My Favorite Books 2023
A few of my favorites.
This is the time of year – as the days start to lengthen, almost imperceptibly but enough that we talk about it—when I haul out my little blue notebook to review what I’ve read over the past year. I choose three or five or six books I liked the best, and add a sentence, maybe two, about why. I don’t assume that many will take my advice; I’m a reader, not a critic. I do it more as a time capsule. I’ll look back a few years later to see if my choices withstood the test of time. Do I remember that tome about which I raved? Would I still recommend it? Even if the answer is yes, was it a flash in the pan, or has it become a classic?
1. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
I’ll begin by talking about a classic author. In the spring I slogged through The Sun Also Rises twice and read several analyses of it. As the forsythia bloomed, I followed that with a big snoutful of Valerie Hemingway’s memoir Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways. When the paddle boat started running on our river, I spent many hours digesting Hemingway’s bloated, insufferable last book, The Dangerous Summer, about the competition between two bullfighters in the 1959 season, grateful for James Michener’s detailed introduction.
All of this Papa-Lit was in service of a short story I was writing about a young man of humble origins from Minnesota visiting Pamplona in 1959 with an upper-crust college roommate. Among other adventures, he encounters cheating among a matador’s crew and converses with a drunken Hemingway attending his last San Fermin festival.
I’m not a fan of Ernest H nor of bullfighting, which made my reading mostly miserable. My fascination as always is my characters, and I wanted to get their context right. Just as important, I wanted to honor the reminisces of my friend Christian Seger, a native Oklahoman. He’d visited Pamplona in that era as a college student and briefly met Hemingway at a bar. The story “The Apartado” is not Chris’s except for certain situational details (an Alfa Romeo with a cherry-red interior!), but I wanted him to tell me it felt as if those fictional boys could have existed and those things could have happened to them.
After I finished my story, I read The Sun Also Rises for a third time. I could see its elegance since I wasn’t researching any longer. I still don’t love Hemingway, but my relationship to the book is more complex now. For turning me around, it tops my list in 2023.
2. Foster and So Late in the Day – Claire Keegan
This year I discovered Irish writer Claire Keegan, first her stunning short novel Foster, about a child taken to live away from home who finally finds affection, until it is disrupted – a book in which much is quiet, unspoken. And then three wistfully beautiful short stories in So Late in the Day, the almost-was and what-have-I-done in relationships between men and women, the obstacles to happiness imposed through self-doubt or inability to act.
3. Liberation Day – George Saunders
Yes, it came out in 2022, but I didn’t read it until early 2023. Dystopic, subversive, twisted, humorous. George Saunders is probably the best short story writer out there, and certainly one of the most creative. “Ghoul” is my favorite short story of the 2020s so far.
4. Horse – Geraldine Brooks
Here’s a writer who’s made my lists in the past, this time for a beautifully written and researched book that crisscrosses through history and combines horseracing, art, science, and a nuanced contemplation of racism.
5. Absolution – Alice McDermott
A damn good story about the wives of officers and “consultants” living in Vietnam in the early 1960s, their lives laced with moral dilemmas as they confront the nature of sacrifice and their obligations to others.