January got you down (and probably indoors)? Consult our list of books to read to get you through the first – and hardest – month of the year. Keep scrolling to find the best books to read this month.
- The Year of Miracles by Ella Risbridger
You could try a new year cleanse – or you could make Ella Risbridger’s Quadruple Carb Soup, the food equivalent to a weighted anxiety blanket. The author first turned to cooking following a suicide attempt (chronicled in her bestselling debut, Midnight Chicken), with the guidance of her long-term partner The Tall Man. The follow-up sees her back in the kitchen, this time in the absence of The Tall Man’s tragically young death from cancer. The Year of Miracles is basically a list of reasons why it’s worth getting out of bed in the morning, no matter what you’ve been going through, disguised as a cookbook.
2. Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
The Roaring 2020s may never quite have materialized, but at least Kate Atkinson brings life to 1920s London in fabulous detail for Shrines of Gaiety. Her exquisite protagonist: Nellie Coker, mother of six children and a nightclub that’s put her on the wrong side of DCI John Frobisher. Read the novel, then go search for the autobiography of Kate Meyrick, the real-life icon who inspired Nellie.
3. Wintering by Katherine May
Wintering brings the pitfalls of hustle culture into focus through May’s account of her own 40th year, in which her carefully constructed existence came crashing down due to a combo of sickness, parental worries and the fact that she had just quit her job without a backup plan. Instead of viewing this period of misfortune as unique, however, May argues that every life includes these stretches. “We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer, and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves,” she writes in the introduction to a redemptive narrative that ranges from October to March. “We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the wintering sun; an endless, unvarying high season. But life’s not life that.”
4. Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon by Kate Anderson Brower
Kate Anderson Brower spoke with over 250 of Elizabeth Taylor’s confidantes while writing the first authorized biography of the Cleopatra star, which includes everything from her two marriages to Richard Burton to her campaigning work as an AIDS activist. Also featured: excerpts from Taylor’s own gossipy journals and never-before-seen photographs of the jewelry obsessed.
5. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Short and funny, this story follows Keiko, a 36-year-old single woman in Tokyo who has never fit in anywhere besides the corner store she’s been working for nearly half her life. She doesn’t feel the urge to change, except everyone else wants to fix her. In the new year, when all the ideas of the person you “should” be arise, it’s a reminder to see the world through Keiko’s unique lens. It’s not that she sees things better, but that her oddness helps highlight the equal strangeness of the norm. When half of our resolutions are related to the things we’re told to want to do or be, it encourages you to step back and ask whether you want to change because you’re unhappy with yourself, or in pursuit of acceptance and validation from others.
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