Here we are already a week into February, so it's time to post my January reading wrap-up. Here we go--in the order in which I read them.
Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska (NetGalley book--to be published on February 26, 2026 by Penguin Press UK)
In this book, Jane Rogoyska is exploring the experience of exile in various forms. She does this describing the lives of people who fall within three different groups, all having interacted in some way with the Hotel Lutetia on Paris' Left Bank. She states that, "This is not the story of a famous Paris hotel. It is about three groups of people who are connected to a particular city, to that particular hotel, to one another, and to the grim ideology which dictates the course of their lives. These groups are linked--willingly or not--by race, nationality, language, and their status as outsiders. They all live in exile, in profoundly different ways. They are displaced, dislocated, their lives disrupted. They are temporary beings who live out of suitcases. Their drama plays out in many hotel rooms. The Hotel Lutetia is the prism through which we view their lives." (p 3) The three groups she focuses on in this book are people in the resistance movement in France, Nazi occupiers, and finally, people who have been liberated from concentration camps at the end of the war. Within each group, there are particular people the author writes about and through them readers get a sense of the larger environment in which events occurred. She writes in present tense for most of the book, with occasional paragraphs of objective historical fact written in past tense. She does speculate at times about how someone might have felt in a particular situation, but it's very clear to the reader when this is happening. I found this to be a fascinating, heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and very readable book. At times it read like a novel in that I cared about what was happening to some of the people she highlighted and wanted to know what happened to them. This is an important book both for the historical information provided but also because of the idea of different kinds of exile. More and more people are finding themselves in one kind of exile or another, whether through war, invasion, climate crisis, hunger, political oppression, etc. It is important for all of us to understand better what this means. Of course, exiled people today will have different circumstances in some ways than people described in this book. But there will be similarities as well. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time. I highly recommend it.
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (personal copy)
This book opens with Price Myshkin on his way home to Russia from a hospital in Switzerland. On the train he meets Rogozhin who will remain an important figure in his life. Upon arrival, Myshkin goes to meet a woman who may be a distant relative--and his only living relative. He becomes attached to the family (her, her husband, her three daughters) and their circle. Myshkin is known as an idiot because he doesn't play the kinds of games that are expected in this kind of society. He also suffers from epilepsy. He's very open and honest with his thoughts and feelings, which is unusual. He is popular, but also set apart and seen as odd. He's been described as a Christ-like figure. The story follows Myshkin as he tried to acclimate to Russian life after being away. There is much running through this book as we follow Myshkin and those he encounters--philosophy, religion, class structures and expectations, gender roles, and more. I loved this book. Having read a couple of Dostoevsky's novels on Serial Reader before this one, I can say that this is an author I love and I will definitely be reading more of his work.
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (personal copy)
I picked this book up at a charity shop in December and decided to bring it with me when we were away. The story begins in Alaska in 1920, where Jack and Mabel have settled to try and make a go of farming there. They'd come from Pennsylvania where they made an unlikely pair--she the daughter of a professor and he a farmer. They married and had a stillborn baby which drove a wedge between them due to lack of communication about their grief. Alaska was a chance to start over, but it wasn't what they thought it would be. Hardship can drive people apart or bring them together and as they struggled at the beginning of winter, they had a momentary thaw in their relationship at the first snowfall. They built a snow child. Shortly thereafter, a girl entered their lives. Are these two experiences connected? Based on a Russian folk tale, the story goes on from there. I enjoyed this book for many reasons--the characters were well drawn, the cultural aspects were interesting, the relationships were true to life, whether the marriage between Jack and Mabel, the friendships that developed, and the parent-child relationships. I will say that the book is set in rural Alaska in the 1920s. There is hunting and lots of it. This would be true of life in rural Alaska today, but even more so a century ago. So if that's something that would be disturbing to you, this might not be a book you want to pick up.
A Danger to the Mind of Young Girls by Adam Morgan (BorrowBox book)
This is a biography of Margaret C. Anderson who was a lesbian publisher--the first to publish James Joyce's Ulysses in the US. She was arrested for this. Her trial would change literary history, but she's largely forgotten today. At the time, it was thought that reading modern literature would turn young women into "disease-ridden lesbians and prostitutes." I suppose this was a step down from the ideas of the Victorian era that too much reading and education for women would cause wombs to shrivel.
The book opens in winter 1921 in New York City with this sentence, " On a cold afternoon in the heart of Greenwich Village, Margaret C. Anderson bumped into the man who wanted to put her in prison." From there readers are taken back to Margaret's childhood through her teenage years and into young adulthood and independence from her family of origin. The author writes about her passion for literature and art throughout her life and how this put her at odds with her family and the larger society. This book is all too relevant today as the Comstock Act and its successor are being used--again--as threats against citizens of the States. Now as then, misogyny plays a role. Margaret C. Anderson lived a fascinating life and this is an excellent book.
Playing with Fire by Tess Gerritsen (personal copy)
I reviewed this book
here
I think I'll end this post here at the halfway point and post the second half of my January reading tomorrow. I hope February is a great reading month for everyone.
