My 5 favorite books in 2023
Buy them! Read them! Or don't!
Welcome to December! Also known as the month of lists of best things from the previous year.
I did some brainstorming on various year-in-review lists I might do, and came up with some strong contenders: The Best 15 Best Movies I Fell Asleep on the Couch While Watching. The 10 Best Songs I Sang in Spite of Not Knowing the Lyrics. The 5 Most Tragic Signs of Aging that Have Appeared on My Face, Neck, and FaceNeck. The 20 Best Baked Goods I Ate After Saying “Oh, Fuck it, Life is Short.”
I may still do some or all of these. (The month is young!) But I’m going to start with a much more conventional list: My 5 favorite books in 2023. Note that not all of these were published in 2023; I just read them in 2023. (As far as I can recall….some, I might have read in late 2022. Let’s not nitpick.)
Also, were these my actual favorites? I mean, given that I can’t remember anything about most books—including, sometimes, the fact that I read them at all—within about a month of finishing them, who the hell knows? But these stand out in my mind, so that has to count for something.
Some of these, I listened to as audiobooks—which I’m doing more and more of these days, in spite of the fact that I tend to zone out about every fifteen minutes. But I’ve ingrained an excellent piece of advice on this point from a bookseller I chatted with at an event during my tour for The Society of Shame. She said “you have to trust yourself.” As in, trust that if you went spacey for a few seconds or so, you probably actually heard more than you realize. And also? It probably doesn’t matter. You’ll figure it out. This has turned out to be mostly true. (But I still have to punch that rewind fifteen seconds buttons an awful lot.)
So, here goes. In no particular order:
Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett. (Harper, August 2023)
I love Ann Patchett, but I resisted this one at first, because it sounded sort of quiet and sentimental, and the cover looked like it would be well suited to a book called Overcoming the Death of a Beloved Pet or 365 Days of Inspirational Poems for Grandmothers. In fact, it is quiet and a little sentimental. And it does have a dumb cover. But it was also one of those books where you feel you’re completely, happily in the author’s hands. She knows what she is doing (and boy does Ann Patchett ever) and you can just settle in and enjoy.
The main character is 57-year-old Lara, hunkered down with her husband and three young adult daughters in the early weeks of the pandemic at the family’s cherry farm. The girls ask Lara to tell them about her long-ago, brief romance with a man she met while performing in a summer stock production of Our Town, who later became a huge movie star. Much of the book is flashbacks to that time, and they’re the more fun parts of the book to read. But the counterpoint between Lara’s past and present are what gives the book its depth. It’s a spot-on evocation of the heat and tumult of young love and the quieter beauty of long-married love and motherhood.
Rating: I know most people don’t rate books they put on “best of” lists. But I had so much fun with the very scientific rating system I cam up with in my last book-roundup post that I am electing to rate these titles. I therefore give Tom Lake a cool swim on a hot day, an ill-advised tequila binge, and an approving nod from the ghost of Chekov.
The Push, by Ashley Audrain (Penguin, January 2021)
OMG, this was so good! A psychological thriller, but with babies! I’d say it’s a page turner, except I listened to it, so…what’s the audiobook equivalent of a page-turner? Maybe a makes me actually enjoy cleaning the house-er? An incentivizes me to go running-er? A makes me sit in the car in the driveway for another ten minutes, listening, after I get home-er?
A new mother, Blythe, fears that her young daughter, Violet, may be a sociopath. (Tra la la!) At the same time, she fears that there is something wrong with her—that she’s unable to be a loving mother, just like her own mother was. Nobody else, including Blythe’s husband, thinks there’s anything “off” about Violet, and both Blythe and we, the readers, start to wonder if it’s all in her head. The paranoia gets taken up a notch when Blythe’s second child is born, and something terrible happens. And the ending….oh, the ending is just so good.
Rating: 3 baby strollers, 1 hot coffee to go, and the “ree! ree! ree!” sound from Psycho.
(BTW: I also listened to Audrain’s second novel, The Whispers, which came out last spring. I didn’t like it as much as The Push, but it was still very good, and still incentivized me to wipe down the kitchen cabinets.)
Nightcrawling, by Leila Mottley (Knopf)
Hoo boy, this one will punch you right in the heart. Kiara, a Black 17-year-old living in Oakland, is barely scraping by, trying to support herself and her brother (who is too busy pursuing his dreams of rap stardom to get a job), and help care for a young boy next door who was abandoned by his mother. When her rent doubles, Kiara turns to nightcrawling—aka prostitution—to make ends meet. Her main customers are members of the Oakland police force, who, in this book, anyway, are big fans of partying with underage girls. When a major scandal erupts because of this, Kiara ends up being a key witness in the investigation. It’s a heavy read, yes, but a fast and gorgeous one, told in Kiara’s lyrical first-person voice. I listened to the audiobook of this one, and the narrator, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, absolutely killed it.
Rating: One N.W.A. album and one generous donation to a good organization for at-risk youth. (Bridge Over Troubled Waters is an excellent one in Boston.)
The Stranger in the Woods, by Michael Finkel (Vintage)
I remember reading about the subject of this book when it hit the news a few years ago: authorities found and arrested a man named Christopher Knight who had been living alone in the Maine woods in a rudimentary shelter for 27 years. During that time he’d stolen untold quantities of supplies, food, tools, books, etc. from homes in the area. The story brought up endless questions for me: How did he go undetected for so long? How did he survive the winters? And, most of all, why did he choose to live the way he did? The Stranger in the Woods answers these and other questions, to varying extents. If you’re a low-key prepper (me), a lover of the outdoors (me), and/or a fan of reading about people who choose to live unconventional lives (me also), then you’ll dig this one for sure.
Rating: 27 can openers
Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons
This April, I’m going to be on the faculty of the Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop, teaching a class on writing humorous fiction. As I plan the class, I’m reading (and in some cases re-reading) a handful of funny novels. Cold Comfort Farm is one I’ve had on my shelves forever—I think it’s been with me at six different addresses—and that always shows up in Best Funny Fiction / Satire lists, but that I just hadn’t gotten to until now. WELL. My loss, because this is one damned funny book! A peppy young middle class woman from London decides to go live with her kooky, unsophisticated, and mostly miserable farmer cousins after her parents die, and makes it her mission to improve each of their lives.
It was written 1932, but the tone of the humor feels absolutely contemporary—wry and witty, and even meta at times: in the intro, Gibbons explains that she’s put asterisks before the passages that are extra good, to help critics and readers find them. These passages are, in fact, parodies of “good” writing, jam-packed with overwrought descriptions and ridiculous metaphors. I feel like this Stella chick and I would have totally clicked. But I also suspect she was slightly cooler than me, and smoked long cigarettes with one of those holder-thingys.
Rating: Five cows and two long cigarettes with one of those holder-thingys.
If I could put one more book on this list—which I can’t, because nobody ever writes a list of 6 anything—it would be Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabriel Zevin. In fact, I think this was the favorite book I read this year. (Why didn’t I include it in my list of 5? I’m not sure…perhaps because it was and is so popular?) Imagine a cross between The Social Network and Hamilton and Pachinko and you kind of get the jist. I can’t say anything else or I’ll be writing a 6-book list. Just…it’s just so good. One of those big, immersive books that’s perfect for cozy winter reading. I’ll stop now.
Oh, and if you neeed another book recommendation, might I suggest this one? Perfect for anyone who likes social commentary, madcap satire, mother-daughter stories, internet/media scandals, female empowerment, and swans. Or anyone who dislikes swans. Yeah, more that.
Finally: a plug—plea, rather—for buying your gift books at a physical bookstore instead of Bezos, Inc. The holidays are HUGELY important for independent bookstores, and they are lovely places to shop, not just for books but for gifts too. It’s way more satisfying to browse, maybe get a recommendation from an employee, and hand select physical books than it is to hit “order” online. Treat yourself to an hour in a bookstore this December—even if it’s Barnes & Noble. And if you must order online, do it at bookshop.org, where you can buy from the indie of your choice.
Happy reading! And if you’re inclined to comment, what were some of YOUR favorite books of the past year?
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We're matched on many--so off to get the others! (Time to get off my serial murderer binge)
So many good suggestions I haven’t read yet! Thanks! Love reading people’s favorite lists this time of year especially books!