The Books I Can’t Shut Up About
My 2023 in reading.
Dear friend,
Trying to pick my favorite books of the year is an exercise in remembering all the great ones I read and realizing how many more there still are to read. I don’t usually make reading goals, and I tend to read a mix of old and new books, depending on what I’m working on and what I feel like at the time. Sometime over the summer, though, I had a wild idea that I needed to try to read all the 2023 new releases that I’d bought or reserved at the library so far. And so for the past few months, I’ve been putting off a lot of books in favor of reading all the new ones I keep bringing home with me.
This year I read a lot of new release novels, maybe more new novels than I’ve ever read in a year before. I wrote about several of them for the newspaper. A Quitter’s Paradise by Elysha Change, The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan, Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, and Dulcinea by Ana Veciana-Suarez are all such great novels that I reviewed. Even after writing about them, I could keep going on and on, singing their praises.
If I had to pick one favorite read from the whole year, which is really hard, it would have to be The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. This novel is about a community of African Americans and immigrant Jews living alongside the white, Christian establishment in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s. There is a huge cast of characters in this book with overlapping stories about secrets and triumphs that culminate in what might be the best heist I’ve ever read. There’s a reason this book keeps showing up on all the best-of lists this year. It’s such a good story.
Here are a few others that I loved:
Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns is a dark comedy about a ride-share driver who is trying to care for her aging mother and avoid eviction in a city erupting in protests. She falls hard for a wealthy white woman, who seems like a social justice ally but ultimately betrays her and her friends. It really is a wild, unpredictable ride!
Yellow Face by R.F. Huang is about two promising young writers in a frenemy relationship. I don’t ever seem to tire of books with writers as main characters, and I probably loved this book a little extra because of that. Plus it deals with a favorite messy emotion: professional jealousy.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith takes place in nineteenth-century England and revolves around a trial in which a man comes out of nowhere (Australia), claiming to be the heir of a fortune. The protagonist, who is a bit of a fraud herself, becomes obsessed with the question of whether or not he is telling the truth. And no one in this book is quite what they seem.
The Museum of Human History by Rebekah Bergman is a science fiction fairy tale retelling about a girl who falls asleep and stays that way for years without aging. While she sleeps, her twin sister, father, and the community around them deal with the strange phenomenon. All the while, weird things keep happening at the local biotech lab.
The Librarianist by Patrick Dewitt is a funny, life-affirming kind of story about a librarian who had a wife and best friend until that wife and best friend got together and left him. Decades later, a chance encounter brings him to a retirement home where he starts volunteering. Here he finds a community of friends and answers to some of the questions he’s been asking all his life about the two people he loved the most.
As far as romance novels, I’m a little behind on my reading, and I have a stack of new ones that I just picked up from the library. As much as I hate to say it, several of the romances that got the most hype this year kind of disappointed me. I won’t name names.
But I have realized that I have a very particular taste in romance novels. My absolute favorite kinds are light and silly and read like an Adam Sandler romantic comedy. Think: Fifty First Dates, one of the greatest movies of all time, and The Wedding Singer, one of the other greatest movies of all time. They don’t take themselves too seriously. I love this quality in a romance, whether it’s in the historical or contemporary genre.
So I loved Midnight Duet by Jen Comfort. It’s a Phantom of the Opera retelling—that alone, honestly, had me—about a scorned and scarred Broadway star who moves to Paris, Nevada, when she inherits a rundown opera house. The love interest is a German hair band frontman who rents the space for his band to write their next album because of the creepy vibes. This book is delightfully rompy and sexy in the silliest ways.
My Roommate Is a Vampire by Jenna Levine is about a broke artist who unknowingly moves in with a vampire who has been asleep for so long he has no idea how the modern world works. And it turns out he’s also the most adorable vampire in American letters.
In addition to all these great novels, I read some new nonfiction and essay and short story collections this year. I really liked Games and Rituals, the story collection by Katherine Heiny, because she’s so funny and I tend to love everything she writes. And I liked Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby, whose essays are always hilarious, and Love and Industry by Sonya Huber for its gritty midwestern-ness.
Wifedom; Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder is an awesome nonfiction book that I reviewed for the paper. I loved how she used a variety of source materials to recreate scenes from Orwell’s life from his wife’s perspective. For Orwell fans, this one is a must-read.
So it’s been a great year of reading, and, alas, the list of books to read has gotten longer still. I’m really looking forward to reading The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. I read a hilarious article he wrote earlier this year about that virtual reality thing that the Facebook guys were doing, and everyone has been talking about his book. I had a gift card from my birthday last month, so last night I stopped at Barnes and Noble on the way home from my parents’ house. They were out of The Bee Sting, so it remains at large from my reading life. But I grabbed a copy of Alice McDermott’s new one, Absolution, which is about Vietnam and probably fabulous because of Alice McDermott; The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan; and Never Met a Duke Like You by Amalie Howard, an author I haven’t read before. I also recently bought the new Danielle Steel, The Ball at Versailles, because I cannot resist when the Queen of Women’s Fiction sets a book in France, as well as the new Sophie Kinsella, The Burnout, because I love her. And I just started reading Julia by Sandra Newman, which is a retelling of Orwell’s 1984 from Julia’s perspective that I’m writing about for the paper and need to get my act together on. Needless to say, what remains of my 2023 reading is set.
If you read anything great, I’d love to hear about it. And happy holidays, friends!
I can’t believe we made it through another year! And gosh, it’s sure been… a year, hasn’t it? If you need me, I’ll probably be sitting somewhere with my face in a book.
Yellow face is currently on my reading list and you reminded me that I finally need to read Phantom of the Opera and maybe pick up that retelling you mentioned. I just finished „A long petal of the sea“, a story about two young people and their struggles during 1930s civil war in Spain.