Books by-the-month: January

T. S. Eliot was wrong when he said that "April is the cruelest month–" [he was wrong about a lot of things, like, ya know, his raging antisemitism, but, anyway, meh: a phenomenal poet] he’d clearly never experienced the nightmare that is returning to work, and the world-in-general, in January. In an election year. 

"Oh, what a long year this January has been!" I literally proclaimed yesterday. 

It's January 9th. 

Bleak times.

But with the festive season long gone, January can feel bleak and never-ending, not helped by the sidewalks lined with the corpses of Christmas trees, the days shorter and the darkness encroaching upon what feels like lunchtime, plus resolutions tugging away at your conscience? HARD PASS. So with the January blues in full swing, I offer a reprieve: an uplifting book.

I jest I jest. January is the birth month of too many of my close friends to count, including my husband. And who am I kidding I love winter coziness and any excuse for hyyge and all thing snuggling. Add a book to the picture of me + fireplace + snow outside + cup of hot something + Tatiana? Bliss. (Apologies for the wintery rant, southern hemisphere friends...)

 

In this new series Books by-the-month, I'm endeavoring to play the role of curator, assembling mini book collections across time and genre, according to themes endemic to the months on the good ol' Gregorian calendar. Holidays, yes. Seasons, sure. Themes the seasons inspire, why not? I also welcome any and all of your suggestions in the comments, friends!

 

And with that said, I give you January's mini list. Whether you’re looking to expand your mind, take up a New Year’s reading practice, or simply distract yourself from the chilly, soggy realities January has to offer, these books are sure to soothe you (at least mentally) for a day or two (plus the month or so those two days feel like... because, it's January).

 

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1. "Fresh Starts" and "Self Improvement"

On the solar calendar, January is all about the New Year's resolutions, and boy oh boy does our culture love to offer every one of us a million offers to improve. Lose the weight! Quit smoking! Save more money! Finally start therapy! Kick your weird habit! Start a juice cleanse! Have better relationships, conversations, anger management, sleep! Stop being a total jerk! 

 

The list is endless. And so is the pressure.

So my choice for this January "self improvement" category is a book of science-backed, evergreen wisdom on improving your overall HAPPINESS. And the first lesson is all about how we as a culture don't fully understand our own happiness, and how doing so can make a huge impact on how we experience the world, connect with ourselves and others, and shape a reality that brings us more peace, contentment and joy. 

 

Because apparently you can get happier. And getting there will be the adventure of your lifetime. So sayeth Oprah and author, researcher, academic and lecturer on happiness at Harvard University Arthur C Brooks. 

 

Build The Life You Want by Albert C Brooks and Oprah Winfrey

"In Build the Life You Want, Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey invite you to begin a journey toward greater happiness no matter how challenging your circumstances. Drawing on cutting-edge science and their years of helping people translate ideas into action, they show you how to improve your life right now instead of waiting for the outside world to change.

With insight, compassion, and hope, Brooks and Winfrey reveal how the tools of emotional self-management can change your life―immediately. They recommend practical, research-based practices to build the four pillars of family, friendship, work, and faith. And along the way, they share hard-earned wisdom from their own lives and careers as well as the witness of regular people whose lives are joyful despite setbacks and hardship.

Equipped with the tools of emotional self-management and ready to build your four pillars, you can take control of your present and future rather than hoping and waiting for your circumstances to improve. Build the Life You Want is your blueprint for a better life."

I hope you are as moved by its practicality, compassion, and candor as I was.


2. Several reads on Martin Luther King Junior to celebrate MLK day

There are many ways to celebrate the life of the peerless speaker, activist, leader, man of G-d and visionary humanitarian, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. It is being suggested by sociologists that in the 2010s-20s we are living during the second Civil Rights Movement, and where better to look to understand our present and our future, than to examine the courage of our origins. 

 

We have the gift of listening to his recorded speeches, joining in festivities, reflecting with friends and family. But of course, my favorite way to do this is to read books. Books have the capacity to create atmosphere like none other, and here are some essential reads about the man who lived up to the name of ‘King’ — the leader of America's civil rights movement.

• "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63" (1986),
• "Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965" (1998),
• "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68" (2006)
• "The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement" (2013),

 All by Taylor Branch.

The first book in Branch's multi-volume King biography, "Parting the Waters," was a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1987. The two following books were also highly praised and in 2013 he provided a single-volume overview. Totaling almost 3,000 pages, Branch's exhaustive biography provides a deep look into King's life and legacy.

In addition,
Here is a wonderful list of MLK celebration books from the always book-savvy LA Times.

3. Winter

In 2011 I wrote books-by-the-season, and regaled you with many books for the wintry months. From the first magic of The Chronicles of Narnia to Italo Calvino's singular If on a winter's night a traveler, to the psychological thriller masterpiece that is Rebecca—I waxed on and on and stand by my choices!

Winter can make for an irresistible setting for a book (believe me I... wrote a book set... in Siberia. So). From the glass-like surface of a frozen lake to the frenetic power of a white-out squall, the dead of winter offers countless evocative and extreme conditions that conjure magic, channel psychological heartbreak and push characters to their absolute limits. But January offers the longest of nights and bitterest of cold, and thus makes perfect meteorological grist for atmosphere, making you clutch your mug of tea a little closer.

And who does any of this better? Than RUSSIAN LITERATURE. You heard me. If you are a London Still venteran you know I love allthingsRussian (just to be clear in 2025: all things arts and culture, and not politics for literally ... the last 100 years?) 

 

And while Bulgakov is my dearest love, there is no greater place to start, end, and linger along the streets of Moscow than in the heartbroken arms of Tolstoy's great heroine, Anna Karenina. 

 

[:: Sweeping orchestral swell! ::] 

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was serialized between 1875 and 1877, and first published in book form in 1878. Tolstoy considered it his first true novel— (note that War and Peace appeared in 1869! He must've felt very strongly!) Those two novels, of course, are considered among the two greatest novels not simply of Tolstoy's, not simply of Russian Literature, but two of the greatest novel and frankly, works of art, of all time.  William Faulkner famously answered, when asked to name the three best novels, "Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina."  And Anton Chekhov reputedly said, after visiting his hero: "When you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone."

 

Tolstoy wrote many other (truly wonderful) short stories, and works like The Death of Ivan Ilyich (my "gateway drug" to all Russian Literature— thank you Jean Gaede by Russian Lit teacher Junior year at Interlochen Arts Academy), The Kreutzer Sonata, and Hadji Murat are also held in high esteem. Tolstoy was also a profoundly influential thinker— a radical Christian, a vegetarian (nearly a vegan), a pacifist. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in both Literature and Peace multiple times, and it feels criminal that he never received either honor (to be fair, it was early days for the existence of the award.)

 

So thanks very much in part to my previously mentioned life-transforming Russian Literature class in high school (once again, thank you Jean Gaede), and additionally in part to a childhood best friend Arielle who married a gosh darn Russian Literature professor, I was hooked. I picked up a copy of Anna Karenina one frigid, lonely, heartbroken winter years ago, and, after owning it for less than a week, I was performing medical-grade triage on the collapsing spine of my copy. Unputdownable isn't the word. Because it far exceeds that.

With its sempiternal themes of envy, fidelity, ambition, success, power, pity, lust and the greater machinations of a "civilized" society, Anna Karenina is the perfect place to begin your Russian literary journey, for it will be an odyssey. 

 

Sure sure, I hear you moan, but what is the novel about? Well, it's roughly 350,000 words are "about" marriage and adultery, but also farming, and war, and religion (and philosophy in general), and about economics, and about the difference between life in Russia and life in Europe; and, in a large way, about how to live a life, and the time-worn question of destiny versus personal agency. It offers few answers. Just better and better questions.

The modernity of the characters is leave-you-breathless astonishing: how they all, from young Kitty, to the author's alter-ego Levin, strive for meaning; how they so often fail (as the cuckolded husband Karenin does when he confronts Anna's adultery) to put into words what they desperately yearn to express; how one society princess is "awfully, awfully bored" and laments the "same everlasting crowd doing the same everlasting things" (Tolstoy's princess is a literary antecedent of F Scott Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby: "What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon … and the day after that, and the next thirty years?")

Tolstoy observed that the way to begin a novel was to "plunge readers right into the middle of the action." This is borne out in Anna Karenina: the opening chapter plunges us into themes that will be explored fully later. We learn in the first paragraph that "everything had gone wrong in the Oblonsky household. The wife had found out about her husband's relationship with their former French governess and had announced that she could not go on living in the same house with him."


Part One's most enduring scene, however, is Anna's arrival where, just after she has exchanged eye contact with Vronsky (her fatal attraction), a guard is crushed by a train: "A bad omen," she says to her brother, tears streaming down her face. As readers, we know she is doomed. And we are hopelessly hooked.

A little note on translations, while we are here.

In translating literature from one language to another in general, it is important to convey not only the literal meaning of the story, but the culture, dialogue, thought flow, and essence of the characters being conveyed in a way that makes literal and emotional sense to the reader who experiences the world through the lens of another language.

Because Russia holds such an extra layer of foreign mystery to Westerners, cultural conveyance is of even more import.

Russians (and of course, subsequently, their language) are very direct in their everyday conversations. They say exactly what is needed, often coming across as harsh or rude to the smiley, overly polite English-speaking world that values socially manicured manners and friendlyness above all else. 

 

 

So who does this best? The contemporary husband and wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are considered by many scholars to be the gold standard of Russian Literature in English translation. Not only in the prose (which is *ga ga ga gorgeous*) but crucially, in the dialogue. Also crucial is the footnotes. Their footnotes explain EVERYTHING you could ever want to know about what you are reading in a comprehensive but concise way. 

[Two little] CONS:
The bummer about many of Penguin Classics editions (that Pevar and Volokhonsky publish with)? --
1. the font is so tiny you could totally get an ocular migraine.
2. The covers...? The American covers anyway are ...  not inspired. And the saying be hang, judging a book by its cover is fine be me because book covers matter.