Some favorite books of 2023

Mostly fiction, with shoutouts to some other memorable books

This time of year, I like to scroll through the hundreds of “best of the year” lists for all things arts and culture-ish. When it comes to books, though, the word best feels wrong. That’s partly personal: As an author, I know how much time, love, effort, sweat, and tears go into every single book that gets published, as well as the books that haven’t yet been published. And when I see list after list of best books, and am reminded that my novel wasn’t on them, it still stings. (It’s also a very rare thing to see a book that hasn’t been heavily promoted and marketed by its publisher find its way onto best or award lists.) But more than that, what is best? It’s a subjective, even mysterious, business as to why I loved a particular book and you didn’t.

Still, I read a lot of books, and I review books for work and for fun. Here are some of my favorites from 2023. Go buy a book for yourself or someone you love, and please let me know your favorites (and not so favorite, if you like) of 2023! 📚📚

By the way, this list is fiction- and memoir-heavy. If you’re looking for narrative nonfiction, let me know, and I’ll try to help.

In Memoriam, Alice Winn

A World War I saga and an epic love story; as the novel opens, it’s 1914, and best friends Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood are sixth-formers at an Eton-like boarding school. The Great War has begun killing their schoolmates, the school newspaper listing the names of dead and wounded older friends. Gaunt and Ellwood banter, deal with hazing, get drunk with their classmates, but they also harbor secret worries: Gaunt is German, Ellwood Jewish, marking them as outsiders. What’s more, they can’t admit that their bond is more than friendship— “the love that dare not speak its name.” It’s a gorgeous novel, one that’s of its time, but shows the impossibilities of war and of life as a gay man in early 20th C. England.

Tom Lake, Ann Patchett

A dual-timeline family story set partly during the pandemic summer of 2020 and partly in the ‘80s. Main character Lara Nelson, a farmer and mom of three young women, spins out the story of the summer she played Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and went out with Peter Duke, a young actor who later became a major movie star. The two timelines converge beautifully, and the revelations, when they come, feel both surprising and inevitable. Sometimes elegiac in tone, the novel threads the themes of Our Town and, to a lesser degree, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard throughout: the passage of time, the inevitability of loss and death, and the beauty of an ordinary family and an ordinary life, wondrous and too brief. (For Ann Patchett fans, I wrote more about Patchett and Tom Lake earlier this year.)

I Have Some Questions for You, Rebecca Makkai

Part boarding-school novel, part murder mystery, part true-crime-podcast story, I Have Some Questions for You gets at some social issues, like our true-crime obsession, as well as the way issues of consent, misbehavior, and what counts as criminal have changed over the past few decades. It’s set at a fictional boarding school in New Hampshire, over a wintry week where podcaster and alum Bodie Kane has returned to teach a short class on podcasting. Now at midlife, Bodie is at a crossroads, and returning to her school forces her to confront her teenage self, the people around her, and what really happened to her murdered roommate, Thalia Keith.

The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese

A multi-generational doorstopper of a family saga set in South India, spanning most of the 20th century. Verghese manages a large cast of characters and a sprawling 19th-century-novel-esque plot, but still, his characters are beautifully developed, with such tender interiority, and his writing so evocative, that I wanted this very, very long novel to keep going. Verghese is also a doctor, and this shows—medical issues are integral to the plot, though it’s not a medical drama, per se. The novel also draws attention to class and gender issues, the depredations of colonialism, and the consolations and restrictions of religion.

Hello Beautiful, Ann Napolitano

Ann Napolitano’s family saga Hello Beautiful follows the four Padavano sisters of Chicago for 30+ years, essentially from the early ‘80s to 2008. It’s an homage to Little Women, with the four sisters—Julia, Sylvie, and twins Emmeline and Cecelia—the daughters of a dreamy alcoholic father and a tough mom. The Laurie character is played by the grieving young college student and basketball player William, who’s drawn into their fold through Julia, when both are at Northwestern. As with Napolitano’s previous novel, Hello Beautiful is a study in grief, disconnection, and reconnection.

Absolution, Alice McDermott

Setting-wise, Absolution is a departure for McDermott, who usually sets her novels in Brooklyn or Long Island. Absolution is mostly set in Saigon, Vietnam, in the early ‘60s. Patricia, a young American wife who’s trying to adjust to the expectations of expat life, and who’s not letting herself see what her husband is doing in Saigon, is taken under the wing of Charlene, a charismatic wife who’s determined to make things happen. The novel takes the form of a long correspondence decades later between Patricia and Charlene’s daughter. One of my writer friends noted that some of McDermott’s previous novels have delved into the ways that good intentions can go so awry, and Absolution is no exception.

The Fraud, Zadie Smith

Historical fiction set mostly in 1870s London. Loosely based on real events, The Fraud is in part the story of a trial that captured Victorian London—after many years away, a man claiming to be the heir to a fortune has reappeared to claim it, and despite all evidence to the contrary, people believe him. The story is told mainly through the perspective of Eliza Touchet, a wise, funny, middle-aged Scottish housekeeper, and partly through the perspective of the formerly enslaved man Andrew Bogle. Eliza is housekeeper and cousin by marriage to William Ainsworth, a prolific and Dickensian writer, a widower in his 70s who’s just married an uneducated housemaid in her 20s, and who needs to make some money. The Fraud feels like a 19th-century novel in its scope, length, and structure, but its very short chapters, humor, and sharp attention to class, wealth, and colonialism make it feel modern.

Zadie Smith is one of my favorite writers, and if historical fiction doesn’t grab you, try On Beauty, Smith’s contemporary homage to EM Forster’s Howards End.

The Rachel Incident, Caroline O’Donnell

An Irish coming-of-age story set partly during the 2008 recession, The Rachel Incident is a voicey, funny novel full of the chaotic decisions we all make in our early 20s. Rachel’s voice and wonderfully off-kilter observations make this a comic story, but the novel also sets the tenderness of first love and platonic love against a sharp look at such issues as homosexuality and abortion in the more repressive Ireland of pre-repeal days. O’Donnell gives us a bright and funny voice in a novel that wears its heart on its sleeve.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer (memoir/criticism)

In her engaging Monsters, memoirist and critic Claire Dederer wrestles with a complicated, sometimes slippery subject: What do we do with art—movies, novels, songs, paintings—we once loved, and sometimes still love, from men we now consider monsters? “I started keeping a list,” she writes. “Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop.” The book grew out of an essay Dederer wrote in 2017 for The Paris Review that went viral in the early days of #MeToo. Here Dederer considers the subject in a series of connected essays from a number of angles, walking readers through her thinking and experiences as a reader, viewer, parent, friend and longtime critic.

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, Jane Wong (memoir)

In her debut memoir in essays, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, poet Jane Wong offers a nonlinear narrative of her life and her family’s lives. Her parents emigrated from China in the 1980s, when they were in their early 20s, and settled on the Jersey Shore to run a Chinese restaurant. “This is the story of lost enterprises,” Wong writes about Atlantic City in the elegiac title essay. “Of boarded-up pizza joints, lonely stuffed animals sans tipsy game operators, echoing parking lots with floating trash, and neon lights toppled over like sand castles.” (If you’re working on personal essays, dive into this book to see how she pushes the essay form, and for her beautiful sensory images.)

Enchantment, Katherine May (memoir/essays)

Katherine May’s essay collection Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age offers similar meditative pleasures as her previous collection, Wintering—though you don’t need to have read Wintering to enjoy Enchantment. “When I want to describe how I feel right now, the word I reach for the most is discombobulated,” she writes, going on to chart the losses, burnout and anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic, and of this era. “Time has looped and gathered, and I sometimes worry that I could skip through decades like this, standing in my bathroom, until I am suddenly old.” Though May’s search for enchantment seems perhaps better suited to the English landscape, with its fairy tale-like ancient sites and villages, than to our American suburban sprawl, Enchantment offers a lovely, meditative way to begin another tumultuous year.

And a shoutout to some other memorable 2023 books:

A short-story collection from a short-story master: After the Funeral, Tessa Hadley

Three literary novels, all with enthralling language: The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff, Day, Michael Cunningham; Wellness, Nathan Hill

A page turner that asks big questions: The Forgotten Woman, Jean Kwok

Two atmospheric coming-of-age novels set in the recent past: My Last Innocent Year, Daisy Florin, and Endpapers, Jennifer Savran Kelly

Historical fiction about the closeted novelist Somerset Maugham, set in 1920s Malaysia: The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng

A comic novel about a rich family that asks if great wealth is inherently bad: Pineapple Street, Jenny Jackson

A body-swapping queer short novel with a funny sex scene you will never forget: People Collide, Isle McElroy

Not a rom-com, but includes romance and comedy: Romantic Comedy, Curtis Sittenfeld

An evocative memoir about a loving father who fell apart and his writer-daughter; and an idiosyncratic memoir about a marriage of opposites: The Critic’s Daughter, Priscilla Gilman, and The Rye Bread Marriage, Michaela Weissman

A witchy, well-plotted historical melodrama with extraordinary cover art: Weyward, Emilia Hart. 📚📚

What books did you love, enjoy, keep thinking about, or throw across the room in 2023?

The view from here, right after sunrise at the winter solstice, Dec. 21.

Our Christmas tree! Very tall this year.