Welcome to the Book Report on Beehiiv, where it took me the better part of a day to figure out how to create a post (derogatory to me + my lack of planning ahead).

Last month/year, I said I wanted to recapture the part of my youth where things felt new. In practice, what has that looked like so far? Like a lot of listening to college radio stations, thrifting (!), hating the government, hanging out with my friends, seeing an [sic] movie, and reading one book (😬). In other words, I’m certainly doing things I frequently did as a young person, things I hadn’t necessarily stopped doing as I grew up, but which I certainly did more intermittently as “life” continued to “happen.”

In terms of music and film, this month I have encountered things that feel new to me. And I am coming to suspect that what I desire isn’t novelty so much as anything that makes me marvel at the human capacity to create something beautiful and meaningful.

Uh oh! Is irony dead again? Maybe in this Book Report it is!! Hope you like listening to this song by this artist I learned about while seeing this beautiful film about everyday life. And if you don’t like it, how about some other great songs I heard on the radio this month?¹

What I read in January:

Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland (2023)—Surely my inchoate yearning for fresh perspectives as described in last month’s Report on some level informed my nomination of Bertino’s novel for Book Club, as Beautyland depicts the experience of an extraterrestrial tasked with faxing descriptions of Earth and its people back to her home planet. A clever way for Bertino to capture how alien it can feel to grow up and learn about the world, even and especially past adolescence!

I really loved this book. It is fresh, and substantial but not heavy, warm but not sappy or sentimental. In parts, laugh-out-loud funny. I’ve never read anything like it. As with anything that feels truly new to me, I am not sure what more to say—I want to know more, to read other books by Bertino, before I can make an assessment. Because if her other books leave me with a similar impression, then imo Bertino is right up there with my favorite accessible surrealist, Helen Oyeyemi. Special thanks to Friend of the Report, Sarah, for convincing me to read this novel!

What I’m looking forward to reading or rereading in 2025:

Annual reminder that due to my continued lack of effort, I remain not an influencer with a list that is not spon con.

If you see something on this list that you think you’ll like, you should preorder it or request that your library carries it.

Any month in parentheses=when a book releases, not when I plan to read it!

Xochitl Gonzalez, Olga Dies Dreaming (2023)²

Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia: A Memoir (February)

Josephine Baker, tr., Sophie R. Lewis and Anam Zafar, Fearless and Free: A Memoir (1949/February 2025)

Ali Smith, Gliff (February)

Alba De Céspedes, tr., Ann Goldstein, There’s No Turning Back (1938/February 2025)

Natasha Brown, Universality (March)

Lynn Steger Strong, The Float Test (April)

Katie Kitamura, Audition (April)

Francisco Delgado, On Remembering My Friends, My First Job, and My Second-Favorite Weezer CD (April)³

Megan Greenwell, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream (June)

Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me (September)

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale (1851)⁴

Teffi, tr. Rose France and Elizabeth Chandler, Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi (2016)⁵

1  I am 100% regressing/this is my midlife crisis.

2  Book Club selection for February.

3  Francisco is a Friend of the Report, whose friendship in fact long predates the Report, and I cannot wait to read his first novella!

4  It’s happening this year I swear to god. I can’t go to the opera without first refreshing my memory of a book I’ve claimed for the last 20 years is one of my all-time faves.

5  Book Club selection for March.