When I was preparing to edit this list, I lamented that 2023 was another bad reading year for me. Then I reread the list itself. I’d forgotten how long 2023 really was and just how many good books I was lucky enough to read (or re-read)—some by writers I’ve intended to read forever (A.S. Byatt, Gwendolyn Brooks, Shirley Hazzard), some by writers new to me (Marie Ndiaye, Vajra Chandrasekera, James Frankie Thomas), some by recurrent favorites (Nicola Griffith, Tessa Hadley, Bryher), some by early-20th-century writers who should be better-known than they are (Glenway Wescott, Edna Ferber, Patrick Leigh Fermor; I wrote a piece for Electric Literature about the queer ones). I re-read most of the Narnia series (it doesn’t hold up) and seven books by Glenway Wescott (mostly excellent). I read 16 books from 2023 and 24 from before 1960.
Regardless, my reading felt more distracted this year than normal. I’d love to pretend it was the brainfog caused by covid and top surgery recovery, or the stress of being Director of Graduate Studies for the first time. But if I’m being honest, it’s because I had a novel come out and got anxiously addicted to checking (but rarely posting on) social media—so much so that by the time the novel actually appeared, I resented doing promo for it. I still resent it, which is unfair to my truly wonderful small press, who’ve done heroic work in getting the book out there. Anyway. Suffice it to say: this year I read a lot of very good things, but less well than I’d like.
As always, the list below is in rough reading order, with writers of whose works I read several clumped together.
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Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man (memoir, 2004). While I can’t fault this book for not being what I wanted it to be—Whipping Girl for trans men—it still read more like an annotated list of Green’s achievements than a 101 or even a memoir.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water (memoir, 1986). Like A Time of Gifts, a keenly-observed travelogue full of astringent nostalgia for pre-WWII Europe that on no account should anyone let Wes Andersen read because he’ll make a movie.
Sarah Thankham Mathews, All This Could Be Different (novel, 2022). Thoughtful coming-of-adulthood novel set in Milwaukee, whose vivid metaphors I think of, for some reason, as juicy.
Otessa Moshfegh, Eileen (novel, 2015). Compelling weirdo shit.
Glenway Wescott, seven novels. I’d never heard of Glenway Wescott before this year. A Wisconsin writer who fled America for Paris’s artistic queer circles in the ‘20s, he’s now little-read beyond two works republished by NYRB Classics. These are exquisite but minor, a novella, The Pilgrim Hawk (1940), and a short novel, Apartment in Athens (1945). Wescott is an impeccable prose stylist and one of the best observers of character I have ever read, as well as an extraordinary, if somewhat begrudging, chronicler of the contradictions underpinning the American midwest in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
- Glenway Wescott, Goodbye Wisconsin (short stories, 1928). Lyrical, precise, unsparing portraits of rural Wisconsin life in the early 20th century.
- Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk (novella, 1945). A perfect jewel of a book about a posthumous marriage and a real (but also symbolic) falcon.
- Glenway Wescott, Apartment in Athens (novel, 1940). A claustrophobic tragedy about a Greek family forced to host a Nazi during the occupation.
- Glenway Wescott, A Visit to Priapus (short stories, 2013). An edited collection of unpublished stories, including the gently sardonic title story, about a man with a preternaturally large cock.
- Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers (novel, 1927). I read this book twice, once in January 2023, once in December. It contains some of the most insightful and condensed character work I’ve ever read. In one chapter, Wescott turns a description of a happy marriage into a meditation on American Protestantism in the early twentieth century and the different shapes idealism can take. It’s astonishing.
- Glenway Wescott, The Apple of the Eye (novel, 1924). Like The Grandmothers but a single story, more autobiographical, and somewhat more open about the queerness of its central character.
- Glenway Wescott, Fear and Trembling (essays, 1932). At the beginning of this collection, Wescott admits that he dislikes abstractions before going on to make abstract proclamations for 300 pages. They’re not very good. His first impulse was right, and he should have stuck to his character portraits.
Darcey Steinke, Flash Count Diary (memoir, 2019). Genuine but a bit overdone in the way boomer facebook memes are. Its belated attempts to remember that hrt exists for trans people read as begrudging—something an editor probably made her do.
C. S. Lewis, Narnia series. I re-read most of the Narnia series this year (I couldn’t get past the Islamophobia in The Horse and His Boy so put it down). Broadly it doesn’t hold up. I was surprised. I’ve got nothing against obvious or even pedagogical Christianity—I love Dante—but these books felt mean-spirited and pedantic.
- C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (novel, 1950).
- C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (novel, 1951).
- C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (novel, 1952). The second-best Naria book, after The Last Battle.
- C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (novel, 1953). Especially tedious.
- C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (novel, 1955).
- C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle (novel, 1956). The Narnia series does not hold up on the re-read. But the conclusion of this book is still stirring. Jewel the unicorn says, “I have come home. This is the land I’ve been searching for all my life. The reason we loved the old Narnia is because sometimes it looked a little like this;” Emmeth sees that he has loved the truth all along, despite his fealty to something false. Lewis’s Christianity muddies these moments whenever it appears too distinctly. Abstracted, they are figures for recognizing something real and joyful that you’ve known all along but could not see, because the world or yourself got in the way. I understand why Lewis assigns this feeling to Christian heaven; he couldn’t see past the anchor of his own referents. But these moments are much better as free-floating signs, a facile language for what happens when life startles you with joy.
Bryher, The Colors of Vaud (novel, 1969). Opens, amusingly, with Bryher’s justification to her publisher about why this Swiss canton deserved its own historical novel.
Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (short stories, 1981). Spare, brutal glimpses of the violence underwriting mid-century suburban American family life. I can see why Carver is good, but he isn’t to my taste.
Rita Chang-Eppig, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea (novel, 2023). An efficiently-told historical about a remarkable pirate queen, whose best moments are the meditative stretches between the sea-battles.
Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans (novel, 2023). An elegant diorama of a novel that has even more of what I liked best in Real Life and Filthy Animals: moments of tension that pry open apertures in ordinary lives to glimpses of transcendence; also people thinking seriously about art and believing those thoughts matter.
Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog (short stories, 2023). Lovey brief fables, with Link’s usual perfection of execution.
R.F. Kuang, Yellowface (novel, 2023). I struggled to articulate what I found inadequate about this novel, then realized that the thrill of reading it exactly resembled the thrill of reading twitter drama. It serves up racism in publishing as a juicy, car-wrecky, can’t-look-away spectacle, but offers little more; I got less out of it than I got out of watching real racist publishing scandals unfold (cf American Dirt, whose barbed-wire-themed party favors remain more revealing about white publishers’ investment in the stories of people of color than anything in Yellowface). This isn’t to say Yellowface is bad. It’s not. But it’s being marketed as more trenchant than it is, and that’s a disservice done to a young writer of color by a publishing industry that has vested interests in selling blunt satire as systemic critique.
Ally Wilkes, All the White Spaces (novel, 2022). Decently-researched but overlong. The lead character’s transness feels uncomfortably tacked-on. The most charitable reason I can come up with is that the author is going to experience a revelation in three years; the least charitable is that it’s a publishing gimmick.
Kenji Miyazawa, Night on the Galactic Railroad and Other Stories from Ihatov (short stories, 1934). Sweet little fables.
Dianna Wynne Jones, two novels. Jones was another first for me this year. Her fantasies are children’s books that remember children become adults (unlike, say, Harry Potter). Fire and Hemlock includes some truly elegant character work.
- Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle (novel, 1986).
- Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock (novel, 1984).
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust (novellas, 1933). Bleak, hallucinogenic, desperately sad portraits of how society kills vulnerable people.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (novel, 1930). The first Faulkner I’ve read since undergrad and what they say is true: this book is high archetypal tragedy told through a set of existential stream-of-conscious snapshots.
E. H. Lupton, Dionysus in Wisconsin (novel, 2023). A delightful magic romp through mid-century Madison.
Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief (short stories, 1987). Transcendent character work, formally graceful.
Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter (novel, 1930). Closely-observed and compassionate.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (novel, 1951, reread). Yourcenar’s masterpiece, so comprehensively-imagined it’s hard to remember it’s fiction. Astonishing.
Natasha Calder, Whether Violent or Natural (novel, 2023). Chilling and claustrophobic; I stayed up all night to finish it.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (novel, 1936). An exacting, intellectual novel that recasts Warner’s fervent affair with Valentine Ackland in 1848 Paris. Of all the writers of historical fiction on this list, it’s Warner who I most hope to emulate. I’m not sure she’s the best (since Yourcenar, Mantel, Renault, and Griffith exist), but I admire the precision of her prose and her interest in the complexity of revolutionary idealism.
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (nonfiction, 1899). Even weirder than expected.
Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America (nonfiction, 1939). A book that somehow captures the zeitgeist of the Great Depression a mere nine years after it happened.
Marie Ndiaye, Ladivine (novel, 2013). Magnificent, unsettling, a book with the logic and horror of a fever dream.
Shola von Reinhold, LOTE (novel, 2020). An indulgent defense of indulgence that approaches history (and the task of reclaiming suppressed history) as ecstatic identification.
Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors (novel, 2023). The best fantasy I read this year, formally ambitious, blessedly unafraid of complexity (personal, political, aesthetic). If this does not rake in a Hugo or Nebula or both, I will be deeply disappointed.
Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (novel, 1993). Necessary trans canon for a reason, and a hopeful (but never pollyannish) call for real solidarity.
Imogen Binnie, Nevada (novel, 2013). Necessary trans canon for a reason, and still formally innovative when compared to other trans fiction.
Percival Everett, Telephone (novel, 2020). My first Everett, very clearly a minor work by a master writer.
E.G. Condé, Sordidez (novella, 2023). Good worldbuilding and fascinating conceit, but felt thin; I wanted more, especially in terms of characterization. Novella-sized epics are popular in SFF at present and I’ve found few of them satisfying, which is frustrating when their authors are as talented as Condé so clearly is. Sordidez is by a comfortable margin the best of the novella-sized-epics I’ve read, but I still wish it had been a novel. To me these novellas read like screenplays: the characters are sketches, the action visually choreographed, and there are plenty of scenes and set-pieces but little narration. I wonder if it’s a symptom of how referents for genre fiction these days are as much movies/tv as fiction. Because I don’t watch much, I miss those referents and so have a hard time with books that speak that language—not a problem with the books, but a mismatch between my readerly mode and theirs.
Tessa Hadley, two novels. Hadley is one of my favorite working prose stylists and writers of character. Everything she writes is worth reading.
- Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day (novel, 2019).
- Tessa Hadley, Bad Dreams and Other Stories (short stories, 2017).
Mattie Lubchansky, Boys Weekend (comic, 2023). Delightful bizarro shit.
Isabel Cañas, Vampires of El Norte (novel, 2023). Childhood-friends-to-lovers set in a fascinating, politically-charged era in Mexico’s history; my favorite moments were not the eerie vampires or romantic tension, but the quiet places where the book stops to survey the chaparral, or note, in passing, tiny details like the hierarchies of the local post office.
Edna Ferber, two novels. I hadn’t read Ferber before this year, and agree with the copy in the back of Come and Get It that calls her stock-in-trade the Great American Novel. Both So Big and Come and Get It are multi-generational family sagas that become parables about the meaning of a certain place at a certain time, and whose portraits of people—self-made lumber barons, louche sons, trapped wives, entrepreneurial mothers—brilliantly suggest, without ever becoming reduced to, types.
- Edna Ferber, So Big (novel, 1924).
- Edna Ferber, Come and Get It (novel, 1935).
Anya DeNiro, OKPsyche (novella, 2023). Dreamlike, fragmentary portrait of a trans mom and her kid in near-future Minnesota, refreshing for its focus on a woman who comes out in middle-age and doesn’t live in New York.
Marie Hélène Poitras, Sing, Nightingale (novel, 2023). I was spoiled for this book by earlier having read an unpublished novel by a good friend that does something similar but much, much better.
James Frankie Thomas, Idlewild (novel, 2023). Excruciating reminder of what it was like to be a closeted queer kid in the early 00s, and the first novel I’ve read that actually depicts the “slash girl to gay man” trajectory familiar to trans guys of a certain age.
Angela Sorby, Bird Skin Coat (poems, 2009). Wry, wide-ranging poems that each feel like a miniature outing, whether to the archive or the woods.
Jean Toomer, Cane (novel, 1923). Gorgeous mélange of observations nearly anthropological in their fidelity, coupled with a poet’s sense of the wayward, inscrutable undercurrents of the human heart.
Katherine Beutner, Killingly (novel, 2023). Quiet, well-wrought historical about the secret griefs held within families and friendships.
Nicola Griffith, Menewood (novel, 2023). Less a novel than a rich, sprawling chronicle of a life from 7th century Britain. Like a life, the book is gloriously uninterested in traditional plot arcs or even tension; they do not matter to its achievement. Conclusive proof that Griffith is Mantel’s successor as the best historical visionary we’ve got. I’ll happily wait another decade for the sequel, though I hope it comes sooner.
Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno, Tone (nonfiction, 2023). Brief, collaborative exploration of a notoriously amorphous topic; at its best when characterizing particular texts rather than generalizing.
Bryher, The Heart To Artemis (memoir, 1962, re-read). I love Bryher. The Heart to Artemis remains a remarkable memoir, not just of trans experience in the 20th century but of that century generally.
Vita Sackville-West, Heritage (novel, 1919). Odd, nostalgic tale of heartbreak in Kent.
Eva Balthasar, Permafrost (novella, 2021). Pitch-black fragments that don’t quite come together.
A. S. Byatt, Possession (novel, 1990). The best book I read this year, so astounding a feat it’s hard to believe it exists, and to which any summary of its plot (“what if the Brownings hushed it up rather than married?”) cannot possibly do justice. The amount of original, believable Victorian poetry here alone is staggering.
T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (poems, 1963). The Four Quartets are Eliot’s best poems, maybe because they’re where he’s the most clear-eyed about the desperate despair of his early years and the desperate faith of his latter.
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (poems, 1923). Pretentious vapor. If you’re going to write a manifesto about what poetry should do, you better be sure your poetry actually does it.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (novella, 1843). Sentimental but affecting. Dickens was damn good at what he did.
Tezer Özlü, Cold Nights of Childhood (memoir, 1980). Beautiful, brutal account of a woman coming of age (and enduring psychiatric abuse) in 20th-century Turkey.
Gwendolyn Brooks, The Selected Poems (poems, 1963). Magnificent—Brooks has that incredibly rare combination of an unerring ear, condensation of emotion and action, formal range, and facility for abstraction. Even her free verse sounds metered.
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (novel, 1978). Harrowing examination of narcissism and the different cages people choose for their lives.
Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire (novel, 2003). Hazzard’s ability to capture the minute flavor of place and emotion is astonishing; she’s as fine as Henry James in her abstractions but more lyrical. The Great Fire is also an elegy for what the world lost after WWII—not innocence but the last pretense of having it.
Alan Garner, Boneland (novel, 2012). At once universal and irreducibly local, like all the best myths.
Judith Moffett, Whinny Moor Crossing (poems, 1984). This collection is dedicated to James Merrill, Moffett’s close friend and mentor; Merrill is among my most favorite poets and has written what remains my favorite love poem (“In Nine-Sleep Valley”). Moffett shares Merrill’s humanity, playful formalism, and gentle humor; she adds to it a naturalist’s eye and deep love for almost-wild things—the titular moor, a skylark, a plague of harmless greenflies.
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That’s it for 2023. I’ll be back next year, maybe—if not, it’s because I dislike how these lists force me to think of my reading as a list-in-waiting.