From the Desk Recommends... Great First Lines

It's the monthly recommended reading roundup.

Before we get into the links… a Desk Book Club note:

There is a chat set up in the Substack app (I also think this is accessible from one’s desktop) for ongoing conversation. For January, we are reading up to page 79 in Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson. We will have our official discussion thread of the first half of the book on…