January Book Roundup
Adam's Notes for January 28, 2026
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Hey, thought I’d try putting the newsletter out a day early this week, see if it works in my favour or not. Most of my reading lately has been research, so I thought I’d share with you these novels from 2025 that I didn’t get around to writing about. There’s a CanLit debut, an underrated English writer’s sophomore effort, two instalments of a Scandinavian septology, a new-to-me historical fiction series, and a book about taking public transit. Let’s go.
Honeydew by Ben Zalkind
Radiant Press, 2025; 240 pages.
Renegade Rose Gold takes a bunch of new activists under her wing as she goes about again Moses Honeydew, an oligarch and celebrity CEO who, after having already conquered space, now wants to drill through the Earth’s crust. The tone is madcap and satirical, I saw one review that suggested this is “Pynchon meets Wodehouse.” Somehow I still haven’t read Pynchon so I guess I can’t say. The surveillance state is so all-powerful in Honeydew that the protagonists have trouble acting to the point that they kind of lose agency—I think this is a legitimate problem that genre fiction in particular is going to have to figure out at some point (not to mention the rest of us who have to live in this dystopian nightmare), so props for tackling it.
Ultimately I found this debut novel to be flawed but charming. Still, I hope Zalkind keeps at it, and I look forward to reading whatever he publishes next.
Joshua Spassky by Gwendoline Riley
Vintage Digital, 2013; 176 pages.
A young woman from Manchester falls for an American playwright, and visits him in Asheville, North Carolina. They’re both alcoholics, though she’s been sober for a year whereas he’s at the point where he’s always sweating uncontrollably. They mostly spend their time in bed, having pre- and post-coital discussions. She speaks in very cutesy language that hasn’t aged well. A lot of navel gazing. Reminds me of the way people would talk when they were being slightly flirty on the pre-social media internet, and it’s sickening because the subtext of everything is just ‘look at me!’ Her observations on America come off as stuff the author might have recorded in a travel diary but don’t really add anything to the novel, just sort of decorative interludes. There’s stuff on her parents dying and her friend Jeane who works in a grimy Manchester bar, but these end up not feeling like much.
Second novel syndrome, although I think this is actually the author’s third. I really did like her debut, Cold Water, about a barfly, and her recent novel My Phantoms. So I’m not giving up on Riley just yet. There was one fascinating part in this one, where she describes the corpse of F. Scott Fitzgerald when it was dug up thirty years after his death to be reinterred with Zelda (I guess they both died in Asheville).
A nice line on this novel that I happened to read in The Guardian: “In this, it is not Fitzgerald who she most recalls but that other great chronicler of the disillusioned and drunk, Jean Rhys. Like Rhys, her heroines struggle through life, defeated yet brave; like Rhys, even her most optimistic moments are tinged with a pessimism about the sheer weight of life; and most of all, like Rhys, Riley is aware that a book doesn't have to be long to say a great deal.”
So yeah, definitely check out Gwendoline Riley if you haven’t, but start somewhere else.
No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus by Lauren Elkin
Semiotext(e), 2021; 112 pages.
I’ve always loved riding the bus. It feels great to zone out and watch a city pass by.
People talked this book up so much I thought it would be special, but the humour, which is the best part, is about equal to what you’d find from a social media gimmick account circa 2015, which is maybe what this book should’ve been.
City of Vengeance by D.V. Bishop
Pan MacMillan, 2021; 416 pages.
The first in D. V. Bishop’s Cesare Aldo historical mysteries. From the cover copy: “Florence. Winter, 1536. A prominent Jewish moneylender is murdered in his home, a death with wide implications in a city powered by immense wealth. Cesare Aldo, a former soldier and now an officer of the Renaissance city’s most feared criminal court… uncovers a plot to overthrow the volatile ruler of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici.”
I wasn’t entirely sold on this until maybe around page twenty or so when Aldo’s backstory is alluded to, and it’s said he rode with Giovanni delle Bande Nere. One of my favourite movies is The Profession of Arms, about the death of Giovanni delle Band Nere, and so it was fun to picture Aldo as an extra in that movie, riding around in the snow.
City of Vengeance is a nice blend of history and mystery, and I’ll definitely be checking out more of the series.
Money to Burn and The Devil Book by Asta Olivia Nordenhof
Vintage Digital, 2025; 156 & 128 pages.
The first one is about a fictional bad relationship and its ties to the real fire of the Scandinavian Star, a ferry that caught fire and killed I think hundreds of people. In the second book the narrator says she can’t finish the story, meets a man on a train and goes to London with him just as covid hits, and the story takes a Faustian turn from there. There are five more books to be published in the series, but I don’t think I’ll bother reading them. The second book in particular just didn’t gel for me at all. I’ll stick with my current favourite Scandinavian septology, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume.
More Books
A brilliant comic book and two war stories: Hobtown Mysteries, The Fort Bragg Cartel, and The German Prisoner
10 Things I Learned About the Bronze Age from The Horse, The Wheel, and Language
Journeys to Renaissance Italy… And Yorkshire: Florenzer, Romola, The Throne, Perspective(s), A God in Need of Help, and The Gallows Pole
Two sophisticated novels for adults, and one with dinosaurs: Audition, Good Will Come from the Sea, and Adam & Eve in Paradise
Summer reading roundup: The Midnight Project by Christy Climenhage; Bodies of Summer by Martin Felipe Castagnet; The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht and Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Permafrost by Eva Baltasar and The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zamba
Thank you for featuring Honeydew in your January Roundup, Adam! I'm a big admirer of your critical writing, and it's a privilege to see my book included here. Cheers!