2023 was a weird year for books. Romantasy became a thing and gripped the public with an iron fist (flame?), BookTokers hawked the same 15 mediocre (IMO) titles, and Oprah recommended a book over 800 pages in her book club. People fought more than ever about the books they loved or hated online (Lessons in Chemistry was particularly polarizing), and I continued to read whatever the heck I wanted. As should you!
Avid readers of this newsletter may have noticed that I mostly read novels, and that remained true this year. If you’re a novel-hater, give me a call and I think I can convince you. Especially if you’re one of those haters who thinks they should only read nonfiction, as if you can only learn new things reading nonfiction. Fun fact: publishing houses don’t employ fact-checkers, so unless the author paid for one themselves, they can write whatever they want (that gets past legal) in their books, especially if it’s social science. Malcolm Gladwell, I’m looking at you.
I read around sixty books this year, since six years ago I read Stephen King’s 2000 memoir On Writing and he said in order to be a novelist you needed to read one book a week and never watch television, and I took that to heart. Just kidding, I just like to read a lot, but that advice does live rent-free in my head, even though he walked back that advice as early as 2007.
I read a lot of contemporary books because I like to be a part of the cultural conversation and I also know how important those initial sales are and want to support the authors I love! Many of the books I read came out this year, but there are a good amount of backlist titles as well. Here are the books that stood out, that I devoured in a couple of hours or days or that I think about every day still.
Nonfiction
Good for a Girl by Lauren Fleshman
Lauren Fleshman is a professional runner in her forties, and this is her memoir about growing up in the burgeoning age of women’s sports, how eating disorders ran rampant and women were taught to not care for their bodies for the sake of performance, her experience with Nike and their mistreatment of their female athletes and discrimination against pregnant women, and her journey to working with brands that actually care about women. I think it’s en essential read (or listen) for anyone interested in sports, and Lauren tells a really compelling story throughout.
Deep Creek by Pam Houston
Pam Houston is a transcendent writer whose work marries the complexities of relationships with the beautiful, often violent unpredictability of the natural world. In this memoir she writes about coming to own a piece of land in the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado, and it nearly convinced me to find some land in the middle of nowhere, get a couple of more dogs and some horses and start homesteading. I’m still on the fence about it…
Couplets by Maggie Millner
I read this delightful little book in a couple of hours. It’s a slightly fictionalized (okay so this isn’t technically nonfiction) retelling of the author’s experience leaving her heterosexual relationship for one with a flighty, mysterious woman. It’s told entirely in rhyming couplets and the language is so delicious I wanted to put it on top of a scoop of ice cream.
Fiction
Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter
When a book is hard to describe, that’s how you know it’s good. This one is about a series of interconnected families, their loves and losses, and the alternate dimension that somehow connects them all. My book club read it and everyone loved it!
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton’s books were an exciting personal discovery this year. I read this book, about a radical gardening collective in New Zealand that takes on an evil tech CEO mining precious metals in an area they’re trying to cultivate, and immediately dove into her previous novel, the 800-page doorstopper about the gold rush in NZ I can’t stop talking about. Join me in my obsession!
In The Cut by Susanna Moore
This novel came out in 1995, and it’s a short and punchy literary thriller about a woman who becomes entangled with a detective investigating a series of gruesome murders in her neighborhood. It was made into a movie starring Meg Ryan in 2003, which I haven’t seen, but I absolutely recommend the book. Susanna Moore was another author who was new to me in 2023, and I loved her novel The Lost Wife that came out this year as well.
Loot by Tania James
I read a lot of literary novels set pre-1900 this year (I won’t use the term historical fiction, since those often fall outside the literary fiction category (cough, Lilac Girls)) and this was one of my favorites (cough, good way to learn about histories you’d never learn in APUSH, nonfiction bros). Set in eighteenth-century India and France, it follows a skilled woodcarver who builds a famed automaton of a tiger for Tipi Sultan (a real event) and follows it throughout the siege of his village and all the way to France in a coming-of-age epic.
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
File this under impossible to describe (I mean, look how cool the physical book is). The conceit: the widow of a famous, enigmatic artist takes on the task of writing her autobiography after several unauthorized copies get it all wrong. She discovers incredible, previously unknown details about her deceased wife along the way, and the reader goes on this trip of discovery with her. Oh, it’s also set in an alternate United States where the South was successful in succeeding and become a fascist theocratic state with a giant wall around it that was abolished only in the 1990s. I know. I think about this literary feat all the time, and you should too!!
Happy holidays, thanks for reading! All links are affiliate links through Bookshop, but you can always go to your local library for freeee.