Top 10 Books of 2023

The final year of my undergraduate degree I had to read more than fifty novels for school which, as I recall, put me off reading for a couple of years. Now I am older and my reading muscles are more built up, I kept reading even after I finished my master’s degree last year. This year I read fluffy murder mysteries and weighty tomes. I read books made of paper, books made of bits and bytes on the Kindle app on my phone, and books made of sounds—audiobooks. Audiobooks are my least favourite way to read but they are my husband’s preferred way. I’m no snob –whatever works for you! I counted and I read more books than I did in that last year of university but I didn’t have to report on any of them – actually that’s not strictly true: I ended up leading a book discussion about one of the books.

I do like looking back over the books I read in the year. As I go, whenever I finish reading a book I write it at the bottom of the day’s page in my journal. If the book is really good and really worse than I expected it would be, I will add a few notes to remind myself at the end of the year. I do want to say that there were a couple of disappointments this year, books I had eagerly anticipated that just didn’t live up to the hype, mine or their publicist’s. Because I also released a book this year and I hope no one would say that about mine, I won’t draw attention to them. When I look at the books I most enjoyed this year, I would say that the common denominator is that they are inventive, making the reader look at the world, literature and themselves in fresh ways.

Are you ready? Here, without further ado, is my top 10 list for 2023:

10. The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch by Melinda Taub.  I’m beginning with a fun and fantastical book. Later in this list you will see a retelling of the lives of the Brontes and this is a retelling of the Pride and Prejudice crew. I’ve encountered a reimagining of that story once before in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book I highly enjoyed for its reimagining of Lady Catherine De Bourgh as a zombie with an unhinged jaw and its explanation for why the militia was hanging about (to combat the zombie hordes). This book brings a very different addition to Austen’s world, one in which Lydia and a number of other characters are actually and secretly witches but few know it. The book is told by Lydia as a retelling of her running off with George Wickham for very different reasons than supposed by the narrator or characters of the original P&P. Some of the reviews of this book suggest it will be of interest to readers of Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell (a book I liked but did not loooove as some did) and it is definitely fantastical and good fun with layer upon layer of plot and intrigue.

9. The Flag, The Cross and The Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened by Bill McKibben. I know Bill McKibben primarily as an environmentalist but in this memoir he examines America form his childhood to today through three lenses, patriotism, the church and the American Dream as exemplified by the station wagon. For me, the section on the flag was a particularly strong section as McKibben revisits his childhood beliefs first as he recalls them and then as he reexamines them. At this time as the American Empire is fraying, such a reexamination of how we got there is a thoughtful and instructive exercise. It’s also probably one that any of us would benefit from undertaking – checking what we believe and how we got here.

8. Wolfish: Wolf, Self and the Stories We Tell About Fear by Erica Berry. This book came to me at the right moment. I am well acquainted with fear and for Berry some of the fear comes from men who pursue her in ways we might consider wolfish, something that happened to me one day this fall. At the same time, she questions that description, wondering whether wolves themselves are actually wolfish or whether they – or the men – are products of our own cultural and personal fears. She does a deep dive into the history and cultural references for wolves and intersperses stories of the real-life relocation and tracking of wolves in the north-eastern US where she is from with her own stories of her own fear. At times this book becomes a bit self-absorbed but that is exactly what fear and anxiety do, is it not?

7. Em by Kim Thúy. I think I first heard about this book on the radio where the word play of the title was especially evident. Thúy is a Quebec-based writer who came to Canada from Vietnam as a refugee child with her family. The title of this book which was originally written in French is a word play – aime is French for to love, while em in Vietnamese is the pronoun used to address a younger person (sort of the inversion of sir or ma’am). This is a book of interconnected stories and people around the US-Vietnam war that lead from one to another to another. At first the stories and the people seem connected in a straight line with the original ones dropping off, but it is not as straightforward as it appears and eventually people and connections reemerge in ways that make us hope for the characters. While the characters are fictional, the book also gives insight into real life Vietnamese-American culture and events that shape the Vietnamese diaspora including Operation Babylift after the Vietnam war and the rise of Vietnamese-American nail salons around the world. The book is told in short, fragmentary chapters — Thúy writes, ‘In this book, truth is fragmented, incomplete, unfinished, in both time and space.’ Awful things happen in this book but as — Thúy says, “in every conflict zone, good steals in and edges its way right into the cracks of evil.” This book is ultimately beautiful and hopeful and was nominated for a variety of illustrious prizes for both its author and its translator, Sheila Fischman.

6. Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart. I don’t know Emily but she lives in my city and is the daughter of writer Jane Urquhart and painter Tony Urquhart whose journey into dementia she chronicled in a moving book I rated highly a couple of years ago. I heard she had a new collection of essays out and so was eager to read it and it exceeded my expectations. Emily Urquhart holds a PhD in folklore and she draws beautifully on this way of seeing people and their lives and their stories. In one of the essays she captures perfectly how writers come up with ideas for stories with a bit of this and a bit of that. This collection teaches the reader to notice the wonder and magic in everything going on around us, but not in a fanciful way so much as in an observant and caring way. I definitely recommend this one.

5. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I said I was going to avoid listing the books I didn’t enjoy but thought I would but here I need to say something about one of them. Let me back up first. During the height of the pandemic, I did a Master’s degree in theology and my husband and I undertook a self-guided degree in classic films we had never seen. We made our own “curriculum” based on lists of the best films of all time and every Friday night we rented a movie that filled in our education. I know what Rosebud means, what Soylent Green really is, and that Hitchcock really liked icy blondes. There are similar gaps in my reading history so when I heard that Barbara Kingsolver had written a 21^st century Appalachian version of David Copperfield that involved the opiate crisis, I decided I would fill in the gap and read the OG version by Charles Dickens. I read the book while sick in bed last winter but it was captivating from start to finish/. It was written as a serial story published in newspapers in installments in 1849 and 1850, and was apparently written without an outline and was Dickens’ own favourite book. It is described as a bildungsroman, a story that follows the growth and development of its hero from childhood to adulthood. Dickens—or David Copperfield who narrates his own life story—takes this very seriously: the first chapter is entitled, “I am born” and begins with the moment of his birth: Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously. This is a book that stands the test of time because it is a compelling series of adventures and misadventures.  I loved reading it and was sorry when it ended. I mention Barbara Kingsolver’s version which is brilliantly entitled Demon Copperhead. I started it and put it down. I suspect if I had read the Dickens version many years ago, I might have enjoyed the new one more but I felt like I had just read the story and so I wasn’t terribly interested in a version where the addiction and economic issues felt dangerously too real. I think the Kingsolver book is likely excellent and as important as Dickens’ book was in his time and perhaps even more so, but I really enjoyed the original this year.

4. Half-Life of a Stolen Sister by Rachel Cantor. I have a young relative who has nicknamed herself Bronte. She asked me not long ago if I knew anyone else by that name and I had to say I did not. Somehow at the age of 7 she had heard of the Yorkshire sisters who wrote the books Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and more. She asked me to tell her the stories of those sisters and the stories they told. There was some consternation on both our parts about the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre (“But why would he…?” “It’s a good question…”) If my young relative was a bit older I might point her to this fascinating book by Rachel Cantor. The book has a terrible title. It really does. But it is a wonder, a creative imagining of the inner life of the Bronte family starting in childhood and all the way until the final sibling dies. But the book does not even attempt historical accuracy although it is very evident that Cantor knows the Brontes inside out and backwards. Instead it is a reinterpretation of the family in a more or less contemporary context, one that gets right at the intimacy and creativity and small lives and enormous genius of this group of siblings. It’s a strange book but the playfulness of it and the willingness to transpose the family into other contexts while still keeping them every bit themselves actually gave me a closer sense of who they might have been – or at least I believed in Cantor’s versions of the characters. The addiction of the one brother and the love of his sisters and father is heartbreaking, as are the lost loves and deaths that the family experienced. I know I said that I didn’t love Demon Copperfield and you might think this is contradictory of me to like this one and not that one but, as Walt Whitman famously said, “I contain multitudes.” I also wonder whether it makes a difference that Cantor was imagining biographies while Kingsolver was drawing on a particular text. In any event, if you’re a Bronte fan, give this one a try. It is interpretation and not every part succeeds – it is written in a wide variety of genres including lists and play scripts – but on the whole it really is satisfying in the way the best dreams satisfy even if the walls and floors don’t all line up the way they would in real life.

3. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. This book has a beautiful cover, covered with brilliant flowers. It has a compelling title that scratches the itch we all have to take a little break, a rest, or at least to put our phones down for a minute. But it isn’t at all what you think. It isn’t a book about self-care and while it is non-fiction it really is not a how-to book at all. It is a book that will make you feel smart at times and really dumb at other times (or is that just me? It might just be me.) I did have the feeling that Odell is smarter than me throughout and that she thinks even more than I do. But this book is also not a book that encourages the reader to stay in their heads, their neck bent forward, their thumbs typing away. No, to give a fair bit of the premise away, Odell’s idea is that we can’t simply refrain from giving our attention to the virtual world but instead we need to give it to the world around us, to the plants and animals and waterways that surround us. She encourages the reader to reenter their senses and their neighbourhoods, and to recognize the revolutionary, anti-capitalist stance that this is in today’s world. She doesn’t suggest withdrawal from contemporary life but she suggests participation on our own terms rather than on the terms of those marketing to our attention. This book is a bit heady and I did feel overwhelmed at times but it changed the way I move and pay attention in the world and that was very much worth it. (This is the book I led a book discussion about, with other writers who work with my literary agent. We are all encouraged to be active on social media and to build a platform so that people can hear about our books. This book did not deny that but encouraged us to have a self that is part of a human and more than human community from which to write and tweet.)

2. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, translated by Michael F. Moore. One of my children has Aslan for a middle name, taken from the Narnia books because my husband and I were big fans. One of my siblings, by contrast, went to a summer camp where Narnia was shoved down their throats for every single activity and that sib developed a resulting aversion to Narnia. Apparently a similar thing happens with kids in Italy who are forced to read two classic books over and over and over again. One of those books is Dante’s Divine Comedy while the other is apparently I Promessi Sposi, a book that didn’t make the jump outside Italy much. Until now with a new translation, The Betrothed, by Michael F. Moore (who is not the filmmaker but a lover of Manzoni and the Italian language). This book is considered a classic of world literature. The book is set in the 17^th century but was written in 1821 and then was revised and revised and rewritten until 1840. It’s a long book at more than 700 pages but it’s just a good story told well. There’s love and betrayal and plague and war and corruption and innocence and faithfulness and betrayal and social issues and more. This is apparently the first English translation in fifty years and it is eminently readable. I highly recommend it.

1. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. I simply adored this book for many reasons. I am hit and miss when it comes to Ann Patchett. She is a treasure in the book industry as both a writer and a store owner. Some of her writing has taken me to my knees while other books of hers leave me cold. This was neither. This was a wonderful warm hug of a book. I will tell you reasons why I loved it based on the story but I will say first that one of the reasons I loved it so was because of how I experienced it. I think I have mentioned before in my top 10 lists that I really like choosing books to match my holiday locales, something like a wine pairing with a meal. Our first trip to Lake Superior a few years back was accompanied by the chilling brilliance of Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow which is set in northern Ontario. The next year we listened to Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake. We tried to listen to The Namesake on a trip to Boston where it is set but as much as I loved the film based on that book, the book wasn’t especially listen-able. But Tom Lake. The audiobook of Tom Lake was read by the inimitable Meryl Streep. (As an aside someone once told me Meryl Streep was my celebrity doppelganger, especially her hands, and so I always try to see her hands when I watch her in any film.) Audiobooks are always better when read by an actor than by anyone else, including the author – there’s a lovely voice actor who reads my book – but while Meryl Streep could probably make the phonebook sound delightful, the thing is that she is utterly believable and entirely submerged into the main character of this book. And the main character is a woman who lives and works on a cherry farm on the west coast of Michigan. Which was exactly where we were headed on a trip this summer. The pairing was…chef’s kiss. We drove along past rolling hills covered with fruit trees, wondering why some had been upended—and then the book mentioned in passing why this was so. We were immersed in the landscape we were listening to – something I can’t recommend enough. We stopped at a cherry store and bought cherry wine, dried Michigan cherries, and cherry concentrate as we listened to what had brought this woman and her family to the farm from very different lives at Tom Lake. Another aspect of my enjoyment of this book is that it is framed during a time when colleges close and migrant workers are hard to find and adult children come home – the reason is obvious to anyone who lived through 2020 and beyond but it is not specifically mentioned. What is mentioned is how much the narrator, the mother, exults in having this found time with her adult daughters, how this time of global upset is also a beautiful gift for some. Like the narrator, this was my own experience. The book skirts very close to the line of sentimentality but I think it avoids it. It’s funny and lovely. It’s well crafted with its revelations being perfectly timed. I don’t know whether you need to drive across to the dunes and the cherry trees of Lake Michigan to enjoy it, but honestly I’d recommend you do that trip anyhow and I’d recommend you read the book either way. Especially if it’s read by Meryl Streep. (One last word on the audiobook question. I mentioned that Ann Patchett owns a small bookstore. Most people tend to buy audiobooks through Amazon and Audible which are the natural predators of small bookstores so you might think that Patchett would choose a lousy voice actor to read the book to support small bookstores. Instead she recommends listening to the book and also recommends a site that was new to me libro.fm which is an audiobook site that allows the purchaser to send the profits to the small bookstore of their choice. Many books – including mine – are available this way. The formatting and price are similar. It just benefits the little store. I recommend it highly if you’re an audiobook reader/listener.)

Oh….and I have a bonus book for you. It is a treasure written by a friend. Simon Sort of Says by Erin Bow might be my favourite of all her books. I had the privilege of doing some editing on it before it went out to find a home. It was longlisted for the National Book Award (which is a big deal) and is rumoured to be at least a nominee for the Newbery Prize. It’s sensitive and laugh-out-loud funny and quirky—and it takes place in the aftermath of a major major school-related trauma. But it’s about recovery from the trauma with the help of great new friends and loving weirdo parents and a puppy and a distinct lack of the Internet for scientific reasons. This is a middle grade novel but this well-past-middle-grade reader adored it and highly recommends it to you and yours. If you want a second bonus book, let me point you toward my own newly released novel. I won’t say too much about it except that it’s set in Italy, and it is a really good book for moms and for bookclubs. Renaissance by Susan Fish: I’d love it if you checked it out.

Happy reading! And do tell me your favourites from 2023!