january reminds me of poetry. lost and forgotten in the back of notebooks. tissues crumpled in spilling-out bins. january is dreary and unkind. miserable and bitter. but she’s also trying, and so am i.

this month i finished six books. spurred on by my holiday having no end in sight. i stayed warmed by the sun as possibility hung from every corner. how exciting, a brand new year and i get to decorate the time with books!

so here’s everything i read while january danced alongside me.

my 5 star reads:

the fifth season by n.k jemison. (broken earth series)

every age has an end. everything falls apart and those who know how to survive— do. except, except, except. something is wrong, something is different this time.

gosh this book was electrifying. time bending, magic and the strength of grief, a story passed down from generation to generation, history that is always cut up and repurposed. what a beautifully dark novel about living through the start of the end of the world.

i struggle talking about books that have left an impression on me. i once read the lines “if i loved you less i’d be able to talk about you more” somewhere on pinterest. it’s credited to jane austin in emma, a book i own but have not read. except for this quote. this line that holds so much truth for me and has stuck with me all these years because i agree. i love love love and suddenly my throat closes up and my mouth becomes dry and my tongue is so heavy between my teeth. i can’t tell you how i itched for the next chapter. how my mind always found its way back to this book. these characters. this journey. it’s a poetic and moody piece of work with multiple storylines all affecting one another. and i devoured it. i cannot wait for book two.

hijab butch blues by lamya. h

every person of colour who identifies as a lesbian knows me. intimately. i love feeling seen. i love having my thoughts reiterated back to me by someone i have never met and possibly never will. i care deeply about other people’s lives maybe because i am so uncertain on how to live my own. two or three years ago it was the common press’ book of the month so i received this copy for free!

it followed me to my second and third years of university. settled with me back home. through two house switches and the threatening possibility of my mum forcing me to get rid of some of my books (we survived another year folks not let go of a single one who cheered!) i finally read it in the long days after new years. where time is like an ink stain bursting in all directions. nothing is touching me, nothing can harm me.

one of my best friends got the brunt of my reading experience. me in kenya, she in london. the three hour time difference was no match for my up-early-reading messages. i texted her an embarrassing amount because i knew this was a book she’d enjoy and it was bringing up questions in me that made me curious of her own experiences. i wanted to know and i wanted her to know that.

curiosity is such a beautiful thing in friendship. i also think it’s something that (when turned inward) can create tender sparks of self-discovery. the lesbian to gender questioning pipeline is real and very alive. i wonder if women of colour feel this impulse to question our gender because we are not afforded the same freedom of femininity as white women? as a black woman i know all too well how we can be masculinised, stereotyped as strong, independent, black women. black being a placeholder for different.

who knows. all i know is that while i will never really relinquish being a black woman, i know that my idea of womanhood looks different and is different to what is widely assumed as such. i am confident that i’m not a woman though i move and see the world through the black female experience. this is not confusing to me even if it is to everyone else.

(here i say a silent grateful prayer to all the black trans people who came before me, who have made it possible for me to even think this way about myself. here i acknowledge how there is still so much i do not know about myself, so much to explore and figure out. here i say a silent grateful prayer to protect my trans friends who have opened up and spoken about their own journey with gender with me giving me the space to figure out what i didn’t even realise was bothering me.)

i found comfort in lamya’s writing. i knew what they meant when they wrote about how scary this discovery is. how isolating but how beautiful. i really enjoy reading the perspective of another she/they lesbian. the way religion plays a huge part in lamya’s story. because there was no removing one from the other. admittedly i found myself getting envious at such displays of faith. having something to return to when the days are hard and long. to have a community within a community.

but that’s me romanticising. reading how tricky it was to navigate finding yourself while knowing what your family feel about queerness. that isolation. i can’t imagine how painful that must be. it is no exaggeration to say that the queer muslim social group she found in new york changed and saved her life.

it made me think about my own community. how discovering black queer events led me to meet so many beautiful people that share the same passion and values as my own. what a wonderfully jagged journey queerness is.

my 4 star reads.

artificial condition by martha wells (book two in the murderbot diaries)

nearly four years after reading the first book, watching the apple tv adaptation of said first book i’m back baby! i love this series. i read this as an audiobook (thank you always libby) and i loved the pacing, the dialogue and the story itself. it’s quite quick i think the whole book takes place across two days? it’s cute. no notes just wish it was longer.

altered carbon by richard k morgan ( book one in the takeshi kovacz series)

this is a story about persevering.

summer of 2020 my world was just starting open up again. i was at my boss’ house, helping them with both work and house work. during a break we ordered food and she asked me if i was watching anything on tv, i told her nothing she’d be interested in to which she laughed and put on altered carbon a netflix tv show that she insisted was one of the best she’d ever watched.

she failed to note that she was on the last few episodes of season 2 spoiling the entire show for myself because when i tried to watch it from season one i was thoroughly unimpressed.

it took two more years before i forgot the plot and tried to watch it again. only lasted a few episodes. it was boring, as exciting as the cgi and colour grading was the dialogue was choppy and painfully unnatural. the only reason i gave the audiobook a chance is because i didn’t want to fly eleven hours without one. the bonus being if i liked it maybe i could finally experience my old boss’ favourite tv show.

and i did like it, a lot actually. way more than i thought i would. but, quick question to male authors everywhere who find it is a non-negotiable that they must describe the shape, curve, bounce of a woman’s boobs within five seconds of the main character meeting them— are you being held at gunpoint? is everything okay? do we need call jane?

did this particular thing jar me? yes. did it, at some point, start to become amusing? also yes, i think you should read this book just because its almost laughable how you know when takeshi has met a woman because all of a sudden her boobs walk through a door before she does. and our scruffy narrator is always at the best possible place to see them.

richard k morgan went to the school of haruki murakami and passed with flying colours because despite all of that its actually a really good book. the women aren’t just their bodies either though in this particular world where you can wear each others skin (they call them “sleeves”) be any gender, any race perhaps that isn’t entirely true.

but the women in this story are all multifaceted, products of their environment. sexy, beguiling and all desperately haunted. i latched onto them in this novel partly because they were so much more than their descriptions and also because it’s so easy for sci fi / fantasy writers to become perverted in how they weave women into their stories under the guise of “story building”(george r martin i’m looking directly at you.) i felt like i needed to “keep an eye on them.”

ridiculous, i know.

i didn’t need to worry. i think the author was well aware of the traps of writing women when you have all this creative power. i think he’s well aware of what the science fiction genre does for social change and i do believe it’s a story about perseverance. we’re talking about artificial intelligence, capitalist greed, humanity, an environmental crisis, consent, censorship, history and murder all being strong themes in a book where the central story follows a man whose been brought out of “storage” in a new sleeve tasked with solving the death of a very wealthy man’s previous sleeve. which had been ruled off as a suicide. come onnnn.

and! it’s got all the elements i love: a future world with inter-dimensional travel. cyberpunk meets urban decay. world building that is so indescribably far from the world i know but still with names i recognise (this one really tickles me) and gritty forbidden sci-fi creative sex? i didn’t realise i enjoyed that until reading this i’ll be honest. i’m looking forward to finishing both the book and tv series.

my 2 star reads.

why do you dance when you walk by abdourahman a. weberi.

a little novel i read for my reading africa challenge. something i started in 2025 and have continued into this year. this was djibouti’s selection and while i thought the prose was thoughtful and interesting— told like a bedtime story for a future daughter. melancholic in the way that a lot of african literature tends to be i found it also made me uncomfortable. mainly because of the authors description of women.

interesting, i know. not even seconds ago i finished talking about a book where the description of women was perhaps not sexual with intent but became it and while i recognised how jarring it was it didn’t make me uncomfortable but instead amused me. so what’s the problem? what’s the difference?

let’s unpack it. our main character who is telling the story who is said to be based on the author himself has a beautiful and charming wife. and that is all we ever know about her. not her interests, not what she does. maybe this could be put down to the fact the story is not about her but his life and the struggles he went through as a sickly disabled child.

if it was just his wife i’d put it down to this and continue with my day. but it’s not just her i have a problem with. the only other woman he has somewhat romantic feelings for is spoken about in more detail. probably because of how often they were together, she was the house help while he was growing up and she lived a life of misery and suffering— as it’s described.

as it’s only ever described.

i do find it slightly unsettling that while in town when our unnamed narrator spots her walking from the market he describes a thought that comes to him. he wishes he was an artist so he could create a sculpture of her with a bucket of water in one hand, a baby on her back and firewood on her head. this woman he once loved, who once was the object of all his childish desires, immortalised as what she suffered under: service.

maybe this one got to me on a more personal level because these are people i could know. while it is harder to see myself in a cyber-futuristic exploration of the limitations of human society it didn’t matter as much to me that takeshi kovacz is clearly a boobs guy because all the women had substance which isn’t the case here.

i do think a lot of this comes from the relationship he has with his mother (who is present but not a presence in his life) his grandmother (who told him stories but also shamed him) and the other girls from school. he’s disabled and mocked for it almost at every corner. does it make the sting go away any less to remind myself of this? slightly? yes and no.

it’s tricky. the women are not the central characters but even his wife who he loves and says his daughter should look up to is nothing more than her appearance to him and the fact that she is the mother of his child. the girl he loved (ish) in his youth is nothing more than a place to springboard his desires onto. nothing but the service she provides. the one thing that is not saving either of these women (even his daughter) is the fact that they’re women.

despite this, i am grateful to read about djibouti. the markets, the slips of french, his perspective about being disabled and a sickly child. so sick that it changed his life forever and how poetry and novels guided him through grief. despite it all it’s still a perspective i have never come across before one that i’m grateful i got to read and experince despite my thoughts about the writing.

her last breath by linda castillo (book five in the kate burkholder series.)

my guilty pleasure. and i mean guilty. it’s partly the reason why i’ll never rate it more than two stars. i don’t think the books are good but i’m hooked. i don’t know what attracts me to this book so much? what is it about an amish woman with a troubled dark past who gave up on everything she ever knew to lead a life of her own (as the chief of police in a small town in ohio) that is so intriguing to me?

this book and the last one “gone missing” have made me laugh outloud the most because it really is police propaganda. it’s a very very telling novel of its time, a woman who has assumed an identity outside of womanhood to survive. she mentioned in previous books that there is no way she can be a “woman” because she won’t be taken seriously (and of course by woman we are talking about those feminine traits of being “soft” and “sensitive”) she takes pride in being rough around the edges, swearing like a sailor and keeping everyone at arms length— until she meets tomas-eddy.

i love a slow burn okay! fuck it sue meeeeee.

their relationship is… I dont know. let me not be in white peoples business.

but but but i can’t leave this without mentioning how it makes me shake my head in dismay (truly. i’m doing it right now) the way we are five books in and kate is unrelenting on the way she speaks about other women who are more feminine then her specifically in her own force with mona. who IS afforded womanhood but clearly because she never backs down never what!!!! she shows up in her colourful skirts, hair always laid, chews and blows bubbles on her pink bubblegum has a soft almost flirtatious lilt to her voie.

kate never thinks mona is ready to progress outside of being a glorified receptionist but i just know the moment she does she’ll find a way to slip in a comment about mona’s way of dressing and excitable personality. this bothers me. i will still finish this whole series guys.

february hopefuls!

finna by nino capri (book one in the litenverse series)

in a bookstore in bethnal green that does a shelf of second hand books (PWYC btw!) found a hilarious little sci fi dytopia sandwiched between two novels i already read which felt like a sign, then when i read the blurb and found out it’s queer i knew i had to get it. also! the other main character is a nonbinary black queer with adhd and a troubled past. we are soooo up.

mouths of rain an anthology of black lesbian thought edited by briona simone jones.

i have been reading this book since christmas of 2024. leave me alone. i’m slow when it comes to anthology’s especially essay collections but i fucking loveeee this one. allll these poems and essays and thoughts and prayers from black lesbians to black lesbians (and beyond) i’m so grateful i get to exist at a time like this. so many offerings on how to survive the world we live in in the body we inhabit with our desires and our bonds and our communities.

katabasis by rf. kuang.

i only wanna read this because i hate being left out of any bookish conversation especially when it’s an author i’ve not just read before but i’ve devoured!

also does anyone else ever feel obligated to read all the books an author published after reading more than four by them? what is this called? because i have this with rf kuang though i know i won’t enjoy yellowface so i just haven’t read it and probably won’t.