I “read” 74 books this past year. 29 of those were audiobooks. My daughter considers this a significant distinction, perhaps in part because she outread me in 2023 if I discount the audiobooks.
I think it all counts, and while you suckers are going about your daily lives being fully present, I’m getting books in my ears while at the grocery store, cooking dinner, etc.
I’m excluding classics like Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and my reread of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises from this list because I think it’ll make it more interesting.
A note on links: I’m including links from IndieBound so that you can order through your favorite local indie (shout out to People’s Book in Takoma Park, MD). I’m also including Amazon links. Amazon is cheap and convenient, and some of you will use it anyway. Also, one of my listed books can only be found there.
Disclosure: Amazon gives me a kickback if you make a purchase using these links. I’ve made $5.92 in the past two years this way. This shouldn’t be enough to buy my complicity in the destruction of American culture and growing income inequality, but it’s not nothing.
Here’s my list in no particular order (except for the last one):
The Butcher’s Wife
Li Ang, Amazon
Seeing limited prospects for their daughter, Lin Shi’s family marries her off to the local butcher, a brutal man with a reliable income. Lin Shi’s choices for escaping her husband are limited, and the people around her don’t offer viable solutions or help.
The horror of this story is not so much in the details of the abuse as much as it is in the very matter-of-fact nature of it. The descriptions of the repeated abuse endured by Lin Shi are told with fairy-tale-like distance. It reminds me of Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.”
Though published in 1983, it feels like an old parable. This is what I like most about it. It feels both like a modern story about marriage and gender inequity and a book about a time long ago.
Last Night at the Lobster
Steward O’Nan – Twitter, IndieBound, Amazon
The entire span of this novel takes place on the closing day of a Red Lobster restaurant. As a writer, this is an exciting premise, and I wanted to see how O’Nan worked within this condensed timeline. He executed it masterfully.
The New York Times called O’Nan “A poet of strip mall ennui.” There’s so much in this book about how capitalism is crushing culture as everything becomes part of a national brand and distilled down to profit margins and product consistency. Still, in all of this, the book shows genuine humanity.
The protagonist, a Red Lobster manager named Manny, carries complex hopes and regrets. He’s concerned about his employees’ well-being, especially his ex-girlfriend for whom he still has feelings. The characters carry a connectedness that transcends their miserable environment, and this is exactly what makes the book magical.
The Upstairs House
Julia Fine- Twitter, Instagram, IndieBound, Amazon
Megan, a new mother in the depths of postpartum depression, is finishing a dissertation about Goodnight Moon author Margaret Wise Brown. Then, Margaret Wise Brown and her lover Blanche Oelrichs show up in Megan’s apartment building either as apparitions or as Megan’s hallucinations. The novel becomes a strange exploration of motherhood and mental illness.
I loved how this story slipped in and out of realism and the surreal. The snippets of Margaret Wise Brown’s real-life biography were fascinating and had me going to Google frequently. The honest look at the stresses of motherhood goes right into the taboo. There are definitely Charlotte Perkins Gilman reverberations here.
This hit home in a personal way too. My wife was completing her dissertation as she was pregnant with our daughter (the one who outread me this past year). Things in our household did not always match the smooth narrative we’re fed about the joys of parenting.
This book is complex and not for everyone which is why I couldn’t help but look at the Goodreads reviews. As is often the case, the negative reviews made me want to champion this book even more. Ashwin wrote, “How NOT to turn your PhD dissertation into a published book.” Whitney: “Are you there, God? It’s me, the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown living in the void of your condominium.” Michelle: “Wtf is this book even about?”
If a book hasn’t attracted enough haters, it’s likely not weird enough for me. Thanks, Ashwin, Whitney, and Michelle.
Rebecca
Maurier Daphne Du, IndieBound, Amazon
This may fall in the category of a classic which I previously promised not to include. However, this book escaped me for years. I’m upset about that and don’t want it to happen to you. Sometimes I finish a book so good I wonder how its author never came up in my years of education. When this happens, the author is usually female. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is one of these.
Rebecca did not escape Alfred Hitchcock who made it into a movie by the same name. It was redone in 2020 too. The book also won the National Book Award in 1938 and is on plenty of best book lists.
This gothic novel is filled with beautiful, romantic passages that weave tension through every detail. Every scene, no matter how trivial within the present action of the story, is fraught with undertones of class, insecurity, and mystery. All of these scenes together build toward plot twists and satisfying revelations.
Ripe
Sarah Rose Etter – Twitter, Instagram, IndieBound, Amazon
While this was one of my favorite reads of 2023, it’s on here in part because I also loved Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X. She’s become an author I will read whenever she has a new book.
A thirty-something woman is navigating a soul-crushing job in Silicon Valley and trying to care about it amid the glaring income disparity she sees around her, an unwanted pregnancy, and a waxing and waning black hole that has followed her since birth.
I grew up in Silicon Valley and graduated from college during the tech boom. Some of what is in here looks familiar to me. It definitely makes sense that elements of magical realism are necessary to accurately portray Silicon Valley. Ripe expertly uses the surreal to accentuate reality the way the best books do.
Tender is the Flesh
Agustina Bazterrica – Twitter, Instagram, IndieBound, Amazon
I’m including this book last because if I had put it any earlier, you may have stopped reading. It’d be easy to dismiss the artistry of this book because of its disgusting premise, but I found it extremely well done.
Viruses have spread through animal livestock (or so the government says) and a system is set up to raise and slaughter human meat for consumption. The main character, Marcos, is a middle-level employee at one of the slaughterhouses. He’s neither outraged at this system, nor is blind to its hypocrisy and violence. Marcos is doing his best to earn a paycheck and care for the people around him. In this way, Marcos is very much like the rest of us caught up in the capitalist machinery (remember how I apologized for including Amazon links at the top of this?).
I was expecting this book to be some radical screed about veganism (which I would be okay with) or a comment on slavery and human trafficking. The magic of this book is that the terror can be more broadly applied. It had me thinking about global warming, the unhoused, and several other things that we largely ignore because we’ve developed laws and systems that allow for their perpetuation.
That wraps up my favorite fiction books of the year. Share yours or tear mine apart on my various social media accounts!
You can check out my 2022 fiction and nonfiction posts. Here is my 2023 nonfiction list.
