Not Dead and 2023 Favorites
Surprise! You forgot you signed up for this newsletter, didn't you? My bad, really. It's been 5 months since I last posted. To be fair, this is the risk of a model built not on compensation but on VIBES alone. And while I still prefer this model sometimes you just sit and do not write.
On the bright side I got a lot of other writing done during that time. In fact I'm starting to think that this newsletter is just a way to procrastinate bigger writing projects. Which makes a lot more sense now.
But I had to at least do my year in review. Which, honestly, I wasn't sure I would be able to make this year. I had a whole draft that I never ended up sending about how far behind I am on my reading this year. Not behind, really. Just not my usual self. I am reading fewer books, which meant I started to fall behind in my galley reading. Until I got to the point where I was literally behind. Like I was still reading October books well into November.
Lucky for me November and December are quiet months. I suspected I'd be able to catch up and I did. I've been reading January for a few weeks now. March may actually destroy my entire system but that is Future Jess's problem. For now, I'm ahead. It's nice. And it means I can actually make a Best of the Year list.
Not that I read everything, I never do. I didn't read the new Zadie Smith, though I'd still like to eventually. And I'm sure there were many books I didn't hear about at all because this was the year that Book Twitter finally and officially died. I know that should make me care more about this newsletter, but it had the opposite effect. It made me feel less connected to other readers which made it harder to care about writing this little newsletter to all 76 of you. (This is not a diminishment, 76 is a lot!)
But lucky for you the usual thing kicked in when the end of the year lists went up and while sometimes the lists are good so many of the lists are bad. Many made me groan aloud. And you cannot just say "Hi this is a bad list." Instead you just make your own list and hope the people who made the bad list somehow sense a disturbance in the universe and maybe come a little bit closer to knowing how wrong they are.
The main problem with my list this year was that I put too few books on it. It had like 6 books last month. I had to go back and look at everything I read and think, "Okay what still gets me excited?" So now the list is reasonable, all is right with the world.
One nice thing about writing this list is it helps me remember just how excited books can still make me. Even during a real slump of a year where I started to wonder if it really was the books that were bad and not actually me at all. I kept thinking things like "Wow the horror this year has been so bad" but then I would look at the horror I actually liked and be like "Nope I take it back, the good horror has been tremendous, I just read a lot of horror I should have quit, that's all."
First some callouts to some books that were not published this year but that I really enjoyed this year anyway.
Since I've already talked about being petty let me tell you my petty story about this book. I wanted to read this book immediately from the moment I heard about it. But I did not read it when it was published. I waited MONTHS. I waited on purpose. I was waiting for the audiobook. Before Book Twitter died I tweeted the publisher asking about the audiobook, they ignored me (pointedly, I think). It just seemed like the right kind of book for audio. They did not put out the audiobook. Finally I gave in, checked it out from the library, and read it in full blown print. I loved it, but the whole time I loved it I was mad that I wasn't listening to it. But then, a twist! These jerks waited FIFTY-ONE WEEKS to release the audiobook. An absurd length of time. And then, finally, it came. And it is read by goddamn Christine Baranski. And I was both so happy and so angry it was hard to think straight. Anyway, I won in the end because the audiobook was marked down for Black Friday and I got it for $2 and now I own it forever and I am just waiting for the moment when it will be the absolute right time to listen to Christine Baranski talk to me about almost marrying Stephen Sondheim. It's gonna be amazing.
Another of my aborted drafts of this newsletter was all about how much I enjoyed reading The Idiot and Either/Or this year. I read 100 pages of The Idiot way way way back in galley form more than 5 years ago. I got stuck, I just didn't feel like it was moving so I ditched it. But this year after someone suggested it to me as useful for a writing project I decided to try audio, which can sometimes help when you get stuck. And then it was just the most delightful experience. The Idiot is not really for me though I still found it really engrossing and fascinating, but Either Or just hit the spot entirely. Got me right in the feelings. Sometimes coming of age novels just do not work for me, but this one worked completely. I almost cried when they started reading the credits because I already missed it.
Pro tip: you can definitely give this book to your mom when she is on heavy painkillers but just know that she will have to start reading it again when she is off the heavy painkillers and really that will be better for everyone in the end. (Just make sure she gets off the painkillers.)
Okay. And now. My favorite books of 2023. Alphabetical by author I guess.
Took a few tries for me and Jen Beagin to click but this was some magic. All wrong for me on paper (except for all the gay-ness) it is deeply cringe and about someone who has no real direction in life except to make every bad decision possible. But actually it was a book with a real emotional center that was going to take you somewhere. Ultimately it is a book about:
(I literally typed out "Insecure gif GROWTH" and then realized Ghost can add gifs. Thanks, Ghost.) I fucking love growth. And this cover. And the great sex scenes (which some people accused of being awfully written and those people are simply wrong).
Okay we're cooking, I'm fun when I write the newsletter! I should be fun more!
I knew when I read this that Eleanor Catton's last novel was a billion pages long and a historical novel set in a New Zealand mining town and I didn't care how many awards it won, it was not really going to be my jam. But you know how much I enjoyed Birnam Wood? So much that I read her last novel. (It was fine, not my jam, as I correctly guessed.)
This is a great not-exactly-thriller that is deeply interested in its characters, in people's principles, in class divides, and with all that elevated stuff it also cares a lot about a minor squabble between two young women and how it's going to play out for their friendship.
If Catton wasn't so prose-y (long sentences, long paragraphs, and 400+ pages) this would be a thriller. But I liked how it was a prose-y almost-thriller! It's a nice little space. I would like to read more.
Speaking of books that got me to read other books, I enjoyed Catherine Chidgey's Pet so much that I immediately went right out and re-read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which is closely enough related that these books could be like cousins or something. My one sentence review was that it was like Brodie but more fucked up. Now that I've reread Brodie I'd put it like this: Miss Jean Brodie - Fascism + Murder.
It dials it all the way up to 11 and goes into full thriller territory and it does get rather gruesome, but isn't that part of the fun?
I famously love books that play with structure and narrative, forcing you to reevaluate everything you thought you knew. This is a good one. Best to go in cold, so I'm not going to say anymore except I think it would pair well with Vladimir by Julia May Jonas.
Basically a perfect example of neo-noir, what all neo-noir should be.
Literary body horror. Ling Ma's Severance but swap the zombie apocalypse for a beauty cult and a much more plotty plot. (I much preferred this to Mona Awad's Rouge, another body horror beauty cult book which never really came together.) They marketed this more as literary surrealism but luckily enough people read it and were like "oo horror!" that it was in Goodreads' Best Horror list this year. Good work, us.
Not enough unreliable narrators anymore. And not just like minorly unreliable but like deeply. Like some old school Nabokovian shit. Great example here that is able to use race and gender as the center of that unreliableness. I will not tell you you will like this narrator. You will not. He is the worst. But this is one of the only books I can recall where a narrator is obsessed with someone and you, the reader, are just as obsessed with them.
I didn't want to read this. I didn't want to know any more about the far right than I already did. But somewhere along the way I heard so many people sing its praises that I was like "FINE OKAY ALREADY." I felt peer pressured into it even without Book Twitter. And it's that good. It sounds like it's going to be the most depressing book you'll ever read and that's not wrong, but somehow I felt better after reading it? I can't really explain it. Sometimes understanding helps me feel less unstable.
If there was one book I was willing to bet money I'd love this year it was this one. And I was right. A very close to perfect horror novel.
When I think about where I want queer fiction to go, this is the first book I think of. Which is interesting because it isn't technically queer? I have the top review for this on Goodreads and the second review is like "everyone is lying this book is not queer." But this book is VERY queer. Especially for those of us who are old enough that we always had to read our identities as subtext rather than text. The subtext is everywhere, it's all around, this whole book is about trans-ness without ever saying to you "hey I am about trans-ness" and in this moment where we are talking a lot about labels and whether or not they are useful or whether they hold us back or whether they move us forward, where books are trying hard to be like HELLO I AM GAY, I find McElroy's approach here so interesting. Also an A+ sex scene. (If you are like, Wow Jess, it seems like there are a lot of sexy books on your list and yes you are correct. I think people who write very good sex scenes write very good books!)
I totally get that horror is the best genre to explore grief but I feel like it usually isn't actually done very well. But here it's done beautifully. Enough that I did not even mind that it started with my least favorite horror trope, the kid dying in the first scene. Still won me over. Even before I knew this book is another gay book that you don't realize is gay for a long time. But now you know! Aren't you lucky!
Going alphabetically by author meant I could put Colson Whitehead last. Because duh. Obviously this book was amazing, why bother putting it on a list?
I reread Harlem Shuffle on audio to prepare and enjoyed it even more the second time. When the third book comes out, I will listen to both of them to prepare and enjoy it once again. They are just such deeply enjoyable books! Exquisitely written and ridiculously entertaining! Shouldn't exist, but it does and we're lucky.
Not going to make any grand pronouncements about next year's reading. I'm not even sure I'm going to hit my reading goal for 2023! The goal I purposely set so low that I will always be able to hit it. 😬 But things change and I have, happily, been feeling a little more like myself when I read lately. And the books have felt more like books. Which sounds ridiculous, but I don't know how else to explain the weird place my brain has been this year, as if books became something else entirely. But I think we're starting to come to the end of this long tunnel and even during a tough reading year like this, there was a real abundance of riches. Lucky me.