shelf dispatch #33: notes on a great reading month

+ trad wives take over fiction, my new favorite classic & more

The Stepford Wives (2004)

Welcome to Shelf Dispatch, a monthly report on my reading life. If you opened this in your inbox, I highly recommend reading it here instead :)

I’m playing around with the letter’s structure again this month, so please bear with me, unless you like it. If you like it, let me know!

🪷 Out there

On My Radar: New books coming out this month + a quick look at the trad wife lit microtrend

🪷 On my shelves

What I Read Last Month: A roundup of my month in books, reviewed + thoughts on why I read more than usual in January and how I intend to keep it up

On My TBR: Books I’m hoping to read this month

On My Radar

Books coming out in February

In the contemporary fiction aisle I only have eyes for Cleaner, a debut following a young artist returned to her childhood home with a host of degrees and no money, no prospects! She finally lands a job as a cleaner for a gallery, where she meets another aspiring artist—Isabella—and they begin a passionate affair. Isabella sneaks the cleaner into her life by hiring her to scrub the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, but when Isabella leaves the apartment one day and doesn’t come back, the cleaner is left to decide whether to go back to her old life, or stay and step into Isabella’s.

I’ve found that some of the satisfaction I find in cleaning and decluttering can also be felt when I read about someone else cleaning and decluttering, which is just a great thing all around because it means I can read instead of actually getting my apartment in order. That, and I still—no matter how many of them come my way—can’t resist a messy tale of obsession.

If a short story collection is just what the doctor ordered, twins!, I’ve been enjoying my fair share of short fiction too. I loved Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix a few years ago, and I want to read more of her work this year, so I might pick up Brawler soon. Crossing my fingers that Libro.fm release the audiobook this month, if they haven’t already.

This month’s horror section is a delight thanks to She Made Herself a Monster, a heady, dark-hued Gothic gem of a debut set in nineteenth-century Bulgaria where a self-proclaimed vampire slayer—actually, a traveling con artist—joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons. I couldn’t ask for more.

If you’re starving for some food-centered fiction, consider Callie Kazumi’s Greedy, a deliciously dark thriller set in remote Japan where a desperate gambling addict masquerades as the private chef to a reclusive billionaire with deadly taste. I have a feeling things will turn pretty gross at some point, but this blurb makes my mouth water every time. It’s been said this is perfect for fans of Parasite and The Menu, both films I very much enjoyed.

Then there’s Evil Genius, following Celia, a nineteen-year-old wife in the 1970s whose contentment with her life is shattered when a woman she knows is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. Before she knows it, her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life, and Celia and her controlling husband are set on a deadly collision course.

I don’t know why—might’ve been a review I read somewhere, might be the cover or the domestic theme both novels share—but this book is giving me Motherthing vibes, which I read and enjoyed in 2024. I’m expecting this new release to be entertaining, fast paced and darkly funny. Throw in a little bit of gore and I’ll be a happy camper.

🔍 I spy with my little eye: The year of the trad wife thriller

When 4th Estate reached out a few months ago to send me an advanced copy of Yesteryear (thanks 4th Estate!), a novel that follows a trad-wife-influencer who suddenly wakes up in the brutal reality of 1805, my first thoughts were 1. sounds fab 2. of course trad wife influencers have made it to fiction and 3. is this going to become a thing?

Of course it became a thing. I’ve since spotted two more trad wife fiction releases coming out this year—Saratoga Shaefer’s Trad Wife (out this month, on February 10) follows an influencer who allows a demonic creature to impregnate her, while Sarah Langan’s Trad Wife (out May 14) sees a journalist find real horrors at a trad wive’s idyllic farm—and I’m willing to bet my pinky finger we’re about to see more trad wifery in bookstores this year.

In hindsight, it was inevitable that a phenomenon this polarizing would make its way into fiction sooner or later. As a reader, it feels a little past its time—I was watching video essays on ballerina farm three years ago, and haven’t since—and I could see the concept getting old pretty quickly. But a book takes a lot longer to write and publish than a substack think piece (thank god), so I’m curious to see how these will be received this year, both by the book-obsessed bubble I live in and the wider market, and whether more trad wife lit will follow suit.

Speaking for myself, I’m very excited to read Yesteryear—I’ll probably pick it up in March or April—but I have a feeling one trad wife thriller will be more than enough.

💬 Question for the comments section: Trad wife lit, yay or nay?

What I Read Last Month

I read an average of three books a month, but I managed to finish a whopping six in January, and start another two. As a slow reader, I can’t remember the last time I read this many books in a month! I’ll share my reviews first, then tell you how I managed to read more than usual these past few weeks, and how I intend to keep the momentum going.

A quick roundup of my January in books

Rebecca: Rebecca was meant to be my last book of 2025, but I barely touched my copy in December, and I’m glad it ended up being more of a January read for me because I think it set the tone for the rest of my month.

I struggled with those first 150 pages for most of December. I found Maurier’s writing arresting from the get go, but it took me a while to fully get into the book because the narrative moves quite slowly at first—the narrator is in no rush to take you anywhere, focusing instead on painting the book’s atmosphere—and with me being too busy to sit down and read during the holidays, the twenty minutes a day I could spare it weren't really cutting it.

I’ve since learned that many books I might’ve considered a miss in the past could’ve potentially worked for me, had they been approached the right way. There’s books you could (and should) read in one sitting. There’s books you have to get through slowly, over the course of a month or a year. And then there’s books like Rebecca, that sit somewhere in between: they can’t be rushed, they demand that you take your time, but ideally you want to be reading them front to back over a holiday or a quiet weekend in. This book feels like a bubble, so it’s best read if you’re in some kind of bubble yourself, and can give it your undivided attention.

Once I was back home from the holidays, I had a few days to sit down and fully enjoy it and that’s when it all picked up. And boy, does it pick up! Those last 100 pages held me hostage the way not many books have. I couldn’t stop reading, I couldn’t look away, and that truly almost never happens.

It’s not the loudest of books, plot-wise, but it doesn’t need all the bells and whistles when it does suspense—so unsettling, so unnerving—so perfectly. If you’re trying to write suspense, Rebecca is a must-read. It became a new favorite classic the moment I finished it.

Homesick for Another World: I don’t read short story collections often, but I make a point of reading one with my book club every January because we did it quite arbitrarily for the first time in 2023 and something about the experience just felt very right to me. It has since become a little ritual of mine to read short fiction in the new year, and this year we chose Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World, which I’d heard great things about. I’d read a few Moshfegh novels by then (I’m currently reading Eileen), so I was already familiar with her writing.

Book club wise, we’ve been a mixed bag of opinions on this one, but I personally liked it quite a lot. Alienation was a big theme throughout (and across Moshfegh’s work as a whole, I’d say), and although the narrators’ voices blended together somewhat, I’ve found that a certain homogeneity in tone works well for me when it comes to short fiction.

As it usually happens with my favorite short story collections, I finished this one feeling quite lost, but then it lingered, it stewed in the back of my mind for weeks. The vague memory of the collection grew on me, and now snippets from some of the stories drift back to me every now and again. I don’t know if this is how you digest your short stories too, but it’s the only way I know to tell whether a collection was successful in my book.

My favorite stories were Mr Wu, No Place for Good People, Slumming, Nothing Ever Happens Here, The Beach Boy, and The Surrogate.

Half His Age: I said last month that I was curious to read this since Jennette McCurdy’s memoir was a big hit (I haven’t read it yet but it’s on my list), so when I saw this as an audiobook on Libro.Fm, I decided to give it a shot.

I found it… perfectly entertaining, but not necessarily anything I haven’t seen before. The lonely female protagonist, the commentary on class, social media and consumerism, the deeply disturbing relationship with a teacher—it’s all been done before.

And yet, as someone with no qualms about DNFing audiobooks after the first five minutes, I made my way through this one in about three days. I never even considered DNFing it; the short chapters and fast pacing contributed to a propulsive, addictive read, which I enjoyed despite my familiarity with its themes.

This propulsive quality isn’t necessarily something I expect to find in each and every one of my reads, but I always appreciate it when I come across it, because I imagine it’s extremely difficult to do. Whether you’re writing literary fiction or non-fiction, sci-fi or romance, the ability to keep your readers engaged from beginning to end is, I believe, severely underestimated, yet seems like an extraordinary talent to me. If you have it, my hat’s off to you and please teach me your ways.

Eloise: If you haven’t heard of Eloise before, she’s a six-year-old girl who lives at the Plaza Hotel and happens to be a charming little menace—think pouring a pitcher of water down the mail chute, meddling with event planning, “skibbling” down hotel corridors with a stick scratching each wall until all guests come out to watch, etc. The character was created in the 1950s by Kay Thompson (who also happens to play Maggie Prescott, the fabulous fashion editor who sings Think Pink! in Funny Face) and was a big part of my childhood, since I grew up watching the Me, Eloise animated series on tv. But only this past holiday season did I dive into both live-action movies (Eloise at the Plaza and Eloise at Christmastime), which are ridiculously similar to one another but a delight to watch all the same, and found so much joy in watching them that I decided to buy the first Eloise book.

It’s a beautifully illustrated little book meant to delight children and adults alike, and adding it to my monthly roundup feels a little like cheating, since I read it in less than an hour. But hey, a book is a book, and if nothing else, let this be a reminder for you to read children’s books more often, and gift them to your adult loved ones too. We all need an extra dose of fun and whimsy every once in a while.

Pages from Eloise, written by Kay Thompson and illustrated by Hilary Knight

We Love You, Bunny: The highly anticipated prequel/sequel to Bunny was on my list the moment it came out last year, and I finally picked it up this month. I’m a big fan of the novel; I loved it the first time I read it, and enjoyed it even more on reread. So I was frankly terrified to pick this up: it’s huge, for one, and I wasn’t sure whether a second book was something I even wanted as a reader. Bunny is the kind of novel that leaves you with a ton of questions, and while I know many fans finished it wanting to learn more, I was quite happy with the reddit theories I was left with.

I will preface this mini review by saying that reading this book, and this review, is only really worth your time if you have read and enjoyed Bunny, and are interested in reading its sequel. We Love You, Bunny can’t, in my opinion, be read as a standalone, or even before Bunny, since it relies heavily on information from the first book.

The book is broken into five parts, jumping between the bunnies’ POVs and those of other characters as they tell Bunny’s protagonist Samantha what really happened that fateful year at Warren University. We learn more about the bunnies’ backgrounds, their motivations, and the mechanics of, well, bringing one’s darlings to life. The bunnies’ collective saccharine voice returns, as does Mona Awad’s signature dark humor (which I love) along with many of the characters we get to know in the first book.

I found We Love You, Bunny too slow-moving—I wish it had been a hundred pages shorter—and a little repetitive too, which was perhaps inevitable, giving its initial intention to retell a story. But while the narrative begins with the bunnies’ POVs as they look back on their past, it then moves on to a brand new character. I was relieved by this at first (I didn’t really want to read Bunny all over again), but the novelty wore off after a while, and I never truly connected with this new character. Their story never really took off on its own, perhaps because it seemed to be a bit lost between the other POVs, and in the back of my mind I was still expecting Samantha to return somehow, and for her story to be the main focus.

In the end, I don’t think there really was a way for this book to win me over; it seemed to stand somewhere between a retelling and a brand new story, and that lack of commitment left me feeling unfulfilled when I finished it. I feel like it was a weird space for the book to be in, because it doesn’t do enough to work as a standalone, and it didn’t add much to my personal experience of the first book.

That being said, you can tell Mona Awad wrote this with a great deal of love for her fans, many of whom loved and appreciated this second installment the way it was meant to. If you can’t wait to learn more about the bunnies and that fateful year at Warren, then We Love You, Bunny is a must-read.

I Could Be Famous: My second audiobook of the month, I Could Be Famous is a short story collection following ten women and one male superstar as they pursue fame, adoration and other deeply human desires. I found it fun and quite solid overall, though there were some moments where the edginess felt perhaps a little performative (then again, performance was one of the main themes).

I really liked how the stories were interconnected and inhabited this little universe of their own, and it was fun to see the male superstar do his cameo in multiple stories. There’s a ton of Zac Efron references too, which, as someone who wore his photo in a heart-shaped locket back in middle school, I have no choice but to respect.

How I read more in January

Looking back now at my reading month, I can see that I didn’t necessarily read faster in January; I just found ways to add more reading time to my day.

🎧 Audiobooks

I have audiobooks to thank for a great reading month. Although I’d listened to audiobooks before, they never really stuck as a permanent fixture in my life, since I turned to them only occasionally—on my walk to a cafe or the gym, while doing laundry, etc. This month, though, I realized that the key, for me, was to make them a part of my daily routine by listening while doing the same task every day.

As a result, I found out I really enjoy listening to audiobooks while I’m cooking. I usually use that time to listen to youtube videos or podcasts, so it was a pretty smooth transition. This helped me establish it as a consistent habit, and it’s worked especially well with the short story collection, since there was that natural break between stories.

🛋️ E-reading in Bed

For most of my life, bedtime was prime reading time. But over the last couple of years, as I started reading more in the mornings, I got into the habit of using bedtime to rewatch my favorite tv shows. This was due to a couple of reasons—I don’t really watch much tv during the day, and having your light turned on to read isn’t great if someone is sleeping next to you—but the result was a noticeable decline in the quality of my sleep.

So late last year, I made a deal with myself: I could watch one episode of any show in bed, but after that it was time for my e-reader. I hadn’t used my e-reader in years, but now it’s back and it’s been perfect for bedtime because it’s easy to handle and I can use it in the dark. Plus, I’m always asleep in no time.

& Some General Tips

• Reading at the same time every day, and really turning it into a routine, helps me immensely. There was a period last year when I didn’t really set out a specific time of my day to read and that landed me in an ugly slump.

• Mixing genres, themes, and book lengths helps too. I try to do a mix of long and short books on my TBR every month, because it makes long books feel a little less daunting.

On My TBR

The books I’m excited to (hopefully? No promises) read this month

Enter Ghost: Litulla Book Club’s February pick, Enter Ghost follows actress Sonia Nasir as she returns to Haifa and joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Our selection of February picks was inspired by the theater and stage life, and I’m so glad Enter Ghost won because it sounds superb. I can’t wait to start this one.

The Girls of Slender Means: A short option (and one that’s been on my shelves for too long) amid longer reads, in case I need something quick.

Greedy: February is pub month for Greedy, and since I’m trying to read my ARCs when they come out I’ll be definitely picking this one up!

Gideon the Ninth: You know, I’ve been craving some good fun fantasy for a while, and Gideon was winking at me from the shelves. It’s a bit of a wild card in this stack, which only makes me more excited to read it.

A quick note on affiliate links

No affiliate links have been used above. However, if you want to support my work by using them, you can use my Libro.fm link for audiobooks and, if you’re purchasing books in Portugal, my WOOK affiliate link. Affiliate links are a way to support your favorite creatives, and the companies they choose to endorse, free of charge. Thank you!