Justify January 2026

I've been looking for an alternative to Amazon's Goodreads for several years. Every time I find a less evil alternative, I'm let down by features, or a lack of community.  At the end of 2025, Valerie Loveland suggested Pagebound. While it's definitely more geared towards cozy romance readers than poetry or graphic novel fans, I do like the site's features, and as long as I don't say anything about not liking particular books in their public forums, their community is pretty supportive and fun.

Last week (so, June 2026), they rolled out a new feature. Like Spotify's Wrapped, they will tell you all the books you've consumed over the period of a month, how many pages per day/hours per day you've read or listened to a book, and other fun stats.

I've decided to take those results and break them down not only by the month but by the week. So, here are the stats, followed by the books I read and most enjoyed in January of 2026.

I read 59 books with an average of 299 pages per day.

January 1st - January 3rd: Dead Man Logan, The Complete Collection

Going back to late 2024, I've been doing a readthrough of every X-Men related book. Every. Hundreds of books, most of them average to bad. Dead Man Logan is about an Mark Millar's "Old Man Logan" version of Wolverine having crossed over into the regular Marvel Universe. He's even older then the older he already was. And in this story, he's dying and needs to get back to his universe/timeline.

I was surprised, given that concept, how much I enjoyed this. This is the third or fourth really solid Edward Brisson X-book.  I loved the sense of adventure, the artwork, and how Brisson is able to get emotional resonance for a character created by Mark Millar.

Other books I enjoyed reading this week: We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson. This is the prelude to a Haunted House. It's a fun horror book. There is, according to members of Pagebound, a surprising twist as to who murdered a family, setting up the events of the book. I did not think this was a mystery. I thought the killer reveal was so obvious that it must be written on the back cover of the book.  I did not think this was intended to be  a mystery at all. It was a really well-written story, though. I have to go back and read more Shirley Jackson, an author I haven't really encountered since high school.

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January 4th - January 10th: House of X/Powers of X

This was not a surprise. When this book was coming out in 2019ish, I was immediately enthralled. I love Jonathan Hickman's writing, and while there was a ton of continuity porn that would probably confuse any new readers, this was precisely the book I wanted to get me back into the X-books when it came out. It's a hard sci-fi reset of the X-corner of the Marvel Universe that retcons a character in a fun way, and then launches the book into the most optimistic a mutant comic has been since the turn of the millennium.

Other books I enjoyed reading: Age of X-Man X-Tremists surprised me. I didn't read the Age of X-Man books when they came out, and that is my error. Most were, at least, good. This one was great. An entertaining alternate universe book with a message, a plot, and a satisfying conclusion.

A book I didn't enjoy reading: Let The Right One In. You know, the child vampire movie from twenty or so years ago.  Well, the author clearly wanted it to be a movie from day one, since this reads like a script with poor attributions. I struggled to finish it, and it didn't even feel rewarding to close the book when I was finished.

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January 11th - 18th: Dawn of X Volume 1

I promise that there isn't going to be an X-book every week. This is just an era of really cool concepts with consistently good writers. For a couple of years in the 2020s, Marvel decided that instead of having you buy X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur, Cable, Wolverine, and whatever other X-books were happening, they were going to streamline them into a single series: Dawn Of X. Here, we have the beginnings of several intertwining storylines across a half dozen books or so. I LOVE collecting the books that way, but Marvel phased it out pretty quickly in order to get back to the status quo. But while it was happening, I cherished each volume, even when they weren't very good. This one was great.

Most of the other books I read this week were X-books that didn't inspire me to love or hate them.

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January 19th - 25th: Raw Shark Texts

This was recommended to me by a long-time writer friend as something akin to House of Leaves. I certainly see why one might relate these books with each other. I absolutely loved the beginning of this book. I would read a couple chapters on e-reader, and then pass it to my partner, who would read those same chapters, and we would talk about how we imagined the story would unfold. The more it unfolded, the less exciting it was, but I enjoyed how it inspired me and my partner to come up with better concepts than the writer had. I would recommend it to fans of weird fiction, with the following caveat: When you start to get annoyed with the book, put it down and pretend it's the end. It never gets better.

Other books I enjoyed reading: Batgirl Beyond Burnside. I lent out some X-books to a friend, and I reached the point where  I didn't have the next books for my readthrough, so I switched gears and started reading Batman books from the Rebirth-era and beyond. Most of them are not good. But this reset of Barbara Gordon's story where she goes to Japan and encounters a childhood friend was really fun and less grim than the usual Gotham books.