Pain from divorce. Full of solidarity but definitely tender if you have gone through a marriage that ended.
Casting: None
Book words: Funny, honest, human
This was the bright spot in a mid month. If my “favorite books of 2025” email hadn’t already gone out, this would have been on it. A fantastic memoir.
Virginia is sixty, blissfully and recently married to her second husband, still feels like a newlywed, and has a new lease on romance and life. Then her husband says he wants a divorce so he can find a younger wife and have his own kids.
This memoir is an honest, funny, and a wild tale on divorce, second chances, growing older, friendship, and just being a person in a weird, unpredictable world. I absolutely loved it.
Big Trouble by Dave Barry
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Content warnings: Abuse, including abuse of a minor. The book is a farce, so the strong abuse scenes threw me since most of the book was meant to be absurdly funny.
Casting: None
Book words: Absurd, fast-paced, heist-y, funny, a little dark
Ultimately, what a weird, fun ride this was. Maybe the five stars came on the tail of mediocre reads, and I was desperate, or it really was just that great. I don’t judge.
Prepare yourself for an absurd comedy of errors. To describe all the absurdity would take away from the discovery of it, but essentially, you engage with a cast of connected characters, all with wildly different objectives in life. You’ve got a couple of assassins, a couple of teenage kids playing a prank, a guy trying to avoid being killed by the mob, a couple of other mob dudes who seem like decent guys just trying to make a living, an unhoused guy living in the tree of the guy screwing over the mob, and a dog who’s terrorized by a rabbit. It’s all extremely weird and super fun.
As mentioned at the top, there is a scene towards the end where a teenager gets kidnapped, and it’s pretty brutal. I was a bit thrown because of how funny and satirical the rest of the book felt. Otherwise, it was like an upside-down heist, and I loved it.
Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Content warnings: Infidelity, mental illness, nothing too disturbingly written in either case
Casting: None
Book words: Cerebral, thoughtful, sharp and funny at times, majorly character-driven
This won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, and I think if I had known that, I would have skipped it. I’m not much for books that win literary honors, not because they’re not good but because I enjoy reading about dragons and circuses more than I do commentaries on changing social norms. That said, I can understand why this book was lauded the way it was, especially a few decades ago. It would have been decidedly fresh and ahead of its time in the 1980s.
I bought it on Kindle sale because the sample I read was sharp and funny. An older literary professor is on a flight from New York to London to do some research about children’s rhymes or something similarly obscure, meets an American in a cowboy hat, loathes him at first, and then eventually has an affair with him. There’s another relationship between a younger male professor and an older socialite in London, and the two relationships intersect here and there. The story is completely character-driven through the lens of… well, I honestly don’t know. I’m not highbrow enough to understand what the author was trying to comment on, but I assume it was important.
I liked it fine.
The Good Part by Sophie Cousens
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Content warnings: Loss of a child off page
Casting: None
Book words: A more thoughtful romance than the norm, more real life than the "dramatic declarations of love in a passive aggressive relationship" kind
I found this surprisingly charming.
As many romance novels begin, Lucy is twenty-six years old and down on her luck. She lives with roommates who make bone broth in the bathtub and still feels like an intern at her television job even though she's been there for years. One night after a bad date, she finds a wishing machine, closes her eyes, and asks to just get to the good part of life.
The next morning, she wakes up as a forty-something television executive with a hot husband, two kids, a great house, and no memory of anything between now and when she made the wish. I had to remind myself to cut twenty-six year old Lucy some slack. Some of her reactions felt immature and dumb, but she’s young, right? What else would I expect?
I loved her relationship with her kids, kids she had no previous knowledge of or relationship with, and I thought the author did a fantastic job of naming the weird nuances that would show up with this kind of life flash-forward.
However, I was mad at the ending. If it had been different, I probably would have given this at least another half star if not the full five.
Four Weekends and a Funeral by Ellie Palmer
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Content warnings: Death of a loved one, breast cancer
Casting: None which, again, is wild for me and romance novels
Book words: Perfectly fitting the romance genre and the enemies-to-lovers, forced together tropes
This is the typical kind of romance with predictable storylines, passive aggressive misunderstandings, petty fights, and grand romantic gestures, but done well.
Alison is Sam’s ex-girlfriend. Sam dies. Alison goes to his funeral, and everyone still thinks she’s the girlfriend. A perpetual people pleaser, she keeps up the girlfriend charade and volunteers to clean out Sam’s apartment, along with his grumpy hot best friend, Adam. You already know what happens.
Most romances usually have some kind of poignant angle to play, something like a dead sibling, a parent with dementia, or in this case, a preventative double mastectomy that has Alison talking way more about her missing nipples than I expected. I care a lot about all three of those things, but sometimes in the context of a romance novel, it feels a little forced. For me, that was true here. That said, the chemistry between Adam and Alison is great, and what’s a romance novel without good chemistry?
Side note: this book is way similar to the movie While You Were Sleeping. Alison doesn’t take train tokens, but she does work for public transportation. Adam is a carpenter who’s afraid to make furniture and go off on his own. There’s a pretend relationship, eager family members, and even a creamy mashed potatoes moment. I’m not saying it’s the same, but I’m not not saying it’s the same.
(While You Were Sleeping will always be superior to any other train-based romance FOR THE RECORD.)
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane 🎧
⭐️⭐️½
Narrated by Tom Stechschulte
Content warnings: Mental illness, abuse, murder, lots of dark stuff
Casting: Mark and Leo. Pretty sure I made Michelle Williams Leo's wife? I don't even remember anymore.
Book words: Dark, creepy, cinematic, psychological, intricate
I should have loved this book. I’m honestly surprised I didn’t. The story is dark, moody, and mysterious, and I love everything about the premise. Two investigators descend upon a mental institution housed on the isolated Shutter Island to find a missing patient, but circumstances are not what they seem. Yes, please.
Except I barely made it to the end. I was both disturbed and bored which is a weird combo and not one that made me want to keep pressing play. I don’t know if the narration was off or if I was, but I just could not get into it. I will say that the movie adaptation got it right with Leonardo Dicaprio and Mark Ruffalo as the two main guys, but even with that saving grace, I was relieved when it was over.
The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place by Maryrose Wood 🎧
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Narration by Katherine Kellgren
Content warnings: Absolutely none
Casting: None
Book words: Charming, funny, slightly mysterious but not scary
This is so oddly funny and potentially a good time for young readers, especially ones who enjoy Lemony Snicket. Plus, the narration is top notch.
Penelope Lumley, a recent graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females, is the new governess at Ashton Place. But her three charges are not normal children. In fact, they act like wild animals. Not to be deterred, she decides to govern them with kindness, a firm hand, and high expectations… because even someone who chases squirrels can learn to appreciate French poetry.
It’s just the cutest thing. An excellent, quick palate cleanser if you need one.
Full disclosure, I listened to the second book almost right away, and while it was just as cute, the charm faded after the first encounter. I didn’t need to listen to almost the same book a second time. Kids would likely feel differently.
Still Life by Louise Penny 🎧
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Narrated by Ralph Cosham
Content warnings: Murder, the occasional dark interaction
Casting: None
Book words: Charming, grounded, a little dark but not too much, a lot of character development while still being a story that moves
Can you believe I’ve never read Louise Penny? Crazy. I do prefer my mysteries more dark than cozy (is Louise Penny considered cozy?), but I absolutely loved it, especially the audio. In fact, I don’t know that I’ll read Louise Penny on the page. The intricacies of the characters, something I tend to skim past on the page, landed better in my ears.
Inspector Gamache is a delightful lead character, kind of a less posh Poirot, and I genuinely loved his first case in the small, quirky town of Three Pines. I’ll keep coming back for sure. For other newbies, don’t expect Tana French, but don’t expect a Hallmark movie either. For me, it lands solidly in the middle of the two.
Kill Your Boss by Jack Heath 🎧
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Narrated by multiple performers
Content warnings: Murder, sexual exploitation and abuse, narcissism
Casting: None
Book words: Steady... not too much or too little of anything, like a freezer chicken pot pie
This was free with my Audible membership, and it was a nice light murder mystery. I’ll never get over the fact that some of us casually say that as a real sentence.
Told from multiple viewpoints, the story centers around the death of the head of the local library, a man no one liked. When he falls off the roof of the library to his death, right in front of the town detective, an investigation opens, and no one is safe from suspicion.
The tone here is deceptively light even though the content can be tough at times. It reminded me a little of Murder Your Employer which I liked better. Slightly similar tone if you liked that one.
Dark Game by Rachel Lynch 🎧
⭐️
Narrated by Clare Kissane
Content warnings: Too many to name
Casting: None
Book words: Dark, gross, depraved, goodbye
I’m going to shoot you straight. Skip this one. It is so dark. Like, so dark. I don’t shy away from dark, but the juice is not worth the squeeze on this one. It’s a crime novel, and some of the criminals are deeply disturbed to the point that I was offended. If there was a compelling story, a compelling character, or some line of hope in there, I might think it was worth it. Nah.
Artemis by Andy Weir 🎧
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Narrated by Rosario Dawson
Content warnings: Nothing terribly sensitive here
Casting: I automatically made Jas Rosario Dawson because she was speaking, but nothing else.
Book words: Fun sci-fi, intricate but not boring, heist-y
For me, even a bad Andy Weir is a good Andy Weir. This is not a bad Andy Weir by any stretch, but it doesn’t touch The Martian or Project Hail Mary. Still, I really enjoyed it, especially with Rosario Dawson narrating. I’ve always loved her voice, and she’s a solid narrator.
She voices the first person character of Jas, a smuggler in the moon colony of Artemis, who’s trying to earn enough money to live better and maybe even a little within the law. When she’s offered a dangerous job that could pay more money than she’s ever seen in her life, she takes it. With the help of some family, friends, and enemies, she ends up having to save the world. It’s a good time.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 🎧
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Narrated by a full cast
Content warnings: None really
Casting: a mix of the movies and the voices so nothing really
Book words: Magical, suspenseful, fun
Goblet is my least favorite Harry Potter, and Chamber is my second least favorite. I love the entire series, but this one will never get five stars. I find it slow, a little disjointed here and there, and borderline annoying. That said, it’s like complaining that your cacio e pepe is made with generic butter instead of Kerrygold. Nitpicking at best.
I didn’t love the full cast, full audio experience of Stone, at least at first. Took me a bit to get used to it. Now that I knew what to expect, I enjoyed listening from start to finish. Glad to have it, especially for my kids to listen, but now I'm just eagerly awaiting book three.