Favorite books of 2023
Favorite books of 2023
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
Read for: A tale that transcends continents and contexts; a multidimensional take on right and wrong and in between
The author’s first book is one I think about years after reading it, even though it didn’t register as a favorite book at the time. But I still sometimes remember how she captured the collective energy of New York City dreamers working for a better future and the feeling of how you can be transformed when your dreams are stifled. I dove into her latest book without knowing its premise, which I recommend. It humanizes the impact of oil production while somehow also being funny and nuanced.
Read with: 📖 Behold The Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
Read for: Infusing your mind with completely new ways to perceive the world, beyond the five senses we’re familiar with; a tour through fascinating animal species
An immensely enjoyable and joyful read about the breadth of ways to experience the world, told through the eyes, ears, and whiskers of many different animal species. It starts with chapters on senses more familiar to us — smells, tastes, light, color, pain, heat, sound — and describes how other animals perceive more dimensions than we can. The chapters on other types of perception — vibrations, the flow of water, electric and magnetic fields — were even more mind-blowing and a reminder that it’s impossible for any being to fully perceive all of reality. We’re limited by our umwelt: a sensory bubble that we can never fully escape, limiting us to the smallest sliver of reality. This book is a window out of the bubble, letting us know what lies beyond.
Read with: 📖 Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a science fiction book that wonders how a world built by super-intelligent spiders (who communicate primarily through vibrations on their webs) would look different from ours
Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids by Scott Hershovitz
Read for: a light intro to philosophy, peppered with funny kid conversations; an argument that kids are philosophers; encouragement to talk to kids about big ideas
I’ve always found philosophy to be confusing, vague, too concerned with imperceptible distinctions between words, too detached from reality. Lately, I’ve found it to be a useful way to trace the diffusion of ideas that shape our everyday thinking.
This book is the Explain Like I’m Five of philosophy, starting from the perspective of literal five-year-olds who ask questions about morality, existence, and reality. They often come up with the same answers as centuries-old philosophers.
Read with: 📖 How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur; 📖 Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
Stay True by Hua Hsu
Read for: Indulging your college nostalgia; simple but distinctive writing; an immigrant story
This memoir captures the weird essence of college friendships: the pairings that happen by chance, the hours upon hours spent talking about nothing, the random things that become rituals of friendship.
I marveled at how much detail he recalled about the day-to-day interactions of campus life, until I realized the poignant reason he had fervently catalogued this detail and held onto it for decades. I also enjoyed both the relatability and specificity of his parents’ immigration story.
Read with: 🎧 Longform podcast interview with Hua Hsu; 📖 Green Island by Shawna Yang (a completely different book that also features Berkeley as a key setting)
Green Island by Shawna Yang
Read for: A multigenerational family saga; diving into a little-known period of Taiwan’s history
I don’t recommend starting this book right before bed, as I did. It opens with a propulsive, distressing story of life under a capricious, brutal regime.
This historical fiction novel follows a Taiwanese family from the time of the 228 incident in 1947 through a half-century of political repression and martial law. The book explores how these incidents follow the family across continents and decades.
Reading this book (and Lisa See’s book below) were a severe reminder that politics can most definitely get worse, and there is no bottom to human cruelty. They also remind us that things can be completely different within a few decades, if we choose.
Read with: 📖 The Island of the Sea Women by Lisa See, which is also a deeply researched historical fiction novel; it covers a portion of South Korea’s history as it waned in and out of military dictatorship and celebrates Jeju Island’s unique subculture of female deep sea divers.
Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner
Read for: Understanding how to feel connected and small at the same time; new ways to appreciate everyday life
Toward the end of every year, I gravitate toward books that felt big and wondrous and mysterious. I would read about the shape of the universe, a sweeping history of religion, quantum physics, human evolution, anything by Ted Chiang. When I picked up Keltner’s book, I realized that I was chasing the feeling of awe. The book covers awe from multiple angles: academic research, the author’s personal story of grief and awe, stories of awe in different cultures and contexts. His research suggests awe can come from many sources, including the ones we might expect: nature, music, art, religion. But the most common sources of awe were of people appreciating “moral beauty,” or stories of kindness and courage from others.
Read with: 📖 We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson, an illustrated, comedic guide to humanity’s unanswered questions about where we live; 📖 God: A Human History by Reza Aslan, a brief sketch about the evolution of religion; 📖 Exhalation by Ted Chiang; 📖 The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.
Other books I’ve written about:
The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker J. Palmer
Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones
Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson