My Favourite Books Read in 2023
Depending on whether I clean up two more in the next 48 hours, I will have read between 58 and 60 books in 2023. That's a pretty good number given that I spent the year in graduate school. Because I was in graduate school, I didn't read as much as I have in recent years; I also did not read as many difficult or challenging books, which has resulted in fewer favourites. But overall my reading year was a success—my main goal was to keep reading quite a bit, if on revised terms, and I'm happy to say I've done that.
I could round out my favourite books from this year to 8 based purely on 5- and 4.5-star ratings, but I only labelled 6 as favourites of the year. Here, then, are the 6 best books I read this year.
Kindred - Octavia Butler [x]
It's my absolute pleasure to call Kindred my favourite book of the year. This book is a strong demonstration of everything the time travel trope is capable of exploring. Dana's journey through antebellum Virginia as a Black Californian of the 1980s is a harrowing and expertly rendered historical exploration that achieves its intentions, but equally memorable is the time we spend with Dana in the 1980s. The reader is also left to decipher Dana's marriage to her white husband, who sometimes flashes into the past with her and responds to it differently, in telling ways.
This book might work for you if: you enjoy stories about time travel with detailed, well researched explorations of slavery in its time—and nuanced explorations of its lasting repercussions.
This book might not be for you if: you do not enjoy time travel. It also may not be the right pick if any of the content warnings you'd expect to see in a book about slavery—detailed accounts of violence, sometimes deadly, against Black enslaved people; sexual coercion and abuse; general explorations of the myriad complex abuses associated with a segregated society and slavery economies—are no-go zones for you; this was a difficult read.
Similar reads: I have not read a book that I can comfortably comp to Kindred, but speculative explorations of slavery and its legacies on my to-read list include The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and The Deep by Rivers Solomon.
-
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies - Deesha Philyaw [x]
It takes a lot for a short story collection to be strong enough to make a favourites list—there wasn't a single dud in this collection. These stories have stuck with me the whole year. Each is about a Black woman or girl dealing with some slice-of-life conflict—some are teens, some middle-aged; some are seeking comfort in dealing with ailing parents, others exploring and negotiating their queer sexualities. All of these are about love, especially love that is a little or a lot transgressive. It made me cry more than once, and has become my easily most recommendable short story collection.
This book might work for you if: you enjoy literary short stories about characters dealing with messy, slice-of-life problems—and who resolve them incompletely.
This book might not be for you if: you like tidy endings or tidy characters. A lot of these women are struggling through complex issues from abuse to body dysphoria to homophobia; some of them are struggling to resolve problems of their own creation, to no avail. Tidy it is not.
Similar reads: Recitatif, Toni Morrison; Lot, Bryan Washington; Filthy Animals, Brandon Taylor; Runaway, Alice Munro
-
Devil House - John Darnielle [x]
This book splits opinions, and it's easy to understand why. This is a book in seven parts that is, on the surface, about true crime, but moreover about how media can exploit vulnerable people; what vulnerability looks like; how vulnerabilites can overlap; and how much one's perspective matters to seeing vulnerability where it exists. Many of its sections are written unusually—there is an Arthurian analogy, including one extended Arthurian metaphor written in a gothic font. When I finished this book, I read the last two pages again, sat with it, and then leafed to the beginning to read the first few pages with new eyes. This book takes risks that at points makes the narrative feel fragmented, but for me the risks were worthwhile.
This book might work for you if: you enjoy slow-moving literary suspense, books with unusual craft and execution, or books that take narrative risks—even if they're not completely pulled off. There is also an element of unreliable narration that hits when it hits.
This book might not work be for you if: you take the book's marketing at face value. It is not meaningfully a work of horror, and it is certainly not speculative horror. This slow-moving book is more interested in craft than narrative. It does not completely come together and make sense of itself until the final of the seven sections—if you need to have a sense of a book's project earlier than the last 15%, this book may not be for you.
Similar reads: Trust, Hernan Diaz; It, Stephen King
-
Indian Horse - Richard Wagamese [x]
It feels redundant and understating to call this a book that achieves its project, but it does: we follow Saul Indian Horse, a young Ojibwe boy who is taken to a residential school in northern Ontario after his family dies / abandons him. Amid soul-shattering abuses, Saul discovers hockey, which provides him with a source of joy. He is taken in by a hockey-loving Ojibwe family as his skill evolves, and the book follows him over decades as tries to navigate the world as a young Indigenous man in Canada who has endured abuses almost impossible to process.
Despite this description, it is not a hopeless read. Among the book's foremost assets is its incorporation of the joys in Saul's life—Saul's love for his brother and grandmother, his love of hockey, the love of his adoptive family and Indigenous community, the ultimate kindness of strangers who help Saul along the way. It was this year's only one-sitting read—I felt like I literally could not move on until Saul's journey was seen through.
This book might work for you if: you're looking for a literary but accessible read on the legacies of residential schools on Canada's Indigenous populations that also explores possible mechanisms of support. Just as Kindred is an apt exploration of how slavery is far from irrelevant to modern American life, Indian Horse is a fantastic demonstration of how settler colonialism—in legacy and in renewed colonization—continues to perpetuate itself in Canadian society, and the factors that can help to acknowledge and address the shattering damage of those legacies.
This book might not be for you if: any of the content warnings you'd expect to see in a book about residential schools and settler colonialism—detailed accounts of torture and violence, sometimes deadly, against Indigenous children; childhood sexual assault; religious trauma; suicide; alcoholism and addiction—are no-go zones for you.
Similar reads: Making Love with the Land, Joshua Whitehead; The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline; The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
-
Trust - Hernan Diaz [x]
Trust is a book written in four parts, effectively telling the same story four times from different perspectives. It follows a powerful family in 1920s America and Europe four times: once in a fictionalized account of their lives, once in research notes on the actual family, once from the perspective of a lower-middle-class secretary to one of its members, and once in journal entries from the woman at the centre of the narrative. At its core, this is a book about wealth, gender, class, and corruption. It takes until about halfway through the book to understand what it's about, and it can be hard to parse the "true" story through layers of unreliable narration, but for me, the journey was worth it.
This book might work for you if: you like slow-paced, craft-y literary books about storytelling—how stories (and histories) are told, who tells them, and the relationship of those stories to the truth.
This book might not be for you if: you're a reader who needs to understand the project of a book earlier than the halfway point. It is very slow-moving, and the beginning pages of the book are a classic example of how not to compellingly start a novel.
Similar reads: Devil House, John Darnielle; The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel; The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
-
Nothing to See Here - Kevin Wilson [x]
This is my weird fiction representative of the year: We follow a disaffected millennial Lillian who is hired by her frenemy to take care of her two step-kids, who keep causing trouble by spontaneously combusting. Lillian is deeply alienated and finds great solace and purpose in helping these kids sort out their feelings—they are not combusting on purpose, but rather can't control the effects of their grief over their mother's death and father's detachment. The story is ultimately about three lonely people who find each other in the most unusual of contexts.
This book may work for you if: you like metaphorical explorations of isolation and alienation. If you, like me, are making your way through the proliferation of "sad Millennial girl" books, I've read a number of those this year and this is by far my favourite.
This book may not be for you if: detached, purposeless narrators without much emotional investment don't work for you—Lillian is hard to access and makes choices that aren't always clearly motivated. This may also not be for you if you need tidy world-building explanations for speculative aspects.
Similar reads: Bunny, Mona Awad; Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield; Big Swiss, Jen Beagin
I've done reading in other arenas that is less trackable: I slush-read 200+ pieces for Augur Magazine, plus read every piece for the two issues Augur put out this year, editing three pieces among them. I read a great deal of articles, scholarship, and literary excerpts for grad school, and read more in French than ever before. I read several short stories from magazines that I haven't tracked, and I have started books and put them down again, some to pick up later and others to put down forever. I also discovered and catalogued a deep love of mysteries and a deep dislike of thrillers, despite extensive overlap between the two.
Most important was that I kept up the habit and made sure leisure reading was a central part of how I spend my time. What I've read matters much less to me than that I've read.
My reading goal for 2024 is loftier than this year's, but I am also taking into account that it will be a year of shifts and changes. Among other things, I will do another semester of grad school, graduate, then hopefully take up a reading- and writing-heavy career in translation shortly afterwards. I also hope to do a great deal more personal writing—to do for writing in 2024 as I did for reading in 2023, which is to produce a practice and make writing a significant part of my time spent on whatever terms that entails.
Regardless, I hope to read 72 books in 2024. I also hope to dig into several minor challenges: finishing books I am halfway through, finishing books I've had several false starts with, finishing series that are on my shelf but I haven't gotten to by sheer daunting. Half of my reading hobby is making connections in what I read, and I hope to do more of this creative stuff in 2024—and talk about it—as well.
Thank you for reading about my reading. I hope your reading year felt as successful and informative as did mine.