The Top 10 Books I Read in 2023

I’ve read 45 books this year. The books below, listed in no particular order, are the ones that I found myself coming back to again and again. (Please put your own in the comments, I need recommendations!)

1. Giovanni’s Room—James Baldwin

   I read this in one sitting on the airplane back from Panama. It’s a small volume, and the language is easily digestible. What makes it brilliant is the preciseness of it’s story. Baldwin’s main character, an ex-pat in Paris, narrates the story of how his lover came to be sentenced to death, and all the complicated and twisting paths that led them both to destruction. The prose is fantastic, the plot hallucinatory. After I finished, I had to spend an hour just staring out the window. In other words: this thing’s like an onion. It has layers.

2. The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales—Ferit Edgu

   I have a long standing love affair going with the New York Review Classics collection, and this book certainly didn’t disappoint. The Wounded Age is my favorite of the two volumes. It’s a prose narrative about a reporter sent to cover the border between Kurdistan and Turkey, a region mired in violence and conflict. Edgu paints a surreal, abstract picture of the mountainous landscape and people held in the clasp of a long history of displacement and loss. Makes you want to run away from civilization and hole yourself up in the mountains for a little while. It will also completely change the way you see poetry.

3. Post-Traumatic—Chantal V. Johnson

   I hold that this book is the better version of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. It’s all that nihilistic, gross, dark prose but with a more fleshed out and substantial message to it. The protagonist’s morbidity and spiraling psyche doesn’t feel like something invented to project onto the world—her despair is deep, and rooted. It explores family trauma and its consequences in a way that’s not patronizing, but real and searingly sharp. I want to recommend this book to every woman I know .

4. On Savage Shores—Caroline Dodds Pennock

   One of the few nonfiction books I read this year. It flips the script of European ‘discovery’ and instead explores how Indigenous Americans viewed the strange people who washed up on their shores. The book challenges the traditional narrative that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were passive throughout history, and instead talks about all the ways Indigenous culture remains a staple of our own cultures today, and how indigenous people shaped their realities and survived throughout history, despite enormous struggles.

5. Biography of X—Catherine Lacey

   One of the best novels of the year. I love dystopian alternate universes, and Lacey’s vision of a United States which split in two after the Second World War is an immersive experience. The biography is told by X’s ex-wife. The elusive artist’ past is uncovered bit by bit, and with desperation, by the person she left behind. This is one of those books that pulls you so entirely into its world that your real life starts feeling like the book. Read if you like alternate history, books about artistic philosophy, and rich storytelling.

6. Monsters—Claire Dederer

   Speaking of books about artistic philosophy, this book is definitely in my top 3 of the year. It’s one woman’s reflection on the the art that has shaped her, and the artists who made it. The question she asks is as relevant as ever: what do we do with the work of artists who we know have committed awful crimes? Not only does she talk about the artists themselves, but the book explores the world of art and how we often close it off entirely to women, or demand that they be artists in a different way. If you’re passionate about making art, consuming art, or critiquing art, this is a must read.

7. Gold—Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori

   Reading this book was me trying to stay connected to my roots, but thank God I picked it up. This translation of Rumi is thoughtful, respects its original context and connections, but is curated so as to be most impactful to the modern reader. In a world of out-of-context and oversimplified translations of the great Persian poets, this book stands out. Even the introduction was fun to read, and the lines themselves ping-ponged back and forth in my brain for the longest time after I finished. Again, the New York Review Classics collection has never failed me.

   

8. Season of Migration to the North—Tayeb Salih

   I am not joking when I say I think about this book almost every day. I think about it when I wake up, before I go to sleep, just in general all the time. It’s been referred to as almost the opposite of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Salih uses the narrative in this book to pick apart the relationship between East and West, and the ruin that it sows in both places. The characters are deep, the plot devastating, the language beautiful. A masterpiece of unreliable narration, a profound work of post-colonial literature from the Arab canon, and required reading if you want to broaden your worldview.

9. The Second Sex—Simone de Beauvoir

   In the last year, I’ve been reading more political theory. The Second Sex is by far the best of those. A foundational work of second wave feminism, Beauvoir’s book is a historical examination of why women find themselves in the position of the oppressed, and what can possible be done about it. Some parts are outdated, but a concerning amount of what she points out about the world still holds true. It’s very rarely that I read a book that re-shifts the tectonic plates of my brain, but this book makes you question everything around you. One of the few female philosophers recognized today, I think she is too often accused of radicalism and too rarely given the credit for so clearly dissecting the world she found herself trapped in.

10. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close — Jonathan Safran Foer

    This book is for people that were weird as hell as kids. That being said, this book is also sometimes so painful that it takes your breath away. It’s modern art, it’s an interrogation of the American psyche post 9/11, it’s quirky. Read this if you like Lemony Snicket a bit too much, or if you just want to experience the fullest range of emotions possible compacted into a single novel.