Books I Read in January 2025

January was a busy month, and now we’re well into the second half of February! And far from catching up with my To Be Read list, I seem to have allowed it to multiply exponentially (my fingers went ahead and typed “existentially” first, and I suppose there’s something existential about a reader’s attachment to books yet to be read!!).

As most of you know, I’ve started a Substack account where I’ve now clicked publish on eight posts. Yesterday’s — “Scattered Thoughts on Staying Grounded in Difficult Times” — has already had some encouraging and very worthwhile comments; you know I love to see conversations built in response to a post. And I think my husband found the solution to the problem some of you have had leaving comments there — if you pop over to read my “Scattered Thoughts” you’ll see I’ve described his (simple! once you know the trick) method.

Meanwhile, I’m going to keep posting my monthly book posts here — I don’t want to chance anything interfering with our Book Chats! My reading year began well — hope yours did too.

I say this every book post now, for those who are new here and as a reminder to regular readers: As usual, the numbering comes from my annual handwritten reading journal, and the italicized text below is directly transcribed from that journal’s pages (once upon a time, I simply included photographs of those pages, but too many of you found my handwriting tough to decipher, especially in the photographed format). Notes to myself, that is, so that I can remember a book and remember my response to it, rather than any attempt at a more polished, edited review.

I’ve used regular font for any additions to my journal notes and included references to any posts from my Instagram Reading account.

1. The Examiner. Janice Hallett. Mystery; Epistolary novel; Art school; Grad school; Set in UK.

As with the other two books I’ve read by Hallett, this mystery purports to be a series of documents, most of them electronic ones, either emails or messages shared between the instructor and the six Mixed Media Art students enrolled in an MA program. The novel begins with an External Examiner’s report setting out his concerns about something he’s noticed while reviewing final grades for “a master’s degree at a prestigious university.”

And as with her other books, we readers must find the clues to sort out chronology, motives, relationships between characters we come to know through what they say in these online messages — either to the whole cohort and/or to the instructor — or in private messages to one or two others. We also learn about them, of course (or think we do) by what others say behind their virtual backs.

Of course, we’re always revising what we think we know and trying to develop a working epistemology — How is reliable knowledge possible here?

There’s a huge range in the group of students, most of them recruited for a Mixed Media/Graphic Arts program with applied and commercial art seemingly its focus: a mid-career artst; late-entry students (Owner of an art store, with no first degree, for example); commercial graphics designer with successful career; very ambitious young woman just finished her BFA; graphic design free-lancing single mom, 40-ish.

Fun approach for a change in the mystery genre, although I might be tapped out for now, having read 3 of these in the last few months (this post included two other epistolary mysteries by the same author).

My Instagram post here.

2. Paris in Winter. David Coggins. Memoir; Travel; Illustrated memoir; Paris.

A charmingly illustrated memoir of many cumulative visits the artist/writer and his wife made to Paris over many years, often accompanied or joined by their two children (now long grown). It’s a book to pick up and dip into, and I guess I put it down after dipping years ago and forgot to pick up again. The bookmark was still there, marking my spot about 2/3 through, and since the book’s just been printed in a new edition, I kept seeing posts that reminded me to finish it.

I enjoyed picking it up again, visiting Paris in winter (which I’ve done a few times for a few days, but never for a relaxed, prolonged visit as the Coggins have). I also see though that his Paris is one that doesn’t enthral me as much as it did when we started visiting, nor as much as when I first bought the book. Now I find it very American bourgeois, if I can be, admittedly, reductive. It’s evocative writing, but I now find it a bit too much name-dropping, pleasure at being known /recognized at this place or that. And an emphasis I don’t love, in descriptions, on race or ethnicity.

So much has changed in the Paris we’ve visited annually over the last 20 years (excepting 2020, of course) — and even more since our visits in the early 90s. I do share what seems to be Coggins’ nostalgia for a certain Left Bank (6th and 7th) Paris culture, but we could never really afford to experience as much of it as Coggins did anyway. . .

Still, worth sitting with for some richly described scenes, anecdotes, and especially for the expressive watercolour illustrations.

3. In France Profound: The Long History of a House, a Mountain Town, and a People. T.D. Allman. Memoir; French History; Cultural History; Papal History; Crusades.

Shamelessly copying this from my IG post (which I first copied into my Handwritten journal, not the sequence I prefer to follow!):

I picked this up on our annual pre-Christmas self-gifting trip to Hager’s Books. . . . But then I was temporarily daunted by 300+ pages of non-fiction prose that includes copious historical information. It sat for a week or two. . .

It was a pricey purchase, though, so rather than risk its consignment to the holding pen under the coffee table, I picked it up in the New Year. And truly, after the first few chapters I was completely invested. American-French journalist T.D. Allman builds his memoir’s narrative around the 800-year-old house he restored and lived in for over 30 years. From the perspective of that house in a small mountain village in Southwestern France, he sketches a history of France (from long before the country existed as a unified nation) of Europe and of the world beyond.

Central to his narrative is the violence (and the attempts to evade such violence through diplomacy and inter-marriage) that accompanied this nation-building, particularly the role that religion played. His account emphasizes the continuing and even central relevance of this history to our political environment today. The mix of xenophobia and imperialism (and the grotesque twisting of Christianity’s supposed foundation) that resulted in the Crusades and then in the various iterations of the Inquisition.

I was saddened to learn that this new-to-me author died last year (in his 70s) the year this book was published. I wonder who will care for his old house now.

4. The Man Who Went up in Smoke. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Trans. Joan Tate. Intro. Val McDermid. Crime Novel; Police Procedural; Nordic Noir; Martin Beck series; Books in Translation; Set in Sweden and Budapest; 1960s Cold War.

I wish I could remember where I read a reference to the Martin Beck series in the last four months. But it convinced me that I should acquaint myself with the series whose ten volumes constitute, apparently, the foundations of Nordic noir and also introduce the prototype of the reserved, unemotional detective — tenacious in pursuit of the perpetrator but not especially heroic, nor even likeable.

P.D. Smith pointed out, in a Guardian article on “What We’re Reading,” (June 2023) that “the series’ novels have been hugely influential, selling more than 10 million copies and setting a new standard for socially aware crime fiction.” And Lee Child, Val McDermid, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo, Michael Connelly are among the many mystery writers who cite the writihng couple’s influence.

As for this title (the second in the series; I mistakenly began with it instead of Roseanna): 1960s Cold War and Beck goes to Budapest — leaving his family on their own to enjoy summer on a vacation island, to his wife’s evident disapproval — to track down a Swedish journalist who has gone missing. The orders for him to do so have come through unusual channels and come with vague parameters about who can or should know what. And once in Budapest, he has almost no support there; an eerie sense of threat pervades his movement in the city. International espionage or simply drug trafficking; petty thugs settling differences or corruption being veiled; and in the days before rapid and secure communication is possible, how will Beck solve his crime? And how defend himself?

I wasn’t drawn in by characters but intrigued rather to see how the setting is established, to absorb the social, cultural, and political conditions of that historical period, to watch the twists and turns of the plot. Flatter, I guess, than we’ve become used to. I’m keen to read at least one more, to watch the series develop, and I’m curious to see if I might eventually feel more connected to the characters.

5. Orbital. Samantha Harvey. Literary Fiction; 2024 Booker Prize; Space Travel; Eco-Fiction.

This won the 2024 Booker. It’s a gorgeous book, lush, elegiaic, astonishing in perspective. The plot is strangely flat, the setting hermetic — we “merely” orbit the earth several times in a (24-hour, Earth) day, through the eyes and minds of 6 cosmonauts and astronauts, women and men, from US, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan.

Honestly, it’s difficult to describe how rich this book is . . . how strange it is that I call the plot “flat” when we’re watching a typhoon of unprecedented proportions move toward a highly populated part of the world — where a family that one of our astronauts has met, keeps in touch with — may soon have their house destroyed, be inundated, the family likely drowned.

It’s that distanced perspective that is nonetheless mixed with a deep connection, love for the planet whose beauty we look at . . . elegiacally.

One stunning chapter/section in particular, Orbit 13, which describes the lifetime of the planet in a “cosmic calender” which renders man’s time on it as the last part of a week at the very end of a year. . . I had to read this one aloud to Paul.

6. The Lock-Up. John Banville. Mystery/Crime novel; Police procedural; Quirke & Strafford series. Ireland, mid-20th century.

This was one of the books Paul chose at Hager’s before Christmas — we’d both read April in Spain a couple of years ago. I really must go back to the beginning of this series — which features pathologist Dr. Quirke and D.I. St. John Strafford — most of which he wrote under the pseudonym “Benjamin Black.”

This one begins in the Italian mountains of Alto Adige towards the end of WWII, but most of it is set in Dublin, late 50s — where Quirke may never truly recover from the recent death of his wife, a psychiatrist and wise woman.

Interesting to read this within a week or two of meeting Martin Beck. Quirke isn’t much more likeable than that Swedish detective, nor is D.I. St. John Strafford. As well, both writers focus on social critique in building their settings. In this volume of the Quirke series, this means emphasis, again, on social class and on the undue influence of the Church on seemingly every institution that matters, and at the highest levels. Alcoholism is indicted and so is rampant sexism — in which young women run risks that are unconscionably high.

I was also impressed by the way Banville worked in the complicated history of Israel through the 20th-century, and the impact of, first, imperialism, and then later a collective international guilt dangerously mixed with a thirst for investment and development. Hard to think he wasn’t influenced by the ongoing crisis in Gaza while he was writing this novel, despite it being set 70 years ago.

7. Woman Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay. Merilyn Simonds. Biography; Women’s Lives; Ornithology; Northern Ontario.

Again, my apologies for repeating what I wrote on Instagram.

Canadian writer Merilyn Simonds’ excellent biography of the brilliant (if modest) Canadian ornithologist Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a woman whose life began in the 19th century but spanned much of the 20th.

Born in Sweden (so I visited that country twice this January, from my armchair!) to a comfortably bourgeois family, she married a Russian and thus became one herself — and then lost her husband in the Bolshevik Revolution managing, herself, to escape and eventually find her way to Canada (because this had been her husband’s dream for both of them). Before she became a renowned ornithologist and writer, she attained celebrity as personal nurse to the Dionne quintuplets.

A fascinating (and long!) life, well-researched by Merilyn Simonds, who weaves in her own experience as an amateur birdwatcher and as one with experience living in a very similar Northern Ontario environment.

And now if you’d care to share your comments on any of the books I’ve included in this post, should you also have read them or want to know more about them. I’ve visited England, Paris, rural France, Sweden, Budapest, outer space, Dublin, Russia, and northern Ontario — where have your books taken you? As always, we also welcome your reading suggestions and any other bookish chat you want to share. The mic’s all yours.