JANUARY WRAP UP: What I Read This Month

Hi everyone! Welcome to a new year of reading. Today, I’m reviewing the books I read in January. I read 6 books this month. Here are my thoughts on all of them:

1. CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC IN SPANISH LITERATURE: Las batallas en el desierto por José Emilio Pacheco (English translation: Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco)

First published in 1981, this book is the story of Carlitos, a young boy who falls in love with Mariana, his best friend’s mother. Meeting Mariana is pivotal in Carlitos’s life; in the before, he is still a child. In the after, his innocence is shattered and he is now experiencing a new world: that of vulnerability, desire, and love. This loss of childhood innocence, however, is not just personal. On the surface, Carlitos (as an adult) is telling us the story of his first love, how he experienced it, and how he processed his feelings when he confessed his love to Mariana and she rejected him. He also confronts the pain of loving someone who doesn’t love him back, and the crude reality that love is sometimes impeded by social differences.

But the second type of innocence loss is both social and cultural. This is post-WWII Mexico and the men in power, led by President Miguel Alemán, were obsessed with “progress”; Mexico was going through a process of “Americanization”, where English words like tenquiu, óquei, uasamara, sherap, sorry and uan móment plis, were incorporated into Spanish, and people started eating “hamburgers, pays, donuts, hotdogs, milkshakes, ice cream, margarine, and peanut butter. Coca-Cola was slowly supplanting drinks such as fresh hibiscus, lime, or horchata water, and adults no longer served tequila at dinner parties. Now, the liquor of choice was whiskey. After all, it was necessary to ‘whiten the taste of Mexicans’”. That is, there was a growing and pervading racist sentiment towards everything that was local and Mexican.

Finally, the third type of innocence loss is historical and political. In this short novel, the author tells the story of what happened to Mexico after WWII. Miguel Alemán, the first non-military president of Mexico after the Revolution, is known today for promoting industrialization, the development of highways and universities in a country scarred by conflict and war, as well as for marking the transition from military to civilian leaders and a period of economic modernization. However, this period of Mexico’s history is also marked by unlimited corruption, the enrichment of the rich, and the marginalization of the poor.

This novel is a tribute to a Mexico that doesn’t exist anymore. It is a social, moral, and political critique.

The title of the novel is linked to the fact that childhood is not isolated from the world. Children absorb what is happening even if they don’t understand it. And in this case, the game “árabes and judíos”, a game that I remember my mom say she used to play as a child, refers to the confrontation between Arabs and Jews when the latter emigrated from Displaced Persons (DS) camps (formerly Nazi concentration camps) after WWII and the Holocaust and settled in the newly formed State of Israel. Hence, the battles in the desert.

Carlitos’s love confession to Mariana is the midpoint of the story. Here, three things happen: Carlitos experiences desire for the first time in his life and his childhood innocence is shattered. However, it is also the moment where the adult world irrupts into the childhood universe, and it doesn’t know what to do with Carlitos’s sentiments of love. It classifies them as dirty, pathological, and sick. Mariana is now seen as a social, moral (and later on, political) threat and the system cannot tolerate it. Hence, she is erased and nobody, years later, remembers that she existed.

And this is what makes the first line of the book even more poignant: “I remember, I don’t remember.”

This book is a New Favorite.

2. CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL FICTION CLASSIC: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

This is the second novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini following the huge success of his debut novel The Kite Runner in 2003. A Thousand Splendid Suns focuses on two women living in Afghanistan during the country’s bellicose and turbulent history in the 20^th century. Today, almost 20 years after the book was originally published in 2007, the Afghan people still have not found peace. After twenty years of Western occupation (2001-2021), President Biden announced the final withdrawal of US troops in April 2021. But in August 2021, the Western-backed Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban returned to power. Today, in 2026, the Taliban still rule the country.

A Thousand Splendid Suns tells the story of Mariam and Laila and the unlikely friendship that sparks between them. At the beginning of the novel, Mariam is 15 years old and she lives in an isolated shack with her mother. Mariam’s mother used to be a servant that her father slept with and impregnated. However, with the shame that this causes, he chooses to house the girl and her mother away from the family. Mariam’s world, nonetheless, is torn apart after her mother dies and she is sent to live with her father. His father’s wives, none too pleased about having the girl live with them, force her to marry Rasheed.

And, at the beginning, after Mariam moves to Kabul with Rasheed, it looks as if the relationship between them has the potential to become a good one. But it soon sours after she experiences one miscarriage after another and Rasheed becomes an angry man, blaming her for every little thing that goes wrong in his life. Mariam, for her part, lives in constant fear and anxiety.

In the meantime, Laila is born, grows up, and falls in love with her childhood friend, Tariq. However, Tariq and his family leave Afghanistan due to the city being in a constant state of bombardment, and they separate. When Laila’s family also makes the saddening decision of leaving their home, a bomb hits their property and both her parents die. Rasheed finds her in the rubble and takes her home. There, he courts her and asks her to marry him. Laila accepts after she finds out that she is pregnant with Tariq’s child. Hence, Mariam and Laila are forced to live with each other and eventually become inseparable after having to bear the brunt of Rasheed’s moods, who, with the years, becomes abusive and mentally unstable.

At the core, this is a story of domestic abuse set in a harsh, inhospitable, and unstable outside world. The story of two women who find strength in each other to survive both their husband’s wrath and the war raging outside their front door. But what is more, this book paints a “hauntingly vivid picture of the lives of Afghan women today; it is not a reminder of the past, but an echo of a living reality” (Review by r/IndiansRead on Reddit). Despite the depth of the suffering that these women have to endure, the terror, the oppression, and the pain, however, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Despite all this suffering, these women are strong and resilient and they will survive.

When I read this book, my heart went out to Mariam and Laila. But I cannot give it a New Favorite rating because I didn’t like the writing very much. Written in third-person free indirect speech, a technique pioneered by Jane Austen, there was just something about Hosseini’s writing that kept pulling me out of the story. Jarring even, and to this day, almost a month after I finished the novel, I still can’t put my finger on it. But it did reduce my rating and overall enjoyment of the novel.

I Liked this novel, but I Will Probably Never Read It Again. 

 

3. SHORT STORIES AND MAGICAL REALISM: Doce cuentos peregrinos por Gabriel García Márquez (English translation: Twelve Pilgrim Tales by Gabriel García Márquez; also published as Strange Pilgrims)

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez was my favorite book of 2025. This is not that. I first read Twelve Pilgrim Tales by GGM in high school, but there is so much about these short stories that I didn’t understand back then. García Márquez’s writing is inundated with political critique that a young girl barely paying attention to her own surroundings and unfamiliar with Latin American politics and history is obviously not going to understand. These stories, however, do not have a common thread that unites them. They are all pilgrims, like the title of the book says and pretty much like the pilgrims that arrive to The Tabard Inn in The Canterbury Tales who arrive to this point of reunion from all the confines of England. They’re all different.

Not all the tales are good, and I will not provide a summary of all of them here but I will point out my favorite ones: “Bon Voyage, Mr. President”, “I Only Came to Use the Phone”, “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow”, and “María Dos Prazeres.”

Will I ever read this book again? Maybe. But not for another long while. It is also not the first book by this author that I recommend.

4. WESTERN AND AMERICAN LITERATURE CLASSIC: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (Spanish translation: Paloma solitaria por Larry McMurtry)

“The Western novel is the epic of American literature.” This is very true, and Lonesome Dove is a must-read of contemporary American classics. USA Today said, when reviewing this book, “If you read only one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove,” and I agree. This book is a New Favorite for me. Here’s why: I loved the relationship between Gus and Call. They were friends, brothers in arms, and family to one another. Gus’s ceaseless talking balances Call’s heavy silences; Gus’s love of life and Epicurean lifestyle balances Call’s stoicism and indifference to others; Gus’s laying around drinking and thinking (and not working) balances Call’s continuous physical work around the Hat Creek Outfit…the opposites between these two are endless. They all, nonetheless, balance each other out. But what I liked the most about these two men was how much they loved each other. They are epitome of a friendship between two men.

Larry McMurtry, however, never lets us forget that both of them are human. He doesn’t introduce us to two heroes beyond our grasp, but to two men who are utterly and unmistakenly human. Men who have made mistakes in the past and regret them, men who fought for their country and wonder, in their old age, if they fought for the right side; men who are coming to terms with their own mortality as they see the America of old become a new one, and wonder if they too are a thing of the past now. Men who are, despite their partnership, lonesome doves in a world that is changing before their eyes.

I highly recommend this novel. I will read both prequels and the sequel of this novel later on this year.

5.  CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC NOVELLA: A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

I’d been wanting to read this short novel for a while now. So, when I saw that an audiobook for it had been released in 2024 (I looked for one in 2022 and 2023), I quickly snatched it up and read the novella. 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). Unfortunately, I didn’t like this book as much as I thought I would.

When I read the synopsis, I was expecting an account of how Tom Birkin’s trauma from WWI contrasts with the peace and tranquility of the countryside and how that serenity helps him recover from the horrors of the battle of Passchendaele. I was expecting to get into his mind and experience the healing process with Tom Birkin. This is not what we get. Instead, we see how he is integrated into Oxgodby society and life when he is not working on the painting and fall in love with the preacher’s wife. We don’t experience how the idyllic English countryside heals his wounds and scars of the Great War. Maybe him spending time with the people of Oxgodby was the healing process and I just didn’t get it. All the same, I didn’t like it.

It is a case of a book that was not what I was expecting.

6. PHILOSOPHY AND ANCIENT HISTORY: Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World by Tim Whitmarsh

Although adherents and opponents of atheism today present it as a result of the European Enlightenment, atheism, Tim Whitmarsh says, is actually not a new phenomenon. It is, in fact, as old as the advent of philosophy in Ancient Greece. To prove this, the author delves into ancients texts of Greek literature, philosophy, and history and analyzes them minutely to prove that atheism is not only evident in, but important to, the way of thinking of the most famous tragedians, philosophers, and historians of Antiquity. These works question the Gods and their divinity and demand that citizens in Ancient Greece evaluate the possibility that indeed there are no Gods.

Whitmarsh analyzes works of Antiquity written in Archaic Greece, Classical Greece, Hellenistic Greece and finally Rome; these works are all then contrasted in turn with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as Hesiod’s Theogony. Having read many of the works that Whitmarsh mentions in this work, and several histories of philosophy detailing how Pre-Socratic philosophers searched for a more naturalistic explanation of the world, I will say that Whitmarsh makes a compelling argument. However, this is one of those books that needs to be read more than once. This month I also read Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Euripides’s Medea, all of which Whitmarsh mentions in this book and I could see clearly the evidence he points out in favor of atheism’s pervading but silent presence in Ancient Greek thought.

The point is, he says, that atheism has been around for a long time and it is not lesser than theism or unnatural. Atheist discourse is just as multifaceted as theist discourse and we should give it its due place in the conversation. I Liked this book and Will Probably Read It Again.

Those are all the books I read this month. Please come back later to see which ones were my best and worst reads of the month.