January 2025 Reading Recap

On escaping The Horrors through dragons, and haunted houses, and sharks.

This weekend my boyfriend and I spent an evening with friends we haven’t seen in a long time, and almost inevitably The Horrors of the last few weeks came up as a discussion. We went through the whole array of feelings – dismay, fear, anger, disgust, disbelief, frustration, solidarity – before one of them articulated something I hadn’t thought about:

Another thing that makes me mad, he said, is that all of this chaos takes over everything. We can’t even just have a nice, normal evening catching up with friends, without this taking over our conversation and attention.

And that’s such a big part of it – in addition to the measurable and mean-spirited impacts The Horrors have on vulnerable people’s lives, the chaos of broligarchs intent on breaking everything they illegally access hits all of us in different ways. The challenge, I think, is to find our lane and make good trouble in it, while not letting the rest of The Horrors take away the things that bring us joy.

All that to say, I hope that hearing about the books that brought me some measure of joy this month brings a little bit of joy to you. The Horrors persist, but so do we.

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📘 How to Be Online and Also Be Happy by Issy Beech

I came into 2025 with what Kendra Adachi, The Lazy Genius, would call “big black trash bag energy” related to the Internet and social media. After reading Stolen Focus and other articles about how the algorithmic Internet is helping to ruin our brains, I was ready to blow up my online life completely. I even created a new, private Instagram account because I was sure I would delete mine and start fresh within the first few weeks of the year.

Reading this book gave me the perspective shift I needed to step back and take a more measured approach to my online life. Using prompts and activities from the book, I have been thinking a lot about what matters to me about being online, what makes being online terrible, and how to actively build an online life that serves me today. It’s harder and slower and made even more challenging by how much doomscrolling is happening right now, but I hope I will end up with a happier way to Internet in the future.

📘 Shark Heart by Emily Habeck

Shortly after Wren and Lewis get married, Lewis gets a devastating diagnosis – he is turning into a great white shark. While he will hold on to his memories, his body is morphing into a predatory sea animal. There’s so much more to this book, but I don’t want to risk spoiling some of the ways the story spools out from there, so I won’t say anything else, plot-wise. This was a perfect first read of the year, I loved it so much. As a young widow, there were parts that I resonated with very strongly, but I have to imagine that anyone who has lost someone they love will find a lot that resonates here. It’s a gorgeous, big-hearted, book that I loved.

📘 Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Opal is an orphan, struggling to make ends meet for herself and her brother, Jasper, in their hard-scrabble Kentucky community. When she’s given an offer to work at Starling House, an uncanny mansion with a mysterious owner, she finds herself drawn into the secrets and haunting legacy of her community. This book was such a treat! I loved all of the characters, the mysterious setting, and the way the story tries to grapple with legacy and complicated history. It’s a haunted house book, but it’s really more about how history haunts communities, and what happens when we refuse to be honest about the stories we tell ourselves and the mistakes we’ve made along the way – a useful lesson for our current situation.

📘 A Fire in the Sky by Sophie Jordan

This book was a bummer because I wanted it to be great and it just did not work for me. Despite being more than 300 pages, we spent almost all of the book with the two main characters sort of lusting after each other, but not doing anything about it, and almost no actual plot to speak of. It really felt like this should have been the first 100 pages of a much longer and more interesting book, because where it ended seemed promising… it was just a slog for me to actually get there.

📘+🎧 Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros

The best part about this book is that it has turned into such a great collective, escapist reading experience. A bunch of my friends, and both of my siblings, are reading the series, and so over the course of the month I’ve had many text threads with people shocked by the cliffhanger, digging into the plot, and sharing theories about all of the mysteries left to come. I have nothing bad to say about this book or the series, I loved it deeply and can’t wait for my inevitable rereads over the next couple of years as we anxiously wait for book four.

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Final Thoughts

One of my “how to be happy online” projects has been to work on developing a better information diet. I’ve been regularly reading three Substack newsletters that are helping:

The Preamble by Sharon McMahon offers great deep dives into the big picture impacts of the news of the day. McMahon is a former government teacher, so she does a great job of giving historical context and making how the government works (or is supposed to work) clear and understandable. I’d also say she’s relatively nonpartisan and focuses on understanding the facts of the day.

Emily in Your Phone by Emily Amick is a current events and activism newsletter. Amick is a former Senate Counsel for the Democratic Party, so has a lot of insider knowledge about how current government works. She writes great guides of talking points and potential impacts of legislation, and has done a lot to demystify the process of engaging with your political representatives.

Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson is a newsletter that covers current events through a historical context. I like this one because she does a great job summarizing the impactful news of the day, while also giving some examples of times in history when similar things happened, and how we got through them. It’s helpful to have a broader perspective on the news sometimes.

I’m still working on other ways to broaden and diversify my information diet, but these three newsletters have been great at providing a balance of history, information, and action for moving through the world today.

What did you read in January? What are you reading now? Do you have Onyx Storm theories to share? How are you making the Internet a less terrible place for yourself and others?