Welcome to the first 2025 Book Review: One week in January.

Combining the words from eight typed pages documenting the first week in new accommodation in Portland Oregon in 2001, with illustrative paintings done recently, this book is a snapshot of a very particular (and in hindsight, precious) moment in time. As Emma Straub says;

“It feels like reading a love story that doesn’t quite know it’s a love story yet.”

Detailing what she ate, who she saw, what she drank (spoiler: quite a lot of beer,) checking for e-mails (nothing changes,) and the complications of emotional ‘entanglements.’ Sometimes she realises that “life is brimming with possibilities”, though that’s hard when you’re broke and unemployed.

Author and illustrator Carson Ellis shows refreshingly clear compassion for both her younger and her present self, who refused to polish out the prickly bits when editing the diary for publication. I love how she ends by describing marriage as “an ocean, with unexplorable depths and shifting tides…”

One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary, by Carson Ellis, published by Chronicle Books.

Adding my shout out to Ellis’s, for editor Bridget Watson Payne, who warmly, smilingly, listened to ideas for a book from The Travelling Bookbinder over lunch in San Francisco back in 2012….

Use your exclusive code bookbinderbookreview44 at Golden Hare Books to receive 10% off One Week In January, valid until 28th February.

When I first saw the subtitle “New Paintings for an Old Diary’, I imagined the actual diary being used as the substrate, as it’s so much easier to start creating with a page that isn’t blank – try making a book of your own with ephemera!