JANUARY 2026: Best and Worst Books of the Month

Hi everyone. Today, I’ll be talking about the best and worst books I read in January. This month, I also DNF’d two books. Both of them, unfortunately, were fantasy books.

1. WORST BOOK OF THE MONTH:  A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

Frankly, I thought I was going to love this book but I did not. A Month in the Country is “set in the aftermath of World War I and follows a war veteran’s summer of restoration – both of a medieval church painting and of his own shattered spirit. It is a ‘tale of survival and healing’ in which ‘a damaged veteran rediscovers the primeval rhythms of life’ disrupted by the Great War” (Comprehensive Book Report, Like Hemlock). The direction this book goes into, however, is not what I had expected and I didn’t like it. I was reading something else. Granted, there is nothing wrong with the direction in which the author decided to go to heal his protagonist, but it was not the story for me. A lot of people love this book and I don’t want to discourage you from reading it, but I was deeply disappointed by it.

2. BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Read this book. That’s all I have to say.

3. EPIC FANTASY AND SELF-PUBLISHED NOVEL: Of Darkness and Light by Ryan Cahill (DNF)

No one is more disappointed than me that I DNF’d this novel. Hugely popular, this series is one of the most talked about self-published epic fantasies on BookTube and other social media book reviewing platforms. Unfortunately, I was utterly bored with this second installment and I DNF’d it at 25-40%. My main complaint is that even though the story picks up right after Of Blood and Fire ends and the account of the siege of Belduar is fast-paced, the story itself moves very slowly and by the time I was at the 40% mark almost nothing had happened. While I was reading, I was also listening to the audiobook but I wasn’t engrossed in the story at all and couldn’t find myself caring about the characters and what happened to them. And I know that I DNF’d this series too early on to understand the magic system and the Knights of Achyron as much as I wanted to, which is one of the reasons why I read and listened to the book for as long as I did, but I wasn’t that interested in the Knights of Achyron to endure hundreds of pages of other stuff just to understand how they fit in the overall story of the series. No. When I pick up a series as long as this one, I want to enjoy reading it and I wasn’t doing that with this one so I stopped.

4. FANTASY AND DYSTOPIA: The Witchfinder by J. Todd Kingrea (DNF)

This is another book that I wanted to like, but I couldn’t get too far into it. Unfortunately, the writing was not for me. Although this book has many things that had the potential to make me love it, I was unable to get past the author’s writing style and immerse myself in the story, and I did not enjoy what little I did read. My apologies, but I will not be continuing with the series.

That is everything for today. Thank you for stopping by. See you next time!