Monthly Reading Review: January 2025

Recommended books and articles from the past month.

Feb 09, 2025

Dear friends,

I am delighted to share my next Monthly Reading Review, covering the best books and articles I’ve read over the past month. Scroll down to read my reviews of Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham, and The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: An Extraordinary Journey Through History’s Greatest Treasures — plus some must-read articles from writers I love!

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney’s spellbinding new novel, Intermezzo, tells the story of two brothers grieving the loss of their father, albeit in very different ways. The eldest, Peter, is a successful lawyer in his thirties, secretly self-medicating with drugs and alcohol while trying to balance relationships with multiple women. His younger brother, Ivan, is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player — a genius, in many ways — who falls in love with Margaret, an older divorcee with a complicated past. With braces still on his teeth, Ivan counts himself as “a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems,” who finds that he is “unsuited” to normal social life. Purposeful and searching, he finds peace in the “order” of chess, which he likens to a divine order — “so deep and beautiful.” On the surface, Ivan’s older brother Peter seems like his polar opposite — for him, “social systems are never confusing,” says Ivan — though they have far more in common than they think.

As in all of her novels, Rooney uses Intermezzo as a vehicle to explore life’s most pressing questions: Is it order or chaos that mirrors the divine? What is the relationship between love and vanity? And should the “long, terrible intermission” of grief be kept separate or shared? True to form, Rooney doesn’t arrive at answers, at least not clear ones. Still, her asking offers the reader great comfort.

I wouldn’t say I necessarily enjoyed Intermezzo as much as Rooney’s other novels, yet there is something about all of her books that makes them impossible to put down. With her pitch-perfect imagery and dialogue, she invites the reader in, stripping things down in a way that feels accessible yet enthralling. Her dialectic heft is paired with an almost childlike earnestness and humility — a combination that manages to provoke the mind while touching the heart, often within the span of a single page.

And There Was Light by Jon Meacham

In the more than 150 years since his assassination, Abraham Lincoln has been remembered as many things: A grandfatherly saint; a master of language; a shrewd political creature; an imperious tyrant; and a secular savior. In his latest book, And There Was Light, Jon Meacham casts these molds aside, taking us on a journey of Lincoln’s intellectual and spiritual evolution while humanizing him as an imperfect man who sought to do right. As a young adult raised on the American frontier, Lincoln memorized the Bible, though he thought of God as a remote force, uninvolved in human affairs. From an early age, slavery filled him with “unconquerable hate,” yet he struggled to do anything about it, especially as he entered the political arena.

As he grew older, nevertheless, Lincoln grew more theologically curious, which buttressed his moral resolve. As president, he listened to thinkers like Frederick Douglass and Theodore Parker while regularly meeting with ministers who professed the existence of “a divinely charged and ultimately merciful and just creation.” Even as Lincoln grappled with the Calvinist notion that everything was foreordained — and thus beyond our control — Meacham paints him as “one of history’s greatest human agents,” suggesting that “he believed that history could be bent and justice achieved.” Through it all, Meacham argues that Lincoln’s true greatness came not from his infallibility, but rather from his steadfast commitment to his moral convictions under extraordinarily difficult circumstances — circumstances that nearly destroyed his country and eventually took his life.

Book club questions:

In And There Was Light, Jon Meacham challenges Lincoln’s early belief in divine predestination and the powerlessness of individuals. “Even if actions, choices, and decisions were foreordained,” Meacham writes, “the individual was still acting, choosing, and deciding. If one did not believe that — did not believe in the power of conscience to conduct oneself in a certain way over and against another way — then one was hardly likely to run life’s great race with the energy that Abraham Lincoln did. One would not, in all likelihood, run at all, for why bother?” What does Lincoln’s life suggest about human agency? How much of our existence do you believe comes down to individual choices?
Meacham makes clear that people on opposing sides of the Civil War used Christianity as a means of advancing their respective causes: “Abolitionists and anti-slavery advocates invoked the spirit of a loving God and the common humanity of all creatures,” he tells us, while “slave owners and their allies advanced biblical arguments designed to prove that slavery was divinely ordained.” Do you think we are facing a modern-day version of this dynamic? If so, how do you think it can be overcome?
Toward the end of the Civil War, Massachusetts Congressman Thaddeus Stevens called Lincoln the “purest man in America.” Certainly, Lincoln was a person perfectly suited for the time in which he found himself — a moral pragmatist who valued compromise while still staying true to his convictions. Do you think this sort of combination is still possible today?

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World:

In The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, historian Bettany Hughes takes the reader on a captivating journey across the Mediterranean, visiting the sites of seven architectural feats that still have a hold on our imaginations. She begins with the oldest of the seven wonders — The Great Pyramid of Giza, built over 4,500 years ago and (ironically) the only one to survive — before taking us to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (691-550 BCE), which some say never existed. From there, we go to my personal favorite, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (550 BCE) — a sanctuary for women and asylum seekers, as well as a place of worship for the fabled Amazons. Moving to the Greek mainland, we find the Statue of Zeus at Olympia (432 BCE), thundering in ivory and gold, before hopping over to the Western coast of Turkey, where we encounter the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (351 BCE). Fittingly, we end with two of the most famous of the wonders: The bronze-coated Colossus of Rhodes (302 BCE), lording over “the Switzerland of the Mediterranean” at 108 feet high, and Egypt’s Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria (297 BCE), where scholars like Euclid, Galen, and Hypatia made discoveries that we are still talking about today.

What I found most thrilling about Hughes’s narrative was not necessarily the size or scale of the seven wonders, but rather their interconnectedness. An invisible string seems to link the wonders to each other and to our present, as evidenced by structures like the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty and modern-day words and phrases like “mausoleum,” “colossal,” and “Herostratic fame.” Centuries have passed, and still we find ourselves drawn to and shaped by these wonders, even as we might struggle to relate to other aspects of the ancient world.

Hughes tells us that Herodotus, the so-called “Father of History,” wrote so that “human achievement could be spared the ravages of time.” So too does her book stand as a testament to the enduring relevance of the past — to the still awe-inspiring wonders that should be remembered, treasured, and preserved.

Must-Read Articles

How Babies Teach Us to Be Human by Margaret Renkl (The New York Times)
Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story by Katy Waldman (The New Yorker)
The Isolation of Intensive Parenting by Stephanie H. Murray (The Atlantic)
Sarah McNally’s Book Club by Matthew Schneier (New York Magazine)
A Motherhood Memoir with No Filter by Erica Schwiegershausen (The Cut)
The Cruel Kids’ Table by Brooke Colyar (Intelligencer)
How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking by Manvir Singh (The New Yorker)