January 2024 Reading Wrap-up

Happy New Year! I hope that as January comes to a close, 2024 is treating you well. 

I’m slowly contemplating my 2024 reading goals, but one of them is to not have a reading goal. I’ll make a post about it but I want to take my time with my reading this year.

Because of this, January was a great month of reading!

One change I’m making to these reading wrap-up summaries is to get rid of the love, like, okay categories. I’m not a huge fan of rating a book (especially on a 1-5 star scale) and felt like this was unnecessary. I still like the mini-review aspect and it’s a great place to compile my notes from after I finished a book! So, for now, these will be in the order of when I finished a book and contain casual thoughts and feelings I have.

Hope you enjoy and here’s my January 2024 reading wrap-up. 

​​Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

This post encapsulates my thoughts on Annie John. I love this book! My first Kincaid and I’m looking forward to reading more. The style is relatively simple but there are so many things happening inside of it. I found it really impressive the layers are woven into this story. This book feels like it could be reread 100 times and still show new layers to it. 

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (Vol. 4) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Volume four is the penultimate book in this series. My sister and I have been book clubbing this series since about September. The story is wrapping up but, not everything has been revealed! It has been such a fun experience. The twists and turns were really conducive to a book club and, after watching part of the donghua, it was so fun to see their full stories. 

Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono

What a fun story. This book was perfect to read in a very gray January. I loved the cover too. It is a book about growing up, striking out on your own, and being true to yourself. Kiki was funny, charming, and her cat, Jiji, was amazingly witty. I wish there were more in the series translated into English!

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada

The first 50 pages had such an eerie feel. The way Oyamada conveyed the ordinary with a slight sense of uncanny was amazing. I feel like the ending didn’t quite hit home for me but I still really enjoyed this and the atmosphere Oyamada created was well worth it. 

Out by Natsuo Kirino

What a ride! I started this book the first week of January and since then it’s been my companion. This book was slow and relentless. It was gory, questioning, and gritty. I was loving it until maybe the last 80 pages. Somehow I felt almost betrayed by what happened in the end and, without spoilers, I think that it was almost intentional. This one I finished the last day, really the last hour, of January so I’m still thinking about it.