January '26 Reading List
Henry Rollins - Before The Chop III: LA Weekly Articles 2014-2016 (2.13.61, 2017)
Henry Rollins - Body Bag (Creation Press, 1990)
Winter is a good time to read Rollins, although I’m not sure why; I seem to delve back into his output each Christmas, and remain there for a month or two. I must have first encountered his work during the winter season. [After writing this up, I went to check my Reading List records - I read nine books by Rollins near the end of 2020, although I didn’t record the exact dates, it certainly was late-autumn/winter time, and another one in January 2021. That was a deep dive!] Digital versions of Before The Chop III and IV are readily available, but volumes I and II aren’t for sale in the UK, which annoys me as a completist!
Body Bag is a UK reprint of three early books: Two Thirteen Sixty-One, End to End, and Polio Flesh. Together, these were reprinted by Rollins’s publishing company 2.13.61 as High Adventure in the Great Outdoors, which in turn was part of The First Five anthology. But crucially, there are differences from the Body Bag texts: some lines have been dropped, layouts amended, and in part, a few stories completely omitted. I’m guessing a more mature Rollins collating the writing decided to edit out the rougher (or obscener) pieces. It might be interesting to compile a list of the complete differences at some stage.
Joan Didion - Notes To John (4th Estate, 2025)
I completely forgot I had this book, which Geraldine got as a gift for me after I enthused about Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, but when you own hundred of books, you can’t be expected to remember them all (sorry, Geraldine!). This is a posthumous collection of journal entries, addressed to Didion’s late husband, detailing therapy sessions which centred on the alcoholism of their adopted daughter, Quintina. The journal was found after Didion’s death in her study. One gets the impression that perhaps it was never meant for wider publication: reading it felt intrusive and uneasy. The writing itself is solid, but it’s not a book I would ever revisit.
Thomas Heatherwick - Humanise: A Maker’s Guide To Building Our World (Penguin, 2023)
I know nothing about architecture, so this was an impulse buy from Oxfam Books in Holywood. It’s a beautifully designed book with plenty of appealing visuals and photography to accompany the central message, namely that building need to be more individual, more humane in design and appeal, and built to last longer. Construction, demolition, and excavation in the UK generates roughly 62% of the nation’s total waste: no amount of home recycling is going to offset that. So, if you’re going to build, build to last, and build something beautiful, instead of boring concrete and steel cubes, often so flat and sterile. Heatherwick makes some convincing arguments - find out more at https://humanise.org/
Daniel Sluman - Single Window (Nine Arches Press, 2021)
A Christmas gift from Geraldine, a poetry collection detailing the poet and his partner’s life stuck indoors, inhibited by disability and chronic illness. It’s a stark read in places, offset by tenderness and mutual love, and worth your while checking out.
Trudy Gorman - Trust the Damage (Dedalus, 2024)
Another poetry collection exploring illness, this time connecting to poverty and class, from the ever-reliable Irish publisher Dedalus. It’s odd how connections unconsciously appear in one’s reading list: shortly after reading Sluman’s collection, an Instagram message from Trudie prompted me to fit her book into my January reading. And as ever when reading many collections from Dedalus, you’re left thinking, damn, I wish I could write like that.
Matthew Haughton - Bee-Coursing Box (Accents Publishing, 2011)
Basho - lips too chilled (trans. Lucien Stryk, Penguin Classics, 2015)
Rebecca O’Connor - Poems (Wordsworth Trust, 2006)
Again, a book that had slipped my mind: I knew I had We’ll Sing Blackbird by O’Connor on our poetry shelves, but had forgotten about Poems (mostly as it’s a thin volume with no text on its spine and easily hides between bigger, broader books). For a debut collection, it reads as if from the pen of a veteran. The Haughton book was a purchase by Geraldine from the same Oxfam as the Heatherwick book. I was hoping it would be something like Sean Borodale’s Bee Journal, but sadly not: bees featured relatively little. There’s not much else within worth commenting on. The Basho book is a slim black volume in the cheaply available Penguin Classics series. Reading it made me hungry for more, so I went to the shelf to take down The Narrow Road to the Deep North, but it wasn’t there; I’m sure we owned that as some stage. One to add to the wish list: reading books usually leads to discovering more books that demand to be read!