January 2026 Reading

I read 8 books & audiobooks last month. Here’s the list:

Beautiful Children by Charles Bock

I had the book sitting in Calibre for 15+ years. I am making an attempt to read some of the stuff that’s been sitting there for a while.

Nominally, Beautiful Children is about the disappearance of Newell Ewing, what led up to it and the effects afterward on his family. Unfortunately, I found that I could not understand the connection between all the characters and scenes. Who is this person? What is their connection to the story? Each scene was fine, but I couldn’t make sense of the whole.

I Know What You Need by Tyler Jones

A free ebook single from Subterranean Press.

You know how everything would be different if small things were changed? If the bad guy hadn’t slipped on a banana peel that was fortuitously in the wrong place at the right time? What if someone knew about all those things and had to get those things where they needed to be? I Know What You Need tells a story of that someone.

West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman

IIRC, West Heart Kill was featured on a newspaper’s book section, so I added the audiobook (narrated by Robert Petkoff) to my Libby wish list several years ago.

A locked room mystery with an unreliable narrator who may or may not be a detective visiting an exclusive hunting club in upstate New York. The author plays with the point of view, switching narrators, including making a stand-in for the reader be the narrator at times, and breaks the 4th wall a lot. I thought this was fun, playful and interesting. Once. I don’t think I want to read another book that does this, or at least I don’t think I want to experience this frequently.

The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti

Why am I reading a book that is 16 or 17 years old? The Purity Myth is another ebook that has been sitting in Calibre for almost a decade. Jessica Valenti’s polemic has a well-argued point that America’s virgin/whore complex hurts women. I don’t think that’s changed since the book was written, but a lot of the examples and references feel out-of-date now.

An Unbreakable World by Ren Hutchings

An Unbreakable World is space opera set in the same universe as Hutchings’ Under Fortunate Stars, so I expected a lot of the same. Some solid characters. A fun plot. A focus on telling a story. There’s a bit of a romance happening; enough to make a relationship interesting. The bad guy is a bit of a mustache-twirler. He only makes 4 or 5 appearances though.

Cobalt Red by Siddarth Kara

Cobalt Red is Siddarth Kara traveling eastern areas of Democratic Republic of Congo investigating the conditions of “artisanal mining”. These are small operations employing locals to dig mines, break apart ore, wash ore, and all other activities, manually, in risky conditions, and for piece rates that are neither enough to lift people out of poverty nor anywhere near a significant portion of the value that cobalt brings to technology companies. Laws and conventions are supposed to keep artisanally mined cobalt out of the supply stream for tech devices. Kara’s interviews make clear two really important points: the conditions are abysmal, and the cobalt ore is clearly being merged into the supplies used by ore refineries.

Squirrel Pie by Deborah Brannigan

Squirrel Pie is a memoir by the mother of a friend of mine, so maybe take my thoughts with a grain of salt. I would also not normally read a self-published book but Tara promised it included how she was abducted as a child and her father was the subject of an interstate manhunt. A second word of warning though, the book is full of abuse: child abuse, rape, beatings, animal cruelty, and state indifference to name some of it. Brannigan dropped out of school and became the child girlfriend of Charles “Mac” McCall, who was over a decade her senior. When she finally has enough and returns to her parents’ home, McCall begins a campaign of threatening behavior and ultimately absconds with their child. The writing is well above average for a self-published book.

The Fortune Seller by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

By the time I figured out where The Fortune Seller audiobook (excellently narrated by Stephanie Cannon) was going and that I did not like it, I was so far in that I was on a hate-listen.

The marketing copy on Macmillan’s web site says:

Yellowjackets meets The Cloisters in this beguiling coming-of-age story about class, reinvention, and destiny, set against the backdrop of two mysterious deaths.

The book has little to say about reinvention or destiny, other than the point-of-view character Rosie Macalister is fed up with rich people at the end and character-who-is-not-who-she-says-she-is Annelise Tattinger is a tarot reader. Every damn character is annoying. Most characters actions are convoluted and obtuse. The bad guy is a mustache-twirler. The “thriller” part of the story doesn’t even start until 70% of the way through the book, and it’s not even thrilling. Wikipedia has the following to say about thrillers:

Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. […] A thriller generally keeps its audience on the “edge of their seats” as the plot builds towards a climax.

There’s no feeling of suspense between the good guy and the bad guy here. There’s no cat-and-mouse action. Simply put, Rosie works for an asshole rich guy and the only action that takes places is that she quits and stomps out of the workplace somewhere after 90% of the way through.