retreat to move forward

or my favorite books of 2023 and year end rituals

Jan 16, 2024

a pair of glasses that are too cool for me to pull off, green with a funky gold trim. a screenshot of a fictional podcast called Zouk’s Cubes. an aspirational haircut of hair much curlier than mine. portuguese orange wine labeled with a hot pink duck. a negative covid test. a video of my nephew as he manages not to trip while reading and walking down the stairs. my three sisters and I in our eras tour attire.

I’m not really into new year’s resolutions, but I do enjoy a few end-of-one year/beginning-of-another rituals. I use these practices to reacquaint myself with the last year, to witness/remember/process and then march on that much wiser (one hopes). To close out every year, my husband and I perform The Year in Review show-and-tell our phone’s photo roll to each other, reminiscing on the food, places, people, activities or random telephone pole notices we’ve photographed in the past twelve months. It’s adorable and instructive to see how the other has captured their days and what was important enough (or not) to take a photo of. This activity helps me to remember many of the highs, the lows, the odd, the mundane and the uncontrollable that can happen in a year for both of us.

The next annual ritual we enact is The Purge, every January. A time to deep clean every nook and cranny of the apartment, rearrange furniture and knick knacks, wander down memory lane and donate/throw away any item we haven’t used since the last Purge. We put on a TV show that we’ve seen too many times, insert our airpods and get to work. We usually get through an entire series (last year was Schitt’s Creek, this year is going to be Broad City) by the time the last dust molecule has been evacuated. Usually takes a weekend or so.1 It is cleansing, weirdly fun and starts the new year off with a clean slate.

The final annual ritual I complete2 is looking through all the books I’ve read and listing out my favorites. I don’t have a quippy name for this. I keep track of every book I finish on Pinterest, have since 2012. I didn’t know about Goodreads when I started keeping track and am not really all in on that site. It’s helpful for some things, especially for following authors and their recs. I will use it to link to books here because I don’t want to link directly to Amazon… just indirectly I guess… #quandary

Pinterest is old school, but I enjoy seeing the long hopscotch of covers, like they are all face out on a bookshelf awaiting their reader to pluck them. Also, they instantly transport me back to when/where I read them.3 But, I do wish I could find a site where I can keep my unedited ramblings on a title private until fit for public consumption and also keep track of particularly frustrating DNFs4 and their crimes against me. If you have an insight here, help me out.

books i’ve read in 2023

I read 123 books last year. Random aside: I was curious to see how many were written by men and turns out, there were 10.5 Two of them were from the same author. And one book, that I know of, was by a non-binary author. There were probably more, I just don’t know the pronouns of each author, so this is an guesstimation.

Without anymore ado, here are my favorite books from 2023 in no particular order6. Click the covers to learn more and then add these to your nightstand.7

non-fiction

thanks to molly wizenberg for recommending this one to me

This memoir jumps around between the author’s childhood and a period of time in her adulthood where circumstances required her to move back in with her eccentric parents. Lockwood’s voice positively drips in wit as she invites the reader into this almost Wonderland-like world where darkness and light, the absurd and the sacred combine with the hilarious, weird, mundane and bewildering. The more she reveals her family to us though, the more it becomes clear that she is just as idiosyncratic as they are.

Though I had a much different childhood, I connected strongly with Lockwood’s confrontations of her religious upbringing and its maddening contradictions. It helped me be bold enough to identify the cognitive dissonance in my own upbringing and to be of many minds about it, not pressured to feel all one way or all the other.

“When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it.”

“Faith and my father taught me the same lesson: to live in the mystery, even to love it”

I’m sure we all grapple with artists whose work we love and whose actions we hate. These essays are a peek into the author’s psyche as she works out how to deal with this emotion laden quagmire for herself. Looking back at my 2023 photos, I had taken quite a few pictures of passages from this one because its wisdom, humor and incisive sentences just kept grabbing me. This felt like taking a class in the best way as I kept having to google different films, paintings, photos etc to get the context.8

… I’m not just sympathizing with their victims-I've been in the same shoes, or similar. I have the memory of those monstrous things being done to me. I don't come to these questions with a coldness or a dispassionate point of view. I come as a sympathizer to the accusers. I am the accusers. And yet I still want to consume the art. Because, out in front of all of that, I'm a human. And I don't want to miss out on anything. Why should I? Why should I be deprived of Chinatown or Sleeper? This tension-between what I've been through as a woman and the fact that I want to experience the freedom and beauty and grandeur and strangeness of great art—this is at the heart of the matter. It's not a philosophical query; it's an emotional one.

fantasy

Another book that felt like taking a class, this one could be titled: The Colonization of Language and How it Upholds Empire. Set at the fictional Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford, the story follows Robin, a young Chinese man brought to England to be educated in the early 1800s. With him, we discover more and more about how his world actually works and what he decides to do about it. This one is dark academia with a pint of magic, but I think the historical vibe of this will work for readers who aren’t that into fantasy. Magic isn’t the main focus. The language trivia and its connections to empire building were riveting and the author’s bio is seriously, academically badass.

I don’t usually gravitate toward “epics”. Too many sprawling locations and time periods, too much sand and too many characters make it hard for me connect. However! The two main characters in this were so visceral and mesmerizing that I was with them every step of their journeys to reach glorious purpose. Set in 1300s China, Zhu takes her dead brother’s destiny of greatness and attempts to hide from her own fate of nothingness through ingenuity, spirituality and violence. We follow Zhu’s journey of grand ambition along with a few excellent supporting characters which keeps the story moving (in pacing and emotion) and devastating. Note that it’s #1 in a duology, but #2 is already released so don’t @ me.

I wish this had a better cover. I find all three of Harrow’s novels to have too-precious covers for their dark and gritty-ish stories. This should have shown off its nightmare/ southern gothic/horror/romance vibe better, but I digress.

Opal lives in the dead end town of Eden, Kentucky and dreams of escape and the local creepy house. As she grows closer to the house’s origins (and its occupant, Arthur), mysterious nightmares begin to inhabit her real world. Somehow this is a sweet romance wrapped up in a story about violent generational trauma with some lovely atmospheric writing. Love me the theme of “the necessity of desire” and Harrow’s consistent way of playing with stories within stories and the immense power they have.

fiction

This was so fucking funny, I annoyed all my companions while reading because of my constant snickering and they were all jealous of the terrific time I was having. Now I have no friends. A sort of coming-of-age tale mostly set in 2010’s Ireland, we follow Rachel’s delectably unique commentary of a specific window in her life, which mostly consists of shenanigans with James, her roommate/best friend, and the wider consequences of said shenanigans. I originally pegged this as one of those novels comprised of an overly dramatic narration of the absurdity of the day to day 9, but its plot is there, hidden inside the hilarity and eventually asserts itself with a terrific blend of fate, intensity and human emotion. I just love when an author has crafted something fully formed and deeply intentional, and it is even more gratifying to realize what I assumed was one thing is actually another AND it works. I gravitate to stories where the ridiculous and the real smoothie together to create something that feels purely true (looking at you Greta Gerwig and Sloane Crosley).

I needed to remind myself of my anger, so I didn’t inadvertently mix up good snacks with a good man.

Somehow both brutal and beautiful, this is a fiction inspired by the true story recounted in the article The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia. Set over two days in a Mennonite community, the story really is of women talking. The men of the colony are away to post bail to free the ones who have drugged and raped most of the women and girls in their sleep over the course of years, having finally been revealed to not be ghosts or demons, but their own brothers, uncles, cousins and relatives. These (forcibly) illiterate women are expected to forgive and welcome the men back into the colony and are meeting to discuss whether they will 1) do nothing 2) stay and fight or 3) leave the colony and in essence their entire world. In a particularly sharp narrative choice, the women ask August, a man recently allowed back into the colony after decades away, to take their minutes as they are, again, illiterate. So, this story of women talking is told through a man’s perspective which lends yet another intriguing layer to the proceedings. Each character is nuanced, uniquely intelligent, frustrating and fascinating and I gobbled all of it up, eager to be angry alongside them. But I found myself also inspired by their hope, wisdom, wit and tenacity, their very female-ness too.

extra credit: Sarah Polley’s incredible film adaptation (streaming now on Prime)

If God is a vengeful God, then He has created us in His image

The second book on this list by R.F. Kuang, (she of the badass academic credentials) this one is a completely different genre from Babel. What an author! A satire set in the publishing world, we follow June Hayward (or should we say Juniper Song???) as she steals her dead friend’s manuscript and releases it as her own. This is one of those love-to-hate first person narrations that is funny and horrifying and, to be honest, I did feel a sense of relief when I finished the book and was finally free of this woman’s dysfunctional POV. This one is clever, uncomfortable and super incisive about the book world and social media which I’m sure the author is well versed in as she plays with themes of appropriation, commercialism in publishing and the millennial mindset.

extra credit: “The Trouble With Race Satires Like American Fiction" by R.F.Kuang10

I don’t usually go for “book clubby” books as I am much too cool for that, but I enjoyed this one. A simple, layered story of a woman recounting (most of) the story of her young adult summer romance with a now-famous actor to her three daughters as they work in their cherry orchard in the summer of 2020. I loved each daughter’s particularities and how they interacted with each other, their mother and with the much mythologized Peter Duke story itself. Each person brings their own interpretations, assumptions and judgements and, of course, no one person owns the story but our narrator gives us her own sly asides and some secrets that aren’t delivered to her daughters.

As a kid, my siblings and I used to beg my Dad for “stories without a book”, and he’d recount various life escapades that have since become lore in our family. This book made me reminisce on these stories: how true are they? how have my interpretations of them have evolved over time? why is that left in and what was left out? my parents had a whole life before I arrived!? It made me value their stories and want to seek them out more, but at the same time I’m nervous to.

extra credit: I hear the audiobook narrated by Meryl Streep is terrific. I rarely listen to fiction so I can’t personally vouch, but for those audiophiles out there, let me know

Usually the phrase “multi-generational story” is enough for me to pass on a title. I like to connect deeply with a character or two and don’t really want to have to emotionally invest in too many times, places and people. But this one! It doesn’t span too much time and follows 3 narrators, each as interesting and expertly drawn as the other. With a sprinkling of magical realism, the story follows unpaid intern Lily Chen in early 2000s New York and her relationship with Matthew, a rich white guy and the years and choices that follow their relationship. Themes of race, class, family, betrayal and genetics abound but are always enmeshed inside deeply human characters. Khong writes incredible sentences, gorgeously simple and profound.

romance

Finally we come to this utterly delightful gender-swapped take on When Harry Met Sally. This was consistently sexy, funny and had a winning supporting cast along with its charmingly dopey mains. Ari and Josh have multiple disastrous meetups over the years that result in a shared dislike of each other, until they reconnect over their mutual broken hearts and become friends. Their friendship is electric; the banter is droll, the comebacks are witty and their connection is sweet. I especially enjoyed the physicality the author includes as it really makes the scenes come alive, almost cinematically. Will read this one again in another year or so for sure.

extra: We all get it, Adam Driver is hot AF, but is it really ok to put his face on all these romance covers? Like, is that even legal? Is he making $$ off these likenesses!?

Have you read any of these? What did you think or feel about them? How many books do you average a year? Do you have a better way of keeping track of your reads?