Reading Recap: January 2026
Tour My Bookshelves • Bible Marathon • Hadestown
I set aside one post per month to highlight my reading life. Books of Titans is a reading project aimed at seeking the ancient paths by reading The Immortal Books by 200 authors chronologically over the next 15 40 years. Thank you for following my journey.
Tour My Bookshelves
“Inside a 40-Year Project to Read Every Great Book”
Timothy Kenny has a fascinating YouTube channel where he conducts hours-long tours of reader’s personal libraries. Timothy reached out last year and asked if I’d like to do a tour of my bookshelves. I thought it would be a lot of fun and so we recorded a number of sessions that ended up totaling 5+ hours. If you are interested in how I organize my library and how that closely ties to this reading project, check out this video. I talk about the origins of Books of Titans, individual books along the way, and even share access to my backup book closet!
January 2026 Reading Recap / February Reading Plan
Bible Read-Through • Flannery O’Connor • Nikolai Gogol
This is my 5th year starting the year reading straight through the Bible. It usually takes between 70 and 110 hours and I try to complete it between January and February. I got off to a slow start but have been picking up the pace lately.
During January of this year, I read The Intertextual Tanakh (The Five Books of Moses and The Former Prophets) and have nearly completed The Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the 12 Minor Prophets).
After that, I’ll continue with the Bibliotheca versions of The Writings, The Apocrypha, and The New Testament. My goal is to finish by the end of February. To do so, I’ll need to average 67 pages of reading per day until February 28th.
The Gogol book is for a February 2nd meeting of the Short Great Books reading group where we’ll be discussing Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat. That is the only story I’ll be reading from the full collected tales.
I decided to use my weekly podcast episodes to share what I’ve been thinking about and what has stood out as I’ve been reading through the Bible this year. You can listen to those episodes here:
During January, I also read A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor. This was for the Short Great Books reading group I lead on a monthly basis. That was quite a story! The discussion we had for the reading group was so good. It always amazes me how we experience books in vastly different ways. I always learn so much from the other book club participants.
Bookish Adventures
In some fun book-related news, my daughter is in a theater group that will be performing the musical Hadestown and I’m going to be playing violin in the band. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack non-stop for the past few months in preparation. Hadestown follows some famous stories from Greek Mythology, so I’ve been totally geeking out. It’s about Orpheus and Eurydice & Hades and Persephone. The music has an awesome New Orleans jazz, blues, and folk feel and I can’t wait for the performances. If you live in Nashville, come see it!