January Books
The six books I read in January 2025: three fiction and three non-fiction.
Well, we made it through the darkest month! I much prefer reading with daylight coming in the window, so December and January can be quite rough. I need to get me one of those Serious Readers lights for winter, but they’re just so expensive. Next year maybe.
So, how was your reading month? I finished six books with an even split between fiction and non-fiction.
Non-fiction
The War of Art
Steven Pressfield.
This was my second time reading this wonderful book and, as with the first time around, I found it incredibly helpful. I’ve been in the creative space for a few years now, whether it be writing blog posts, making videos or writing and performing music. I’ve also read a lot about depression, autism and ADHD to try and understand what makes me and other family-members tick. Pressfield’s book comes into that space between creativity and resistance, between writing an essay and doomscrolling. It explains why people get in their own way and examines strategies for dealing it.
This is a book for everyone, not just those involved in the creative arts. It’s about finding ways to make your bed in the morning, to get to the swimming pool when it’s pissing down outside and still dark, to choosing a banana over a biscuit. But yes, of course it applies to the creative arts too. I always feel better after writing something or recording something, so why do I put it off and choose to distract myself with social media? On paper it makes no sense, yet we all do it. This book shines a light on the reasons and how to fix them.
The only place where I disagree with Pressfield is the way that he frames this as a battle. He gives the word resistance a capital letter, making it a proper noun. I think this gives it too much power. I prefer to think of it as something that we ourselves bring into existence, so that by making the right choices, resistance deflates until it disappears completely. It reminds me of one of my favourite Peter Gabriel songs, Darkness:
And the monster I was
So afraid of
Lies curled up on the floor
Is curled up on the floor just like a baby boy
I made a full video review of this book here:
The Histories
Heredotus, Translated by Tom Holland
This was part of my Humanities read-along, following Ted Gioia’s list. Ted had assigned three chapters to keep the weekly page count within his limit of 250 pages, but as I’m reading his weekly selections over a month, I had the luxury of time to read the whole book. Was that a good thing? I’m not sure.
I listened to this one on audio, narrated by Frank Laverty and he did a good job. By about mid-way through though it was just getting to feel like too much information too fast and there was no way I could keep up. Honestly, I feel like it would take a whole semester at uni with multiple lectures and tutorials to get through this with any semblance of retention and understanding. Names, places, begats, battles… and lots of violence and murder. I know one of my fellow Ted’s-list readers recommended reading this one in the Landmark edition for the maps—that would probably have helped a lot.
Symposium
Plato, Translated by Robin Waterfield
This was a lively read that I enjoyed. I ended up listening to a discussion on this work on the In Our Time podcast and that helped with my understanding of the topics. The book is part of Plato’s Dialogues, others of which I’ve read as part of my Humanities reading project (Republic, The Last Days of Socrates).
On the whole I’ve found the Dialogues to be more accessible than I expected, but they are deceptive in their simplicity: there’s a lot going on under the hood, which is why seeking out ancillary discussions is so useful. As with Heredotus, one could easily spend a semester studying these texts, but they’re much more digestible for philosophy newbies like myself (as indeed was Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics) and you will almost certainly take something away.
Fiction
Shift
Hugh Howey, Book 2 of the Silo Series
I’m enjoying the TV show Silo and couldn’t wait to learn how the silos came to be, so I binged through Wool and then Shift. This book takes us back to the beginning and tells the story of what happened on earth. It wasn’t quite as interesting a story as I thought it would be and the book was a bit of a slow-burner. I actually got close to quitting at one point, but I’m glad I persevered because it picked up in the last third and it got way more interesting round about the time when Solo shows up. I won’t be continuing with Dust just yet. And now I have to wait for season 3 of the TV show. Come on already!
Greenwitch and The Grey King
Susan Cooper
I’ve been having a good time with these middle-grade fantasy novels, published in 1974 and 1975. These are the third and fourth books of the five-book series known as The Dark is Rising Sequence.
Greenwitch follows the Drew children, Simon, Jane and Barney, the three siblings who found the grail in the first book in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone. Will Stanton comes in from the second book, The Dark is Rising, but he doesn’t play a very big part in this story. Like the first book, it’s set in Cornwall and it’s basically another grail quest, but with magic this time where the first book had none.
The Grey King takes us to Wales, where Will Stanton has gone to convalesce after an illness. It’s a much moodier story than Greenwitch, and includes some Welsh language and folklore alongside the Arthurian mythology from books one and three. It also makes excellent use of dogs and has a great baddie in the character of Caradog Prichard. I listened to the audiobook of this one, narrated by Richard Mitchley. His Welsh pronunciations really helped to set this book firmly in its location and I highly recommend this one as audio.
I’ll be reading the last in the series, Silver on the Tree very soon, after which I’ll write a post on the whole series.
Currently reading
I have a few reading projects on the go, including some that are being run by fellow bookish Substack writers (Bookstackers?).
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, run by
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, run by
The Iliad, Homer, run by
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin, run by
Dominion, Tom Holland, #Historathon2025 (Fable group)
Catherine the Great and Potemkin, Simon Sebag Montefiore, #Historathon2025 (Fable group)
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon
Just finished
Fool’s Fate, Robin Hobb, buddy read with Rae Loves to Read
That’s me for January. Let me know what books you enjoyed in January and what you’re looking forward to this month.
I love Greenwitch, mostly because Jane gets to have a bigger role, but Grey King has dogs so <3
I read Silo recently (I haven't seen the TV show), and I found it rather odd. It didn't seem like a book for children at all. So much time and energy is invested in the characters at the beginning (the Mayor and Deputy Sheriff) that when they died I found myself pretty much mourning them for the rest of the story and frustrated that no one could revenge them/bring their murderer to justice. Maybe this is the point Howey was trying to make: move on, and justice will find its own way. I am not a mover on. I am a holder on.
Oh, I love The Dark Is Rising! (Though Greenwitch is my least favorite. I'm not a fan of the full-on paganism.) But I do love this series! I have fond memories of reading as a child, in deep Chicago winter, sitting in front of our heater. I reread it every few years. It makes me happy to see someone else enjoying it!