What I Read | January 2025
Roxane Reviews First Edition of 2025
It feels incredily trivial to be reading or writing anything that isn’t related to politics at the moment. I’m spending every minute of free time I have spiraling about the end of American democracy as I thought I knew it, cried on my morning commute reading On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (review will be in the February issue but go read this book right now if you feel powerless), and spent an entire call reading about the protests in LA. Nonetheless, I know making sure I’m doing things other than compulsively reading through endless reddit posts or political articles is important. There is a balance between ignoring what’s happening and spending my whole day fighting off a panic attack. I’m finding out that it’s a hard balance to navigate, but I’m hoping the below will ground me in the things that give me solace: reading, writing, and sharing thoughts about what I read and write.
With this depressing preface out of the way, let’s dive in. As always, if you’re new and want to read past issues, here are: What I Read | December 2024, November 2024, and October 2024.
During the first week of January, despite all my reading-related goals for the new year, I didn’t touch a single book. While that is very unlike me, I can chuck it up to context: I was hosting my sexy amazing boyfriend (thanks for the proofreading,
), my grandmother, and some friends in our apartment in France, dealing with record-high levels of family drama, and spending most of the day skiing, going out, or organizing activities for our entire group. The first book I finally picked up in January was North Woods by Daniel Mason. and I had vowed to read it at the same time after both his grandmother and a random seller at the Union Square Christmas Market recommended it to us. We read North Woods on our respective flights back from New York, he flying from Zurich and I from Geneva. We debriefed the novel over FaceTime as we waited in the customs line and found that we had both really, really enjoyed it.Mason follows a plot of land across 200 years and the various people who end up living on it, starting with a runaway couple (who emobody Adam and Eve fleeing from Eden). The land’s hay-day is as an apple orchard for the Osgood family: a Major and his two daughters, Alice and Mary. The sisters become spinsters (more or less voluntarily), and the farm falls into abandon after their death. It is later purchased by a painter in search of nature and an escape from his growing homosexual feelings for an author friend of his. Next up, the house is purchased by a couple with grand renovation plans, but those are cut short when the wife becomes plagued by visions of the aforementioned painter and writer mid-coitus. The novel is structured into 12 chapters, each representing a month of the year, and chugs along to the present day. By the end of the novel, all the characters Mason wrote about are dead and free to forever haunt and enjoy their beloved land.
Spanning so many different eras and following so many different characters is no easy feat, but Mason is up to the task. I was blown away by his masterful ability to emulate Puritan, Dark Romantic, True Crime, and Modern styles, among many others. It’s not easy to write well, but Mason even manages to write poorly well, when the story demands it (I’m thinking most notably of the Dunne True Crime chapter). My favorite part stylistically was the letters written by the painter William Teale to his writer friend/lover Erasmus Nash, which (I think) emulate the letters exchanged between writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville at around the same period, in a similar Western Massachusetts landscape.
North Woods rings heavy with biblical symbolism, most notably with the apple orchard, references to Arcadia, and the battle between good vs. evil forces as a key themes. If you’re in the mood for an engrossing, well-written ‘all-American’ novel, and don’t mind a fair bit of supernatural, I can’t recommend North Woods enough.
Back home in New York with my never-ending TBR standing in at 286 (will it EVER go down?!), I figured it’d be time to call upon my trusted Random Number Generator to pick my second read of 2025. The RNG picked the collection of essays The Deadline by historian Jill Lepore. I started the collection and really enjoyed it, but have to admit it’s been sitting untouched on my nightstand since the beginning of January. I’m finding myself wanting to read either fiction or politics, so The Deadline will remain on my bookshelves as a read for future peaceful times.
While still trying to get myself into The Deadline, I needed a smaller book to carry with me everywhere, and decided to grab Orbital by Samantha Harvey, winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. Orbital follows six astronauts during their stint on the International Space Station as it orbits around the Earth. There is no plot; the astronauts do not have an overarching mission to complete. On the contrary, both the space station and Harvey’s story go round and round in steady circles. Harvey’s prose is absolutely beautiful, poetic and soothing. She jumps around from character to character, from space to earth, from past to future. Her writing, like her characters, is not subject to gravity or earthly rule.
Orbital was the subject (victim) of some political discourse on Goodreads. Because two of the characters are Russian, the novel was flooded with negative reviews on Goodreads from people who had most likely never touched the book (comments had to be paused for a time). There is definitely some talk of Russia in Orbital, but anyone who actually read the novel can easily see that Harvey is not pro-Russia as much as she is pro-Earth. She writes at length about the lack of visible borders from space, the need for peace and cooperation, the value of a singular human life. She condemns man’s hubris, the need for war and destruction, and the notion of discovery and progress above all. Even for readers who are not fans of science-fiction (me), this is truly a beautiful and moving read, especially in today’s political climate.
Have some thoughts on Orbital and the Goodreads backlash?
Next up, I wanted to read a poetry collection, so I picked up My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems by Sandra Cisneros. Cisneros is most famous for The House on Mango Street, which is on my TBR. I was pretty confused because my copy of My Wicked, Wicked Ways was dog-eared and highlighted, but outside of the famous One Last Poem for Richard, I didn’t remember reading any of the poems… Maybe I purchased a used copy and didn’t remember it?
Anyway, I liked Cisneros’ voice and style, but I didn’t think this collection was her best work. A lot of the poems were too juvenile and awkward for my taste, and it’s clear she had yet to find her voice. My favorite poem was the one prefacing the collection, which she wrote significantly later, and exemplifies the quality of her later poetry. With that being said, I did dog-ear a few more pages in my copy, took down some passages I enjoyed, and would recommend the collection to any fan of contemporary poetry. Below are a few lines apt for the beginning of this new year, from December 24th, Paris — Notre-Dame
A year ends
merrily. Merrily
another one begins.
I go out into the street once more.
The wrists so full of living.
The heart begging once again.
Next up, I finished The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, which I had started as an audiobook while on holidays. Back in New York it became a good way to entertain myself while I built some new IKEA furniture, but I can’t say that I really enjoyed the novel. It’s similar to Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (which I reviewed in November) in the sense that it follows the various members of a wealthy family and the people around them in the wake of a strange tragedy. Like Brodesser-Akner, Moore writes from a myriad of perspectives and sets her novel across time periods, but struggles to find different voices for each character. Both authors could learn a thing or two from Daniel Mason, whose writing I lauded above. Similarly to Long Island Compromise, The God of the Woods overwhelms its readers with unnecessary context and useless social commentary. The novel is meant to read as a thriller as we follow the disappearance of one of the main characters, Barbara, but it struggles to uphold any tension. Unless you need something to drown out your thoughts while performing meaningless manual labor, I’d say skip it.
After the shallowness of The God of the Woods, I was craving something really good, so I grabbed Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson. This book has been staring at me from the shelf above my bed ever since I got it after reading Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragments, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho.
Eros the Bittersweet defies attempts at classification. Jesse’s Goodreads comment sums up that conundrum better than I could:
Carson always perches her work in the most precarious positions. One wonders what exactly they are holding in their hand: is it scholarship? A novel? An art book? A translation? A sequel? A reimagining?
Such questions are certainly important, but ultimately feel somewhat beside the point insofar as the response always seems to be a quiet but unapologetic "it is, and—."
Eros the Bittersweet reminded me a lot of philosopher Roland Barthe’s Fragments d'un discours amoureux but from/with the perspective of the Ancient Greeks. Carson delves into a number of topics, theories, and texts from that period to investigate the concept of Sappho’s bittersweet Eros. We get Ancient Greek history, mythology, text analysis, and a lot of philosophy, from Aristotle’s to Plato’s to her own. I’m not the biggest fan of philosophy (I always find the reasoning quickly gets too far-fetched for me), and so the qualms I had with Eros the Bittersweet were qualms I have with the field of philosophy in general (Coming Soon: Roxane v. Philosophy: The Takedown). Nonetheless, this was a highly informative and smart investigation of Eros (especially in comparison to Logos), and relevant texts and philosophies of some of the big guns in Greek philosophy.
My favorite part of the book was when Carson set up attitudes to Eros on a continuum with, on one end, cicadas:
creatures pulled into confrontation with time by their own desire. […] The cicadas simply enter the ‘now’ of their desire and stay there. Abstracted from the process of life, oblivious to time, they sustain the present indicative of pleasure from the instant they are born until, as Sokrates says, “they escape their own notice, having died.” Cicadas have no life apart from their desire and when it ends, so do they.
And on the other end, the philosopher Lysias’ idea of the ‘nonlover’:
The nonlover sidesteps painful transitions between ‘now’ and ‘then’ by stationing himself permanently at the end of desire. He sacrifices the intense and transient pleasure of the lovers’ ‘now’ in return for an extended ‘then’ of consistent emotion and predictable behavior.
But Carson establishes that both those extremes are not available to mere humans: we cannot, like cicadas, just give ourselves entirely to pleasure, and we cannot, like Lysias purports, exert the self-control needed to become a ‘nonlover’.
Even though I highlighted basically half the book, I figured I would include just one more quote here that showcases both Carson’s philosophical but accessible writing, as well as the importance of Eros in our lives:
Imagine a city where there is no desire. Supposing for the moment that the inhabitants of the city continue to eat, drink and procreate in some mechanical way; still, their life looks flat. They do not theorize or spin tops or speak figuratively. Few think to shun pain; none give gifts. They bury their dead and forget where. […]
A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination. Here people think only what they already know. Fiction is simply falsification. Delight is beside the point (as a concept to be understood in historical terms).
Next up, I read The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue, a novel following a young woman named… you guessed it… Rachel, as she navigates her twenties in the harsh reality of Ireland in the early 2000s. The Rachel Incident does a great job at illustrating both the meaningless, day-to-day trials and tribulations of one’s life (an MIA boyfriend, fights with a friend, a broken heater, family drama, etc.), alongside the bigger, macroeconomic concerns that can plague an entire nation and generation (lack of jobs, abortion bans, recession). This novel truly does have it all: love, family, friendship, cheating, queerness, pregnancy, abortion, money struggles, various timelines, breakups, soul-sucking jobs, university, and more… In my opinion, the breadth unfortunately comes at the cost of a little bit of depth. With O’Donoghue touching upon so many things, some of then inevitably are more superficial (after all, not everything can be a Russian novel). Overall, The Rachel Incident is a moving and funny take on one’s coming-of-age story in a country where most things are difficult and uncertain. It’s also a great reminder of the importance of friendship in such situations.
Finally, I picked Paul Bloom’s Psych: The Story of the Human Mind back up, after letting it collect dust for the last six months. I had paused reading it because I had undertaken a way-too-ambitious note-taking project and didn’t have time to both read and take notes on the book. After shedding those unrealistic expectations, I was able to get back into Psych, a book I would recommend to anyone wanting either an introduction or a refresher on the big topics of Psychology. Bloom is a great writer: he is clear, engaging, and even funny at times, and made his 400 or so pages of Psychology theory a breeze to get through (unless you decided to take notes on every single paragraph, which I do not recommend).
While I technically didn’t read as many books this month as I normally do, I feel like I started the year well, with a good mix of fiction and non-fiction. While I’m not reviewing them here, I also started re-reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy as part of
, and am excited to go deeper into it this time around. I also switched out The Deadline for The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, as an antidote towards complacency and silence in the face of oligarchic forces. It’s big and extremely dense so I’m not sure if I’ll be “reviewing” it in February or March, or even later, but stay tuned for that! Additionally, I’ve been reading tons and tons of Substack articles, and if you want any good reads, head to my Notes and find some of the articles I restacked!Enjoyed this? Want to get next month’s recap?
Thanks for reading <3
Roxane