All the books I read in 2023, reviewed in two sentences or less
Continuing the annual tradition for the tenth year!
The Last Wish: Introducing the Witcher - Andrzej Sapkowski: While I am the kind of person who enjoys a new fantasy concept, the macho energy of the Witcher did not do it for me.
The Purpose Driven Church - Rick Warren: I do not belong to a church and do not plan to organize one, but I think Warren's approach to organizing his church is a valuable perspective on how organizations of all kinds can intertwine leadership development with organizational development. The nature of churches as voluntary associations of believers requires careful attention to how to serve volunteers, as well as activate them into service, and that balancing act is one that we could all learn from.
Soundings - Doreen Cunningham: Soundings is a mosaic of stories about family, animals, and climate change assembled around a story of following Grey Whales on their migration from California to Alaska. The intelligence and beauty of whales makes them common places to begin conversations about protecting the planet, and the author cuts through the many cliches that have built up around them with incredible honesty and a great deal of personal grief.
The Great Derangement - Amitav Ghosh: There are many informative books about climate change now in the world, but I think this one might be the most interesting, exploring how Western storytelling shapes what is visible and invisible in the climate crisis.
All of the Earthsea books - Ursula K. Le Guin: This was my occasional re-read of comfort-food fantasy.
October - China Mieville: The more I’ve had some time to reflect on this book, the more I think it is a somewhat less than honest portrayal of the October revolution in Russia. There are many interesting things to say about the Russian Revolution, and an admittedly celebratory Leninist take isn’t the best way to say them.
Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver: This is a novel written with a clear humanitarian intent, but in my mind it never shook a sort of patrician distance from its characters that made it feel less than credible as a portrait. Perhaps it was the awkward result of trying to align with its original Dickensian source material, but it never felt like the author wanted to truly get close enough with her characters to give them life.
Good for a Girl - Lauren Fleshman: My friend Maria recommended this book and I’ve gone on to recommend it to several others since. It’s specifically about the structural mistreatment of elite women athletes, but the core of it is a lesson in how to be kind to your body, which is worth doing.
The Poppy War Trilogy - R F Kuang: I started this trilogy with some hope and just felt like I was slogging through it by the end. Even when enduring cataclysmic events, the characters never seem to grow or change in a meaningful way, and the quality of storytelling isn’t up to the task of its ambitious scale.
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel: This is as charming of a book as can be written about an apocalyptic pandemic, and it says a lot that it retains its appeal after an actual pandemic.
Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson: The Mars trilogy is one of the best works of science fiction I’ve ever read, but I didn’t have the bandwidtch for the whole series this summer. A nice reminder of how clarifying and provocative scifi can be, at its best.
Severance - Ling Ma: I think Severance might be my favorite novel that I read this year, and while it’s about a pandemic in a way, it’s not solely that. A lot of people have said this book is great, and they are right - what I enjoyed most was the elegance of how it slipped metaphor into plot and plot into metaphor to create something worth thinking about for a long time.
Bluets - Maggie Nelson: Maggie Nelson is a wonderful writer and seems to know so much about tragedy. I still haven’t read anything by her that I haven’t enjoyed.
Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann: I am so glad I read this book before seeing the film, which was structured in a wildly different way: David Grann’s book reads like a mystery and stays much closer to the victims in the Osage Nation, which makes it a much better story, in my opinion. I will also add that his book has far more conviction and outrage in it than the film as well, with a real take on the systemic exploitation behind the white Osage economy.
Braking Day - Adam Oyebanji: I wouldn’t consider this a wildly groundbraking work of science fiction but it is interesting development of the intergenerational spaceship sub-genre, with pacey plot and anti-authoritarian undertones.
The Genocides - Thomas Disch: This is a classic work of sci-fi that I re-read this for the first time in years for something I’m writing, but I found it honestly difficult to enjoy. More crude, despairing, and unkind than I remembered.
Tiny Beautiful Things - Cheryl Strayed: I love an advice column, and Cheryl Strayed’s are some of the best. I wish I was this kind to myself and others.
Windfall - Erika Bolstead: I met the author of this book Erika Bolstead at a conference as I was thinking more about the way that oil wealth and land shape people and places. I don’t think I’ve read a more personal take on this issue than this book, and if you are curious about oil, or the upper midwest, it’s worth checking out.
Flux - Jinwoo Chong: I liked the tone and voice of this novel, which passes through different eras, viewpoints, and characters with grace, but I thought it was one step too evasive with its core themes, and would have benefited with a few more moments of clarity between the intersecting narrative devices.
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood: Margaret Atwood is one of our finest writers of overwhelming dystopias, and this classic of the post-apocalypse deserves to be read alongside her other more prominent works. Though a book about hyper-capitalism and genetic engineering, it is also a great study in the dangers of male obsession.
Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer: I read this after seeing the film Annihilation and was very pleased to find it even stranger and more haunting than the already strange movie. Itchy, provocative, and bizarre to the last word.
The Name of the Wind and Wise Man’s Fear - Patrick Rothfuss: Rothfuss has crafted some fantastic characters in the beginning of this series, but his story begins to truly drag and sprawl through the second book, even with obvious chunks pulled by an editor who needs to be empowered further. I hope there will be more of these books, but I’m not holding my breath.
Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin: This would be the other book on my list in the running for best novel I read this year, not for any grand reasons but because it is so fundamentally strong: an interesting subject matter that is well-researched and fleshed out, characters that have meaningful conflict over a well-paced story. There’s no great literary fireworks or melodrama, it’s just very good.
Every Man Dies Alone - Hans Fallada: I read this on a recommendation for my trip to Berlin, and I can’t remember a book with more brutal depictions of despotic violence. While emphatically anti-fascist at its heart, it’s a fundamentally difficult read about the political environment of early 1940s Berlin, and the ways people sought to resist - and collaborate with - the Nazis.
Tremor - Teju Cole: I love Teju Cole, and when I saw him give a great talk on Tremor in November he said that you might not need to read it for several years, if you have other things to return to. I think I might agree in this case.
If an Egyptian Does Not Speak English - Noor Naga: This novel about an American-Egyptian woman in Cairo meeting a man from a poor village in Egypt was the most rewarding book I picked up on a whim from a store shelf. The best parts were subtle, sympathetic, and unsparing at the same time, but I can’t decide to what degree the ending put me off - not everyone who reads fiction is in a Brooklyn writing group, and it’s OK to not write for that narrow demographic.
End Zone - Don DeLillo: While not quite possessing the grandeur of his greatest books, End Zone has few of DeLillo’s most annoying quirks and a lot of his most entertaining: hyperreal setting (West Texas desert), wild bouts of technical language (both football and nuclear weapons) and moments of startling clarity.
Swamplandia! - Karen Russell: Swamplandia! is one of those great books that captures the grand dichotomies of American life: freedom and danger, eccentric local color and crushing conformity, magic and banal evil. If I were to pick a national book of Florida, this would be it.
Fledgeling - Octavia Butler: I love Octavia Butler, but this is not her best work. Thematically it builds on her ideas of hybridity and codedepdence, but the story is too talky, a main sympathetic character is a definite pedophile, and the main action wraps with a stiff bureaucratic set-piece.
Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir: “Lesbian necromancers in space with swords” is the main calling card here, and if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for, you’ll find it in spades. If you’re looking for nuance, or characters who talk in anything besides quips, look elsewhere.