January 2026 Reading List and recent projects

The Signal, Ron Carlson

Long Bright River, Liz Moore

Sarah, Plain and Tall, Patricia MacLachlan

The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life after Brain Damage, Drew Magary*

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, Christopher Hayes*

The Cruelest Month, Louise Penny*

St. Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton*

I post the books I've read in the order I've finished them.  Asterisks indicate that the book was checked out from the library.

The Signal was okay.  I might enjoy it more on a re-read?  

Long Bright River had some holes, and I hate the jumping back in forth in timelines--especially so soon after The Signal--but I think I raced through it in a weekend.  Some of the twists I saw coming, some I didn't.  I'm happy to pass it on to you if we know each other in real life.  The writing was good.

Sarah, Plain and Tall is still an absolute treasure of children's literature.  Reading it as an adult is almost like reading a free form poem.  I might like it better now.

The Night the Lights Went Out was really honest. Margery is a great writer and he was really good at describing the sense of disorientation around never knowing what caused him to collapse, the amount of loss that can come from not being able to smell, the way sudden partial hearing loss affects pretty much everything.  It was good.

Twilight of the Elites.  This was written in [2012] and is a good summary of the last century and a good preview of where we're at now.  Meritocracy was never much a real thing in American society, but the collapse of it by the end of the twentieth century was huge (the chapter about ACT scores and everyone having to go college hit me hard) and the decrease in public trust in institutions--whether religious, governmental, educational--was leading into a kind of free-fall.  Yes, of course, I'm fun at parties.  Why do you ask?

The Cruelest Month is the third book in the Three Pines mysteries and I really enjoy them.  I finished this one in the first couple of days of our being snowed/iced in.  How many secrets can one charming village have?  There at least 10 of these books, so I'm sure I'll find out.

St. Thomas Aquinas.  I didn't know much about St. Thomas Aquinas before I read this and I still don't.  Chesterton has a lot of asides that I just don't have a lot of patience for.  If I read another wordy English man's writing again any time soon it will be C. S. Lewis.  When I was in college I knew a guy who was obsessed with G. K. Chesterton and had read nearly everything by him and he was his favorite author in addition to E. F. Shumacher (why don't these men have names???). He kept recommending titles to me and I kept saying that I had plenty of other old dead people to read and then I'd go back to my medieval lady mystics and tragic WWI poets.  Anyway, we're married now and I feel like if I had read some G. K. Chesterton back in the day, I would have made some very different decisions.  The BBC adaptations of the Father Brown mysteries are fun, though.  

Projects:

I patched a quilt.  I may have done worse sewing before, but we don't have proof of it.  This is a quilt top I made in the early 2000s and then whip stitched to my dorm room comforter in 2002.  I always intended to put it against proper batting and backing and then didn't.  Years went on and this remained my favorite covers.  The whole structure, improperly and unevenly stitched pieces of fabrics of varying weights stretched over a comforter from Dollar General or Fred's, became untenable in 2020 or 2021. Go figure.  It sat for a long time.  I removed it from the comforter with the intent of patching the top and finally Doing Everything Right (tm).  It sat for an even longer time.  I finally patched it up a few weeks ago, and bought batting and set it against an old sheet.  I gave up on perfect. I gave up on moderately okay. I just wanted my blanket back and I wanted to be warm underneath a quilt that had just the right weight.  I tried hand quilting.  This was not the project for that.  

On Day 4 or 5 of being iced in, I snapped.  I stitched the wretched creation down and then folded over the back to create the binding.  The sheet was old and stretched out.  It's a mess.  I put it in the washer and ventured out for the first time in almost a week.  I bought 2 bottles of wine, a can of Faygo for my kid, and a bottle of papaya punch that I once purchased for my husband as a joke because the liquor store was out of his requested plain apple juice and now he loves it.  I came home and put the quilt in the dryer.  I took it out of the dryer, enjoyed my $9 pinot noir, and stitched 2 more patches on some problematic areas while listening to music.  

I still have a few more spots that need repair. And I should probably hand quilt some squares, which I understand is a bad idea now that the binding is on.  But this thing is already such a wreck that me practicing my stitches under my cozy quilt while watching some TV is not going to make this thing any less warm.  If I can't have my specific quilt done correctly, I'm going to do what I can to have my quilt.  That being said, I'm looking forward to sewing more projects with some scraps of quilting fabric that I've gotten from my church's crafting group.  Maybe a small pillow for the couch.  Something lower stakes and small and simple enough to learn from and build some skills.  

I've also been working on a simple hat for myself that's just a tube of K1 P1 ribbing in lightweight yarn. It's taking forever and I keep setting it down because it's boring.  I want it to have a tall brim, though, so I press forward.

Currently reading:

Wuthering Heights

Fear and Trembling

Killers of the Flower Moon

The Gold Apples

Future projects:

My state fair doily, or at least picking out the pattern. 

Small gift toppers for my entire family.  If I start now, I'll have a slight chance of finishing them before Christmas.

Maybe socks.