January Reading Wrap-Up
What Diana Reads #jan2026
January turned out to be a month of quietly devastating books – the kind that look calm on the surface but keep echoing long after you’ve closed them. My reading ended up circling around memory, failure, family, and the many small ways a life can go wrong or right without anyone really noticing.
#1. *The Secret History* – Donna Tartt
This was the big, immersive one of the month, and my first five stars of the year – the kind of novel that makes everything else feel a bit dull while you’re in it. Tartt’s campus is both seductive and suffocating: old stone buildings, dead languages, and a group of students who mistake their own cleverness for a moral compass.
What struck me most wasn’t the murder itself (we know it happens from the first page), but the slow, disorienting collapse that follows. Tartt is excellent at showing how ordinary people talk themselves into unforgivable things, one small rationalization at a time. The atmosphere is dense, slightly rotten, and irresistible. I didn’t “like” any of the characters, but I believed all of them – which is rarer and more satisfying.
# 2. *Filho da Mãe* – Hugo Gonçalves
In contrast, *Filho da Mãe* feels much closer to the bone: contemporary, intimate, and painfully recognisable. It’s a book about family, resentment, and the complicated loyalty we feel toward the people who shaped us – badly and beautifully at the same time.
What I liked is how unclean the emotions are. There’s no neat reconciliation, no saintly forgiveness. Gonçalves lets his characters be petty, unfair, and nostalgic all at once. The writing has that specific bitterness of adult children looking back at their parents and realising that what felt like “normal” was actually a quiet catastrophe. It’s sharp but not cynical – the tenderness is always there, just under the sarcasm.
# 3. *Stoner* – John Williams
*Stoner* is as simple as it gets on paper: the life of a university professor who never becomes famous, never starts a revolution, never does anything that would make it to a headline. And somehow it was one of the most emotionally intense reads of the month.
Williams takes this unremarkable man and pays him a level of attention usually reserved for heroes. The prose is spare and precise; there’s no melodrama, just a steady accumulation of disappointments, small joys, and compromises. It’s about a life that could easily have passed unnoticed – and about how no life is actually small from the inside.
It’s a quietly brutal book: no big tragedies, only the slow erosion of hope, and yet there are moments of grace and dignity that feel almost luminous.
# 4. *In the Absence of Men* – Philippe Besson
This was the most overtly romantic of the bunch, but in a very French, restrained, and melancholy way. Set during WWI, it follows a young man discovering desire and love in a world that’s falling apart.
Besson writes with an elegance that borders on fragile. Everything feels slightly blurred by heat, cigarette smoke, and the awareness that time is very short. It’s a story about a first love shaped by war, secrecy, and the sense that the intensity of this moment cannot be repeated. The book is slim, but it leaves a surprisingly heavy emotional aftertaste – like reading a long, painful letter that arrived years late.
# 5. *Somebody Loves You* – Mona Arshi
This was the quietest book I read in January, and also the one I ended up feeling most conflicted about. Told in short vignettes, it drifts through childhood, migration, silence, and mental health in a very fragmentary way.
I loved some of the individual moments – Arshi is great at capturing small, precise details and the feeling of things left unsaid in a family. But the fragmentary structure also kept me at a distance. I never fully connected to the characters, and the emotional impact felt muted rather than devastating.
If I had to sum up January’s reading in one line, it would be: **quiet catastrophes and the people who live through them**. No grand heroes, just ordinary lives seen up close – flawed families, failed ambitions, forbidden loves, and the stubborn, sometimes pathetic, sometimes noble refusal to give up on meaning.
