The Best Old(er) Books I Read in 2023
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I read more books in 2023 than I have in any year of my adult life, and perhaps even in years when, as a child, I spent all my time burrowed into fantasy novels by the likes of Tamora Pierce and Patricia C. Wrede. Happily, I've maintained my ability to read quickly through long covid, although there are lots of days when I can't read at all, and headaches often force me to stop reading even when a book is getting really good (probably for the best).
I've already written up a list of the best ten books of 2023, though as I've started to catch up on some titles I missed, I've already read two I would surely have included on that list, though I'm not sure what I would have kicked off (My Work, by Olga Ravn [trans. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell], a formally inventive novel about post-partum depression, and Mobility, by Lydia Kiesling, about a blissfully ignorant young American woman who stumbles into working in the oil industry). This list, by contrast, is ridiculously long, to reflect the ridiculous number of backlist books I read and loved in 2023. I've tried to keep my blurbs short in order to include as many as possible, but my hope for this sprawling document is less that it be read in one go and more that it can serve as a resource for people looking for reading inspiration over the course of 2024.
Many of these reads were inspired by the podcast Backlisted, which has introduced me to many new authors, especially female novelists from twentieth-century Britain, who are well-represented here. Next year, my goal is to read more fiction in translation from countries outside of Europe. I'm always trying to read more books in translation, and did a decent-ish job this year, but most of those books were by European authors.
You can find most of this long list of books over on Bookshop.org, minus a few only available in the UK.
Fiction
The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson. I've had this on my shelf for a while and finally got around to it, and it's as good as everyone says. A wonderful way to get into this kind of classic text if you find books like this intimidating; she has an extensive educational introduction and the poetry itself is incredibly readable.
Various plays by Chekhov and Ibsen. Sometime the time comes for you to rectify an embarrassing hole in your knowledge.
Most of the plays of Tom Stoppard. I'm missing some of the early stuff and am saving up The Coast of Utopia. Being inside such a pyrotechnic mind is a joy. Also, he's so funny.
Many books about pregnancy and motherhood. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, Barbara Comyns; The Pumpkin Eater, Penelope Mortimer; The Millstone, Margaret Drabble; Princes in the Land, Joanna Cannan; The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan. All these were provocative in different ways, from depicting childbirth graphically in a time when that was a taboo (Comyns) to challenging the idea that a woman needs a partner to have a baby (Drabble—maybe my favorite of the lot). And Jessamine Chan's (audio)book made me weep hysterically, which is a rarity and high compliment.
Many books by Natalia Ginzburg. Ginzburg was my big discovery and obsession of the year; normally I don't read a lot of books by the same author in quick succession, but I got addicted to her. Like Szabó below she has a moral clarity from living through WWII (especially as a Jew), and the best book of hers I read was All Our Yesterdays (trans. Martin Secker), which mostly takes place in a small town in southern Italy as the war unfolds.
Katalin Street, Magda Szabó (trans. Len Rix). Nothing can match The Door, Szabó's nihilistic masterpiece, but she gets at the deepest most messed up feelings of her characters in this book, set in the lead-up and aftermath of WWII in Budapest, in a similarly abject way. I'm awed by her.
The Eustace Diamonds, Anthony Trollope. Simply one of the most fun Victorian novels you'll encounter, part sensation novel and part political farce. Pretty much everyone in this book is awful, which didn't impede my enjoyment in the slightest. For a while after getting sick I couldn't attempt a book like this, and reading it made me so happy.
Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens. I've already written about this here.
Esther Waters, George Moore. I do not know how this man, whom everyone who knew him seems to have agreed was a horrendous asshole, wrote such a startlingly frank book about being a female servant in Victorian England. This book, too, deals with the reality of motherhood in this period in a way that almost no other contemporary novels dared to.
A House and Its Head, Ivy Compton-Burnett. For a pseudo-Victorianist such as myself this is a fascinating text, one in which everything that had to remain unspoken in actual Victorian novels (family abuse, sex) becomes explicit. An incredibly dark book.
South Riding, Winifred Holtby. One of my very favorite books of the year. A long novel set in a fictional area of Yorkshire in the 1930s, clearly (loosely) inspired by Middlemarch and focusing primarily on a local girls' school and its headmistress and the local government. Holtby juggles an extraordinary number of characters, giving you a real sense of the depth of the community, and like Eliot you sense that she has a real love and affection for these people and people in general, even though some of them behave badly.
An Academic Question and Jane and Prudence, Barbara Pym. Pym is who I read when I want to just feel nice for a day. These two books are connected in an interesting way—she reused characters from the first in the second some time later—and the first takes place in Oxford and uses Oxford tropes in a way I found very amusing.
Something in Disguise, Elizabeth Jane Howard. A simultaneously funny and extremely dark novel about the adult children of what I suppose you might call a blended family. This is, like most of my favorite books, very funny at times, almost as a cover for the bad stuff lurking beneath.
Look at Me and Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner. Finally caught up to Brookner whom I've been meaning to read for a while. I don't know how she manages to write these books where nothing happens but the emotional stakes seem so incredibly high. I'll read more this year.
O Caledonia, Elspeth Barker. As good as advertised, bildungsroman with a gothic twist. The palpable sense of decay and degradation of this place, and the little bird, have stayed with me.
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe. Another instance of filling in an embarrassing gap. I read this with the teenage girl I mentor and had the great experience of finally reading a very famous classic and finding it really thrilling, as a piece of writing. Next year I hope to read the sequels.
The Narrows, Ann Petry. One of the best books I read last year and have ever read, one of those maddening times when you read a full-on masterpiece by a Black writer and wonder "Why is this not routinely taught in American lit classes at universities around the nation?" Somehow simultaneously a triumph of realism and modernism, stylistically; a mammoth work that should be recognized as one of our country's great works of literature. A painful read but also an incredible pleasure to experience such extraordinary sentences. (The Street, Petry's better-known novel, is also great, but it can't compare to this.)
Other People's Houses, Lore Segal. A novel that may as well be a memoir about Segal and her family fleeing Austria for England, then the Dominican Republic, and finally New York after Hitler rose to power. Segal is so good at showing what she, as a child, did and didn't understand, and how self-absorbed children are even in a difficult situation, but also how traumatized she was, in ways that she couldn't really process at the time.
Desperate Characters, Paula Fox. A mad tale of a bourgeois, gentrifying couple in Brooklyn—the wife gets a cat bite and refuses to go to doctor to have it treated despite her hand getting more and more swollen as time goes on. This is, obviously, a metaphor, one that Fox deploys viciously but never quite articulates.
Oreo, Fran Ross. The single most gleefully anarchic I have maybe ever read. I could not begin to summarize what happens in this book, you just have to read it yourself. Ross would get "cancelled" so fast in 2023 for this, which is largely what makes the novel so exciting (and funny). The seventies weren't that interested in what she was doing, either, and this is very sadly her only book.
A Drop of Patience, William Melvin Kelley. I love Kelley's A Different Drummer and this book is fascinatingly experimental in a different way: the main character, a jazz musician, is blind, and there are no visual descriptions in the book, and I believe he also doesn't use the verb "to hear" anywhere either. Kelley was not blind but conveys this experience (it seems to me) with incredible detail. The main character is also not a very nice person, especially to women, though not a villain either, bypassing a lot of stereotypes and disabled and blind people specifically. Another book I feel should be read and discussed a lot more.
Sula, Toni Morrison. Filling in gaps! I never took an American literature class in the entirety of my education so I feel like I'm still catching up. Of course, this was wonderful.
Heartburn, Nora Ephron. I'm not in the cult of Nora Ephron in the way some people are—though obviously, what's not to like—but Meryl Streep reads this audiobook and it's basically the best thing I've ever heard in my life.
Caucasia, Danzy Senna. Another book that I feel like should be talked about and read much more. This is so accessible and enjoyable—it has a lot of classic bildungsroman elements—and also so politically cutting. Senna has a new book out this year that I'm now looking forward to reading.
The Trees and Erasure, Percival Everett. I finally read a couple Everetts—there are so many more to read—and now I'm annoyed that the adaptation of Erasure, American Fiction, sounds like it's not very good; I keep reading peeved reactions about how dated and hollow it is. "Read the book!" I want to scream at everyone. But really, read the book.
We the Animals, Justin Torres. I'd also like to reread more books next year; this was a rare reread for me (in preparation for his new novel, which I've still not read) and it was maybe even better than I remembered it being, which is saying a lot.
Benefit, Siobhan Phillips. In some ways this feels more like a collection of stories—the main character reconnects with everyone from a Rhodes-type fellowship at Oxford some years later, while doing work for the foundation that sponsored it, the money from which came from sugar. She winds up getting into the historical implications of this, and many of the other characters are implicated in the American imperial project. A fascinating and formally clever book (that I don't think anyone has really read).
The Spare Room, Helen Garner. One of many books I read about illness this year, and one of the very best novels. In this, the narrator's friend is dying of cancer and insists on pursuing unscientific quack treatments. If you have encountered anything like this in your life you will want to pull out your hair.
The Springs of Affection, Maeve Brennan. These short stories, by a former New Yorker writer, are perfect little brutal gems, mostly focused on the problems of marriage and thereby gender relations in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. Very little happens and yet you feel just awful. "Read this if you want to feel bad!" Always an irresistible endorsement.
The Colony, Audrey Magee. A recent Irish novel about language and colonization should have gotten more attention.
Nonfiction
Many memoirs of illness and disability. The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso; A Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain, Christina Crosby; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby (trans. Jeremy Leggatt); Easy Beauty, Chloé Cooper Jones; The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, Siri Hustvedt; Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy (with Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett). These books were incredibly important to me this year and I'm sure I'll be reading many more this year and in years to come. I recommend all of them. My favorite was perhaps Autobiography of a Face, but I might just think that because I read it most recently. Crosby's book is also especially valuable. She was an academic and she brings in and analyzes theory about disability, pain, the social safety net, etc. in a very illuminating way.
Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, Sarah Polley. This book could easily be included above, with the illness books, but Polley's essays also span growing up in the entertainment industry, parenthood, and MeToo. Of all the wonderful memoirs I read this year, this book has perhaps stayed with me the most. I am in awe of Polley's ability to conjure and dissect her own past experiences and relationships, the often unhealthy power dynamics at play therein, and how these stories connect to wider cultural trends. (Her writing about concussion and recovery from concussion is also some of the best writing about illness I've read.) Also, despite the very dark subject matter of most of these essays, this book is very funny, made moreso by her narration of her audiobook, which includes imitations of her own children so perfect I laughed out loud.
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, Phyllis Rose. A book written for me, somehow, despite it coming out before I was born. Each of these marriages is fascinating in its own way, and Rose's broader observations about marriage are so insightful.
The True History of the First Mrs Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, Diane Johnson. A great book to pair with Parallel Lives. This book rescues and reimagines the life of Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, the daughter and wife of two famous male writers (her husband, George Meredith, barred her from seeing their son after she had an affair with a painter). The historical record about her is often lacking, but Johnson somehow manages to fill in the gaps in a way that is at once speculative but not outright fanciful.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe. Listened on audiobook; Keefe reads his own work very well. I probably don't need to explain this one, which has gotten plenty of attention, but even though I thought I knew a lot about the subject going in I still came away wanting all those people to die painfully.
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation, Imani Perry. As a New Englander, who's spent the rest of my life in New York (and occasionally Oxford), this book was incredibly illuminating. I don't understand the South and I've barely spent any time there. Perry explores all the Southern states and regions, delving into her own personal history, the history of Black communities in these places, and the history and societal structures that work to perpetuate racism and segregation. This is very long but worthwhile (great audiobook).
Nine Continents: A Memoir in and Out of China, Xiaolu Guo. I love Guo's writing and this book really gripped me. She doesn't hesitate to write about the brutality of her family relationships as well as the grimness of aspects of her student life in Beijing and also her life as an immigrant in London. I think there's often a temptation to romanticize either the homeland or the new country and she refuses to do either; she is too uncompromising.