Happy holidays, friends.
Last week, I said in my year-in-review post that I didn’t do enough of anything to make a “tops of the year” list, except reading. So, here it is! A more-or-less exhaustive list of every book I enjoyed in 2023, separated into a few categories.
I read more books than this (though I failed to get to two of my most hotly anticipated titles of the year, Claudia Dey’s Daughter and Mona Awad’s Rouge), but I’m only listing the ones that stuck with me (although now that the post is written and I’m out of time to revise it, I do regret excluding the two older books I read with my book club this year — Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, both of which did stick with me in very particular ways).
I’m no critic, and these are not reviews, just personal recommendations. Emojis indicate whether I read the book on paper or listened to the audio version. You’ll notice that I read my “serious novels” mostly on paper. That’s because, much as I love listening to books, I can’t focus on anything too literary in audio format. If the sentences are really good, I have to read them with my eyes.
Top books that successfully allowed me to escape from reality:
📖 The Honeys by Ryan La Sala
This book has it all - grief, patriarchy, toxic masculinity, misogyny, homophobia, unfettered capitalism, body horror, and a queer, non-binary teen protagonist named Mars, whose twin sister has recently (mysteriously!) died. Now, Mars has to infiltrate the prestigious summer camp that his sister attended, to find out what really happened. This story veers into much more disturbing and creepy territory than I expected, and it was a lot of fun.
🎧 I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai
This is a murder mystery, a #metoo novel AND a ‘90s novel, all rolled into one! A successful true crime podcaster returns to her old boarding school to teach a course, and ends up embroiled in an effort to solve the murder of one of her own classmates, which took place when they were teens. The novel flips back and forth between the current and past timelines, and manages to be totally immersive in both.
🎧 Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
The title says it all. I really liked this rom-com about a “plain” female writer on an SNL-type show, and the “gorgeous” male rock star guest host who falls for her. It felt like the author did a fair bit of research to get this world right. I laughed a lot!
🎧 All the Thursday Murder Club novels, by Richard Osman
Nothing is more “my jam” than charming, old, British people solving mysteries. These books are my ideal go-to when I’m stressed, or just don’t want to be alone with my thoughts (or, like, I’m doing the dishes). My only complaint is a ridiculous one, but here it is. The first two books were read on audio by the sublime Lesley Manville. I fell so in love with her take on the characters that when the also-brilliant Fiona Shaw took over for Book #3, I felt bereft.
Top books that were full of great sentences (my highest praise for fiction):
📖 All’s Well by Mona Awad
A theatre prof with chronic back pain is in the middle of staging a very troubled production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (a lesser play, at least in the world of the book1), when a chance meeting with three mysterious men in a bar leads to a miraculous recovery. Awad is an absolute master of taking you deep into a character’s mental breakdown. I loved this even more than Bunny.
📖 Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu
This is the best short story collection I’ve read in at least a decade. Every story is horrifyingly perfect, and so is every individual sentence.
📖 Milkfed by Melissa Broder
CN for eating disorder talk, but if you’re okay reading that kind of content then I can’t recommend this enough. Absolute banger about a weird sexual relationship that blossoms between a woman trying to deal with her severe eating disorder (and mommy issues), and the fat, sexy orthodox Jewish girl who serves her a daily frozen yogurt. The lesbian sex in this is even better than the woman-merman sex in The Pisces. Melissa Broder is a real one, and I can’t wait to read her latest.
📖 The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen
This entire novel is about an (indeed, negligible) incident: a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu, along with his wife and sons, to an American university where he is applying for a job. The story is narrated by the Netanyahus’ reluctant host, American historian Ruben Blum. The whole thing is apparently (very loosely) based on a real incident that literary critic Harold Bloom recounted to the author. This confounding and mordant treatise on the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience was strange to read in January and feels even stranger to think back on now. It won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
* And also …
📖 The Abduction of Seven Forgers by Sean Dixon
Full disclosure: a) I know the author of this one, but I promise you I wouldn’t have included it if I didn’t genuinely like it, and b) the only reason it’s at the bottom of the section, out of alphabetical order, is that I am still reading it. It felt wrong to claim to have read it when I’m only halfway through. But it felt equally wrong to wait a full year before recommending a new release. It’s dense and delicious, a real Sacher-torte of a novel.
The best books I read for inspiration, or in search of comps for my own writing:
📖 Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
There are so many parallels between this book and the one I’m writing. The bad weather, the dreams that bleed into reality, a character who needs to reconnect with her own culture in order to work through the weird things happening to her. And, of course, it’s also a completely different book from the one I’m writing in almost every way. I was totally captivated by Johns’ understated, evocative prose. A talent to watch!
🎧 The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
The main character in this book didn’t ask as many questions as any reasonable person would have, if they were placed in a library containing every alternate life they might have lived in an infinite multiverse. I enjoyed it a lot, this is exactly the kind of book I love to read, but I had many more questions than Nora did.
🎧 Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
One of the narrative points of view in this one belongs to an octopus at an Aquarium somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. I read it because I have an idea for something that involves a sentient octopus character. I was thrilled to discover that this book is nothing like my idea, and also that it’s really very fun! It’s all about an elderly woman who works as a caretaker in the aquarium, and how the octopus sort of mends her broken life for her. A very charming, feel-good book.
📖 Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson
I’m years overdue to read this one, and it really delivered. It’s such a page turner, equal parts beautiful and terrifying. Robinson’s prose is clean and spare and I felt immediately immersed in Jared’s world as he wades through the problems of poverty, social and peer pressures, a challenging family environment, drugs, and more - all while figuring out that he is, as the title suggests, a bit magical. Can’t wait to read the other two books in the trilogy.
Books that I thought were good, even though the experience of reading them was, at times, unpleasant:
📖 The Guest by Emma Cline
I loved The Girls so much. The raw honesty with which the young teenage protagonist’s experiences were described made me wonder if I too might have fallen in with a Manson-esque cult when I was 15. It was just that relatable! The Guest, by contrast, filled me with nothing but anxiety. The main character is a 22-year-old call girl who’s barely scraping by on prescription pills and her so-so looks. When her older, wealthy boyfriend tosses her out, she makes a plan to salvage her summer, and with each passing day becomes increasingly untethered from reality. The book is well written, but reading it gave me a slow-motion panic attack.
🎧 I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
I love listening to an author read their own memoir, and this one did not disappoint, though a lot of the content is hard (shocking, devastating, somehow still very funny?). Delivered in McCurdy’s signature punchy style, the book was was incredibly compelling and often hard to listen to. My only quibble is slightly spoiler-y, so I’ll be vague about it: she really doesn’t address one major aspect of her abusive mother’s behaviour even though she refers to it many times. I hope she’s addressing it privately, in therapy!!
🎧 Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
The only other non-fiction book on my list is all about “why you can’t pay attention — and how to think deeply again” (which is the book’s subtitle). It was chilling, overwhelming, gave me lots to think about, and is deserving of its own Substack, which I’ll write sometime in early 2024.
📖 A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux
Someone should have warned me that this one was all about her experience of losing her mom! The emotional hangover was immense.
🎧 Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
It was the must-read book of the year, wasn’t it? But it’s in this section because I found the main character so unbearable that I had to keep taking breaks from her. June Hayward (who later rebrands herself as Juniper Song), is a middling white novelist who steals the manuscript for a Chinese historical epic written by her wildly successful Asian-American friend (after the friend accidentally dies, in the opening pages), and passes it off as her own. An NYT review of the book referred to it as an “Art Monster2” story, “but one that can’t allow room for ambiguity or revelation without rushing in to fill that space.” I felt a version of that, in the sense that Juniper’s actions were so obviously gross, and her rationale such a weird mix of cringey-confessional and delusional - that I couldn’t empathize at all. Perhaps it would have felt like an even more thorough skewering of white privilege and cultural appropriation if I’d found myself relating to Juniper’s point of view, at least once in a while.
Before I sign off for the year (I may or may not send a Boxing Day Substack next week, depending on whether I have the spoons to tell you about what Christmas is like, with and without my mom), I will leave you with one recommendation that is not a book:
My friend (author, editor + Slate’s music critic) Carl Wilson put together a 9+ hour holiday playlist for 2023, and I think you need it in your life.
Stop Me If Yule Heard This One Before is available on Spotify, Tidal, or Apple Music. Enjoy!
Is it actually so maligned? I’m not a Shakespeare expert! This book makes it seem so, but perhaps that’s only because the professor chose it over the students’ far more famous and popular choice of Macbeth?
A reference to the viral magazine article “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” and the controversy around the short story “Cat Person,” among other recent art monster discourses.
Thanks for sharing your top picks from the year. I have been curious about some of these titles and will add a few to my reading list. Very thoughtful reviews!