January 2026 reads

January Reading

The Qur'an - translated by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem

Les Enfants Terribles - Jean Cocteau

You Are Awesome - Matthew Syed

 The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

Malone Dies  - Samuel Beckett 

 

The Qur'an 

This translation of The Qur'an was something I found in a charity shop (checks calendars) yeah some while back, then it sat on the shelves for quite a while in advance of my finally picking it up at the back end of 2025. While I do not profess to any particular faith (I was brought up Christian, left to my own decisions early, and have enjoyed much doubt, study of literature of all kinds, and problems with literalism, since), I started The Qur'an with an open mind and a desire to try to understand it better. 

 

I'm glad I've read it. It was sprinkled throughout with intriguing moments of poetry, which had me harbouring a wish to have enough of a grasp of Arabic to get more out of the original words. This seems quite central a point: that the book is, explicitly, God communicating in Arabic, at a specific point in history, and as part of a canon of works doing the same thing in different situations (as recorded and studied by the Peoples of the Book).  As a modern English speaking human, there are a number of aspects that are difficult to reconcile. However, the injunction to "Be mindful of God" is a recurring feature of human thought, and an appropriate summary of the intent of the text.

 

Les Enfants Terribles

Overlapping with The Qur'an, I started into Les Enfants Terribles. I suppose I might have been able to find a more "Modern" text to juxtapose with the desert certainties of the former,  but the snowbound 1929 avant-garde poésie of Jean Cocteau would take some beating. Also of its time, yet occupying a similar liminal space. Some of the descriptive moments communicated a (melo)dramatic sense of the cosmos that was quite appealing, though I also got the sense that reading it as a teen it might have had a more seismic impact. I've not read any other Cocteau, or seen any of the films, which it occurred to me was a bit of lacuna, to be added to the list of Things To Check Out.

 

 

You Are Awesome

Matthew Syed's book is basically a growth mindset/Carol Dweck primer for young people. One of the kids had read it and got a lot out of it, so I enjoyed a riffle through it to engage with that. It covers ideas like marginal gains and positive self-belief, and is an easy read. 

 The New York Trilogy

Well, this was a game changer. 

Like Cocteau, I had not read any Paul Auster before. This came to me via a friend who had, as I recall, made some off-hand comment about it being something I'd be into. So, I popped it on the shelf and there it sat, full of promise, something I might be into. Sure enough, several years later in December 2025, J read it and handed it to me with a raised eyebrow and a "Well. You're going to have to read this." Finally following which, I dived in and raced through the three stories in a few days of open-mouthed excitement. 

 

It was one of those books where by the end of the second section I was flipping through the front pages looking for the list of whatever else I needed to get my hands on. Thinking about finding him on trips to the library, charity shops, even contemplating going into actual book shops. As well as manifesting an urge to dive deep into the catalogue, it also provided a reminder that I love those worlds of words and writing, characters, authors, notebooks, the published and unpublished, and the suspect overlays between them.

 

Quite enjoyed it, then!

 

Into February

  

January is rounded off with Malone Dies, which as I type I am about one-third from the end of, or two-thirds from the beginning, depending on which way I pick up the book. Like Cocteau and Auster, there is a Beckett-shaped gap in my reading. Back in time I read Godot, sans dire, and I was lucky enough to see John Hurt in Krapp's Last Tape, part of a Beckett Centenary Festival at the Barbican in London, 2006. Which I note with some alarm was 20 years ago now. Time flies. Beckett's prose is funny in a way that suits wintry nights, and the mood of age inexorably creeping up behind hefting a leather sap.  

 

 

 

 

Paper Towns

 (Read this one in March 2025)

Another bit of a "quick read", picked up I think from a supermarket charity shelf. I didn't realise John Green was the Fault In Our Stars John Green until talking about it after, and I haven't read that so won't say anything else about it.

My initial note (four or five pages in) was "first person American quirky, Wes Anderson vibes". By this I mean earlier Wes Anderson, recognisably Americana-ish, Salinger eccentrics vibes. Talky high schoolers in unusual situations? John Hughes another flavor note.

 

The book is from 2008 and does a lot of pre-ubiquitous-internet internet references, that sort of date it and sort of create a weird nostalgia snare: combined with the bookish self-consciousness of the rest of the novel, it evokes a now possibly wholly-dissolved membrane between digital mediation and analogue solidity, which perhaps is me retrofitting an ill-considered cultural notional something more to the book than might have been intended.

 

As the book itself seems to suggest, maybe now we're processing things differently (he drafted into a phone) we lack something that used to be offered by well-thumbed page corners turned down, highlighted connections and margin notes. Stuff literally hidden in doorways. Maybe those memories are as simultaneously there-and-not-there as the title conceit.

As a novel, though, it's deeply novelish - a manic pixie American dream girl (Margo) is quest object for the massively square Quentin, in a slightly old-fashioned (even for 2008) follow-the-clues road trip romance, complete with tokenistic support ensemble (also: too much dialogue). It seemed particularly frustrating to have a support ensemble that then just evaporates for the denouement, even as the now squarer-than-square narrator foregrounds them, and the "real" life they represent, as part of his justification for avoiding any sort of commitment to the joyful abandon signified by Margo.

Thusly, the Narrator wades squarely through Whitman, Woody Guthrie and various modes of wanderlust 'til he finally recognises his shadowy anima... and walks away from it? An apparent acceptance of enduring alienation, from true-but-too-eccentric love, or self, or something, seems yet another dumb decision made with all the dumb, square certainties of youth. 

 

Which, of course, resonated. Probably I would have loved this in my late teens/early 20s, though would even then have compared it unfavourably to early Douglas Coupland. 

 

What I got most from it now was a reminder of what it was like to find depth and power in books, music, and those cross-references that mattered more than everything else when that age, in that age.