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The early 2000s are back in style now so we might as well bring back blogs because they’re better than low rise jeans and skinny brows, you know?

2023: my year in books

This year was a record for me in terms of reading. I read more than any year since I started recording my yearly reading in 2014. This is due in large part to the fact that I finally downloaded Libby, the free audio-book app that connects you to audiobooks through your library card. I listened to books while I ran, walked, worked in the studio, and drove. It was one of my goals for the in addition to the goal of replacing mindless phone time with reading. I didn’t do so great with the phone part, but I think it’s probably destined to be a constant battle for me. I read some books about this very thing–our distracted compulsion towards our phones and the dopamine hit we get from them–and it definitely helped me with some strategies.

But in the end, I don’t read in order to optimize my time or discipline myself away from my phone or keep a public record of how many books I consumed in a year; I read because I like it and because I think it’s good for my brain and my health. Reading quiets my brain and forces me to focus on one thing (kind of what pottery does for me too). It sometimes allows me to escape, but other times makes me settle in and examine things I take for granted. Depending on the genre, it offers me a world in which things have clean solutions and happy endings, or it offers me different perspectives or experiences of this world, in which things never have clean solutions and seldom have “endings” at all.

The fiction books I loved this year were notably dark and contemplative, seldom something one would call happy. But they tugged at some part of me or illuminated some aspect of the human experience that I didn’t know I needed to look at or sit with for a while. The non-fiction that I loved zoomed all the way out, situating our narrow current political landscape, reliance on technology, and cultural constructs in a much bigger picture.

Writing is art. And I generally think that the more time spent consuming art, the better. We are a culture obsessed with optimizing our time, productivity, and output; we also love hot takes, clap backs, and writing delivered in screen-shot-able snippets. I like books because they’re the opposite of all this. You have to settle in for the long haul, hear someone out, jump into their world, and stop waiting for your turn to talk. So here’s what I read in 2023 with some thoughts on my favorites.

The master list

Here’s everything I read this year. Audio books are noted in parenthesis. Favorites have an asterisk.

The Next Millionaire Next Door—Sarah Stanley Fallow (audio)
*The Door—Magda Szabo
Counterstory—Aja Martinez
*Either/Or—Elif Batuman
Moby Dick—Herman Melville (audio)
Oh, Caledonia!—Eslpeth Barker
*Sapiens—Yuval Noah Harari (audio)
*Never Let Me Go—Kazuo Ishiguro
Cult Classic—Sloane Crossley
*The Possessed—Elif Batuman
The Remains of the Day—Kazuo Ishiguro
Our Missing Hearts—Celeste NG
Pond—Claire Louise Bennett
To the Lighthouse—Virginia Woolf
The Employees—Olga Ravn
When We Lost our Heads—Heather O’Neill
Dopamine Nation—Anna Lembke (audio)
*Stolen Focus—Johann Hari (audio)
Getting Lost—Annie Ernaux
*Her Body & Other Parties—Carmen Maria Machado
21 Lessons—Yuval Noah Harari (audio)
*Heartbroke—Chelsea Beiker
Book Lovers—Emily Henry
*Case Study—Graeme Macrae Burnet
People We Meet on Vacation—Emily Henry
Harlem Shuffle—Colson Whitehead
Work Won’t Love you Back—Sarah Jaffe (audio)
The Paris Apartment—Lucy Foley (audio)
*Autumn—Ali Smith
*The Night Watchman—Louise Erdrich (audio)
*Winter—Ali Smith
American Dirt—Jeanine Cummins (audio)
*Spring—Ali Smith
Happy Go Lucky—David Sedaris (audio)
The Art of Memoir—Mary Karr (audio)
*A Little Life—Hanya Yanagihara
*Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow—Gabrielle Zevin
Hey, Hun—Emily Lynn Paulson (audio)
Mr. Palomar—Italo Calvino
The Post-Script Murders—Elly Griffiths (audio)
Prodigal Summer—Barbara Kingsolver
Ninth House--Leigh Bardugo
*Summer—Ali Smith
The Woman Upstairs—Claire Messud (audio)
Hell Bent—Leigh Bardugo
Pure Colour—Sheila Heti
*The Appeal—Janice Hallett (audio)
The Twyford Code—Janice Hallett (audio)
Jesus and John Wayne—Kristin Kobes du Mez (audio)
Hamnet—Maggie O’Farrel
Aliss at the Fire—Jon Fosse
This is the How You Lose the Time War—Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Swamplandia!—Karen Russell (audio)
*The Candy House–Jennifer Egan
*If I Survive You–Jonathan Escoffery
Lessons in Chemistry–-Bonnie Garmus
Feel Free–Zadie Smith (audio)

*Loved this one! Cool frame story, unreliable narrator.*

Favorite reads

Novels

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

*Disturbing book, but worth it in my opinion*

If I had been warned about the content of this book beforehand, I probably wouldn’t have read it. I knew that it was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, that it was much talked about when it came out, and that it was long. Other than that, I went in with no knowledge of the plot or subject matter, and I hadn’t read Yanagihara’s other work. The story follows the lives and friendship of four men from their college years into late adulthood. I tend to read mostly fiction by women authors about women, so this was a notable deviation from my normal preferences, but I was instantly drawn in. I’d never seen this kind of examination of male friendship and emotional bonding. The narrative most closely follows the life of one character named Jude, whose story is told more in depth than the others, through a series of flashbacks that slowly reveal information about his mysterious and traumatic past. The book portrays physical, sexual, and psychological abuse and violence, and it’s hard to read. But to me, it was totally worth it. The narrative brought to mind Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Like Ferrante’s story, this one is violent and melodramatic, but also one of the best portrayals of friendship, redemption, art, and human connection that I’ve ever read.

Spring by Ali Smith

I read all of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet this year, and I relished every book, but Spring is the one that I loved the most and that I still can’t stop thinking about. It’s hard to describe the plot of any of these books, and they’re not a series in any traditional sense. However, each book has some overlap of characters and by the third book I was looking for the overlap like little easter eggs hidden throughout the narrative. Smith doesn’t bother with much exposition or hand-holding for her reader. If what you’re reading is a dream sequence or the beginning of a totally new plot-line, you just have to jump in and figure it out, and I love that about her books. Because I sometimes had to work a little to keep up, I found that I was fully immersed in the world Smith created; I gobbled up the majority of each of these novels in one or two sittings, unable to tear myself away and unaware of the outside world as I read. Don’t get me wrong, these books are weird. They don’t have traditional plots (or plots at all in some cases), and Smith liberally sprinkles in cultural allusions to everything from Pauline Boty to Shakespeare to Charlie Chaplin. But it is never pretentious or forced or pedantic. Every word she writes has a purpose, and the tapestry of stories always comes together in a satisfying way. In Spring, Smith tells two different narratives and connects them in the second half of the book. The primary narrative follows a woman named Brit who works as a guard in an immigrant detention center in the UK as she is led on a caper by a young girl whose identity and purpose become clearer as the narrative unfolds. This book, and its themes of immigration, resistance, surveillance, and detention (as well as art, death, and grief!) has stuck with me throughout the year. In the days after finishing it, I found myself sobbing in the car on the way to work, still thinking about the characters, the world (which is this world) and the implications of the story. The book dug into me and split me open. I don’t know if Smith’s books are for everyone, but they’re definitely for me.

Either/Or and The Possessed by Elif Batuman

I haven’t really shut up about Elif Batuman since I read The Idiot last year. After finishing it, I promptly went out and bought its sequel, Either/Or, which I tried my best to savor, loving every word of it. Either/Or follows Selin, the Turkish American college student to whom we were introduced in The Idiot during her freshman year at Harvard. If there are two sub-genres of novels that I love they’re the campus novel and the bildungsroman (coming of age story), and Batuman’s stories are both. But it’s not just these elements that made me fall in love with these books. In Either/Or Selin is back for her sophomore year at Harvard and her subsequent travels around the world as a writer for a budget travel guide. Selin’s earnest desire to understand the world through philosophy and literature, her wild naivete about sexual and romantic relationships, and her whip smart but dead-serious observations about the world, are why I love these books so much. I also love that Batuman doesn't editorialize the past. In other words, she doesn’t imbue her character with the wisdom of a 40-something year old feminist living in the 2020s; she lets her be a 19 year old living in the 90s. It is only you, the reader, who gets the benefit of hindsight. Selin must muddle through life with the tools she has at the time. This is what I find so relatable.

After I finished Either/Or, I needed more Batuman, and to my delight, I found that she’d written The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People who Read Them before she ever published the two novels mentioned above. The Possessed (another Dostoyevsky reference) is a collection of personal essays that are also about Russian literature. I love Russian literature, so that made this book all the better for me, but I don’t think you need to know anything about Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky to enjoy this book. Each essay has some connection to a Russian writer but is driven by Batuman’s own bizarre and hilarious personal narratives. She tells the story of flying to Russia to present at a Tolstoy conference, only to find, upon her arrival, that the airline has lost her luggage so she must wear sweatpants and flip flops for the remainder of the conference (it’s held at Tolstoy’s estate, so there are no shops nearby, and the airline simply never delivers her lost bags). The other conference attendees are delighted by her attire, assuming she’s a true Tolstoyan (a sect of extreme asceticism based on Tolstoy’s views). As in her two novels, Batuman’s gift for combining wry wit with radical sincerity is what makes this book shine. I don’t know if there’s a narrative voice that I’ll ever love more than Batuman’s.

*No full review, but this was a fav: a super weird little sci-fi novella with themes of labor, obedience, and exploitation.*

Short stories

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

I’ve been teaching a short story by Machado in my intro to fiction class for a few years now, but I haven't read much else from her until now. Her work is often categorized loosely as “horror” which isn’t a genre I usually pick up, but I loved every single story in this book. They were beautifully written, weird, funny, and each one was so rich that it felt more like a novel than a short story.

Heartbroke by Chelsea Bieker

Bieker’s first novel, Godshot, was an instant favorite for me when I read it a few years back. It’s a dystopian coming of age story that revolves around a young girl in a Christian cult. The stories in Heartbroke have many of the qualities I loved about Godshot–witty narration, down and out characters, and dark humor. I loved every story.

Nonfiction

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

I know I’m 10 years late reading this book and that it has received some criticism and debate from the scientific world for being not especially scientific (Harari is a historian), and I can’t really speak to that, as I’m pretty sure that I’m the intended audience–a layperson with some interest in the big philosophical and scientific questions about human existence. That said, I loved this book. I listened to the audiobook and felt like I was sitting in on a semester’s worth of captivating lectures that traced human cognition through 6 million years on this planet. The major take-away for me was Harari’s emphasis on the human invention of concepts and stories to understand (and attempt to rule) the world. The results have been everything that defines humanity as we know it: our wars, revolutions, art, governments, corporations, subjugation, myths, nations, ideologies, religions, etc. The notion of social constructs wasn’t new to me, but the scale of the picture Harari paints is profound and changed how I think about humanity.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari

I also listened to this one as an audio-book and didn’t really know much about it besides that there was a fair amount of buzz around it. Turns out Hari is a bit controversial because he was part of a plagiarism scandal before he wrote this book. Nonetheless, I still really loved this book, and while I think some of the criticisms of it are valid, I still think a lot of it holds up and I found it to be really useful for better understanding why (to use Hari’s analogy) we all behave as if we’re covered in itching powder but no one stops to ask who poured the powder on us to begin with. In this analogy, the itching is our scattered attention and our irresistible urge to be constantly scrolling. He also introduced me to the phrase “surveillance capitalism”-- the widespread collection and sale of personal data by large corporations– which has helped me to make sense of how social media works, who it benefits and why it doesn't actually have to be that way. Hari might make some sloppy leaps from his hypotheses to his conclusions at times, but that doesn’t bother me too much as I’m more interested in drawing my own conclusions anyway. If you’re interested in how our current mediums for communication are impacting our cognitive function and mental health and how we can resist the worst side effects of a world lived online, this is a solid read.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes du Mez

This book explores the history of what du Mez calls militant masculinity in the American white evangelical church. Du Mez traces the white evangelical church’s ever evolving relationship with manhood from the Victorian notions of gentleness to the muscular christianity movement of the 19th century to John Wayne to Donald Trump. She argues that the American evangelical movement has been paving the way for Trump’s brand of masculinity for decades. This was an interesting read for me, because, having grown up in the evangelical church myself, many of the movements she discusses are things I experienced first hand. I found the phrase “militant masculinity” to be very useful as it clearly gestures to the specific marriage of religious nationalism and patriarchy; I was fascinated by the way that evangelical leaders really worked to craft this narrow vision of what it means to be a Christian man during the second half of the 20th century. But to me, the most interesting argument she makes is that evangelical Christians are less influenced by their own personal faith, church, or spiritual leaders than they are by the larger evangelical movement as a whole.

Lighter reads

I don’t know what to call this section and I don’t want to be patronizing towards books that aren’t especially serious or literary. I read my fair share of murder mysteries and romance and thrillers, and I think the literary world has been unfairly snobby towards “genre fiction” for a long time. Anyway, here are some favorite reads that are a little less weighty.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

This book was a delight from start to finish. Garmus tells the story of a brilliant young chemist in the 1950-60s who encounters every imaginable roadblock to success because she’s a woman; she eventually has to settle for hosting a chemistry-adjacent cooking show because the scientific world is so horrifically prejudiced that they’d rather produce no research at all than have it come from a woman. The book paints a painful picture of the kinds of sexism that women were dealing with in mid-century America, ranging from men taking credit for their work to the constant threat of sexual harassment or assault. Despite the heavy themes, the book manages to have a distinct levity throughout. There’s a certain element of fantasy to Garmus’s storytelling, and it did feel a little corny at times. I don’t mean wizards or spells, but there’s a dog with a human consciousness and a Nobokov-reading 4 year old that felt a little beyond my suspension of disbelief. Nonetheless, this is a witty, fast-paced read, and I loved finishing off the year with it.

Jean Hallet novels

Jean Hallet writes clever and complex mystery novels that always have some sort of fun narrative device. The Twyford Code is written as a series of transcribed audio recordings from a mysterious phone, and the identity of the author is slowly revealed. The Appeal is written as a conversation between two detectives trying to solve a murder mystery, but the bulk of the book is presented as the email correspondence that they’re given as evidence. The emails are all between the cast and crew of a small town theater troupe, one who we know will be dead by the end of the story. I listened to the audio version of these two books and I loved them. I think they might be better read in book or e-book form because there are often little riddles or references that I would have liked to see in writing.

Lucy Foley novels

Lucy Foley writes murder mysteries, but they’re not exactly the cozy kind. You’re likely to encounter some unreliable narrators and no one is ever totally innocent. But she creates a certain ambiance around her settings that I really love, and I think the sense of place that she builds is often what carries her stories. She’s a go-to if I want a fast-paced vacation read, and while I wouldn’t want to encounter any of her characters IRL, I always want to be in her Paris apartments and Scottish inns.

Epilogue

I wanted to write short reviews of all my favorite books from 2023, but I fear I’ll never publish this if I have to write any more. Let me know in the comments if you want to hear more about a book on the list, or–better yet–let me know what books you’ve loved recently so I can add them to my reading list for this year :)