January 2026

Hello! Here are some things I enjoyed in January, 2026:

A Shadow Intelligence by Oliver Harris

Elliot Kane is a spy with MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, working undercover in the middle east when he learns that the operation he’s running is done, the paid informants on his side have been burned, and he needs to leave the country ASAP before things get much much worse. Elliot escapes by the skin of his teeth and returns home to England to be debriefed. While dealing with surprisingly antagonistic questioning from his superiors, he discovers a cryptic coded message from his girlfriend Joanna, a fellow spy who typically does analytical work based in the UK but who has disappeared during Elliot’s absence. Joanna has sent Elliot a video of himself in a hotel room in Astana, Kazakhstan, a city that he has never visited, appearing to meet a man he has never met. Elliot soon evades the attention of his suspicious MI6 bosses and sneaks out of the country and into Kazakhstan, seeking to find Joanna and figure out how and why someone is fabricating his presence in the country. Elliot uses his spy training, his contacts, and some surreptitiously collected resources to establish a cover identity, familiarize himself with Kazakhstan’s domestic and international influence brokers, and pick up where Joanna’s work left off in the hopes of reuniting with her. Once Elliot finds Joanna’s rented Kazakh apartment and the dead body left inside it, he knows it’s only going to get more complicated.

A Shadow Intelligence is a fast-paced and complicated political thriller, with a focus on the mechanics of spycraft — how Elliot constructs fake identities that can (mostly) pass muster, how he investigates potential leads without blowing his cover, how he wins friends and influences people. He uses his wits and charm just as much as his social media analysis and breaking-and-entering skills. Elliot is a competent and experienced spy, but he’s not a superhero and he’s not James Bond — sometimes he screws up, and often things go quite wrong. The stakes are high for Elliot, and getting out of trouble often happens with a steep price.

Kazakhstan is an interesting setting for this novel because of my own ignorance of it. Kazakhstan is a setting that has almost never appeared in other media I’ve read (and I could probably just change that to ‘never’ if I exclude Borat, which I probably should), but it feels like a well-chosen setting for a modern spy thriller, sharing borders with both Russia and China, featuring an autocratic ruler, dealing with western corporations intent on plundering their oil, and managing cultural conflicts between ethnic Kazakhs and their Russian and Chinese neighbors. How accurate is the portrayal of the country and region? Is the dictator and his heir apparent daughter depicted in this book anything like the real life leaders of this country? Beats me! But the unfamiliar dynamics made this book feel surprising and unpredictable to me.

A Shadow Intelligence is the first book of a trilogy, and I think the clearest way to distill my feelings on the book is that I will probably read the second book, though it’s not going to the immediate top of my to-read pile.

Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan, soldiers of opposing sides in a space military conflict, have fallen in love and gotten married, leading Cordelia to leave her life among the egalitarian and scientific Betan people to marry Aral, the honorable and open-minded leader of the generally more hierarchical, sexist, and militaristic Barrayaran empire. When the emperor dies and Aral is selected as the regent to run the empire and protect the emperor’s young heir, Cordelia goes from the challenges of adjusting to a new culture and preparing for a baby to dealing with threats on the life of her husband and unborn child and attempts to undermine the government Aral now controls. Eventually Aral’s enemies launch a coup that requires Cordelia and Aral to flee to a resistance network and fight to reclaim control of the planet.

A year or two ago, someone on a podcast I listen to described getting into “The Vorkosigan Saga,” a series of novels by Lois McMaster Bujold that were written between the 1980s and the 2010s. As a reader of science fiction series for most of those years, I was surprised that I’d never heard of it. And I was delighted by some of the familiar sci-fi series bullshit that apparently goes with this series. I have prepared a meme to illustrate my reaction to learning about it:

I can’t explain why this kind of nonsense is so compelling to me - debates over proper reading orders, giant complicated worlds that get expanded on over and over throughout time and probably weren’t especially thought out at the beginning, borderline nonsensical ideas like having several books that pre-date the birth of the main character… It’s objectively ridiculous, but it’s catnip to me. Last summer, I read Shards of Honor the first published entry in the series (and the second or third book in chronological order), which introduces Cordelia and Aral and establishes their romance. This book, the seventh entry in the series in publication order and third or fourth book in chronological order, follows immediately after that book, and apparently fills in some backstory about the events that lead to the birth of Cordelia and Aral’s son, Miles Vorkosigan, the protagonist of this series and a character I still have not met!

Despite that odd context, this was an interesting and engaging read. Bujold’s writing is very episodic, with her novels that I’ve read feeling like they are made up of three or four major sets of events that are almost self-contained but build towards a larger story. I like her characters and the world they inhabit. It’s set in a world with space travel and with some fancy technology, but it feels pretty grounded and realistic. The story’s approach to gender is interesting to consider, especially in the context of being a science-fiction novel written by a woman in the 1980s. Cordelia is a strong character who asserts her own agency against a culture with some sexist expectations about the role of women, and her husband is generally a supportive and respectful partner who values her competence and independence. But, even still, aspects of Cordelia’s character and approach felt like they wouldn’t be written the same way today. There were occasional moments where Bujold writes Cordelia in a way that comes across a bit like “well, I guess I’m a feminist, but I’m not a stuck up prude,” a kind of defensive cool-girl attitude that I can understand why a woman writing in a male-dominated field in the 1980s would use but that feels a little off in modern context. But I’ve certainly read 20th century science fiction novels with way way worse gender politics, it really wasn’t much of an issue here, just interesting to reflect on the differences between what might have been progressive 40 years ago and how it plays today.

I’ve enjoyed the two novels I’ve read so far in this series, and I think it’s finally time for me to read one with the actual protagonist of most of the series, now that I have read a) the story of his parents meeting and b) the story of people trying to kill him and/or his parents before he is born. Even after reading those two novels, I’m still not sure what the series is about! But what I’ve read so far is fun political intrigue with main characters who use their wits to stay a few steps ahead of their enemies, and my sense is that the soon-to-be-born protagonist leans even further into this, as he faces some developmental challenges (for reasons explained in this book) and so will always have to out-think his enemies rather than trying to fight them. It’s a fun series so far and one that I’m surprised never crossed my radar until a few years ago.

Bugonia directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Jesse Plemons plays a disaffected young man who enlists his cousin in a plot to kidnap a rich and sophisticated tech CEO played by Emma Stone to expose her as an alien who is testing alien technology on humans and planning to destroy the Earth. Things both do and don’t go according to plan, as they manage to kidnap the CEO but aren’t entirely sure how to get her to take them to her leader, while she tries to figure out how to placate her captors and convince them to let her free. We learn more about Plemons’ character’s backstory that led him to lose hope for the world and suspect the tech company, and follow along as Stone’s CEO uses her public relations skills and experience as an authority figure to turn the tables and facilitate her escape. It ends in a way that I’d say both is and isn’t predictable if you’ve ever seen another Yorgos Lanthimos film - I was extremely prepared for a twist, but what form a twist would take and what could even be considered a twist was constantly shifting for me as I watched. In the end, I thought it was both delightful and grim, hilarious and bleak. A feel-bad thrill-ride! I’ve seen several of Lanthimos’ previous movies - The Favourite, The Lobster, and Poor Things - and found this to be his most coherent and traditional story of all those. It’s bizarre, and there are some flashbacks and cutaways that are a little abstract, but for the most part it tells a pretty A-to-B-to-C story that makes sense (albeit grading on a curve a bit!). Both Plemons and Stone are great actors giving intense performances. It probably won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found this to be a strange fun and surprising time.

Other things with fewer words:

Dispatch: A fun adventure game with great visuals, stellar voice acting, and a reasonably fun if slightly unnecessary strategy game layer, telling the story of a superhero who is knocked out of action and joins a sort of superhero temp agency while trying to get his life back together. From developers who were formerly at Telltale, who really led a revival of the adventure game genre in the 2010s before they kind of blew up due to mismanagement, I’m glad this game seems to have been a huge hit and look forward to more games like this.

The Pitt Season 2: So glad The Pitt is back! Such a good show. The first season made me cry so frequently that I learned I had to stop watching it at the gym because I felt ridiculous running on a treadmill with tears running down my face as people came to terms with the death of a loved one. I’m not sure the second season is hitting as hard for me yet, but I’m still fully on board.

That’s it for January 2026! Stay tuned for February.