My favourite reads of 2023
I don’t know if one book leads to another, so it’s a weird business to lay them out chronologically and think that the one before informs the one after. That’s probably not true, right? And yet there was a feeling, this year, that each read was in order, changing my perceptions, revealing new insights. Even the rereads had fresh things to add to the mix. I like the idea that this was a year of a reading journey, so instead of organising the ones that have stayed with me by genre I’m going to lay them out in the order I came to them, starting with the very first book I read last year:
Acting Class by Nick Drnaso was an eerie graphic novel experience for a January start. I love Drnaso’s blank faces that reach towards emotions, looking for something real, something true, in all sorts of places. It becomes all-involving and chilling, this search. The sense builds that something terrible could happen imminently, because these blank faces are truly, deep-down, desperate.
From there to Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, which is full of people who would find it impossible to maintain a blank expression. This is a family bigger than reality, each one written to have fantastic energy and self-involved charisma: an antidote to Drnaso. It’s a book I’d heard people talk about, and never quite found time for; I’m so glad I did this year.
My first revisit of the year came straight afterwards in the form of another fantastical vision. I first read Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov as a teenager and it’s safe to say it was a different experience this time around. I wanted to read it again after I’d got the writing of Three Eight One out of the way, not before, so that only a memory of those footnotes, that hidden journey, informed my own. What a book. Even as a dim recollection it had power – this time around, it was incredible.
Some journeys are less imaginary but no less vivid. Tash Aw looked back over his family’s travels in Strangers on a Pier, exploring how the experiences of past generations have led to a complex sense of belonging, of identity, of self. He has such beautiful, honed prose, exploring deep ideas with precision. I was hugely moved by his attempts to talk about the things that have happened, and cannot quite be explained.
Belonging shaped by world events also lies at the heart of Eva Ibbotson’s The Morning Gift, but this is a totally different experience, one born of romance and a lightness of touch, as sweet and gentle as a book can be. I’ve kept it to reread whenever I feel low. I’d read Ibbotson’s books for children at exactly the right age, and I think I found this book at precisely the right moment too. She was a brilliant writer.
Speaking of brilliance, I found JG Ballard’s The Kindness of Women in the library, realised I’d never read it, and got completed sucked into it. There’s a quality of extreme, surgical honesty to his prose that is frightening, and this book dissects some formative experiences of his own. From Ibbotson to Ballard is a hell of a jump. One is so kind, and the other so cruel, but both are true.
Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, with a not-great cover and a chunky look about it that didn’t call to me until I finished the Ballard and wanted something with a longer word count to help me catch my breath. It’s a great example of SF’s ability to examine ethical issues relating to the changing world around us, particularly in the area of technological advancement. Here, the autistic narrator questions whether they have value in a new future dominated by corporate goals, but the quality of the voice is so strong that perhaps we already know the answer to that. Still, the issue is handled with care, but also within a storyline that made me desperate to read on. That’s a thrilling combination.
I wandered off to the bookshop to look for something different after Moon’s novel, and ended up standing in the children’s section, totally absorbed in Jon Klassen’s The Skull. This is a retelling – a misremembering – of a very old folk tale, and he embraces the slippery tricks of memory to create something marvellously weird and wonderful. I wished it had been available to me as a child, but it was no bad thing to see it from this end of the experience, with the ability to appreciate his skill.
Sometimes I get asked to read books before their release, and fortuitously Paul Carlucci’s The Voyageur fell into my lap just as I was casting around for the right thing. It sounded wonderfully up my street – a historical exploration of a deeply unpleasant but very important scientific discovery – and discovering an elegant, thoughtful voice driving this tale was brilliant. It’s not out for a few months yet, I think, but I really recommend it for 2024.
I became a fan of John Darnielle last year, and this year I read his Wolf in White Van. I always get the feeling he’s putting his finger on something painful, and pressing it – something that lurks behind the scenes in modern life and can’t quite be put into words. It’s not unlike Drnaso, maybe. Anyway, I love games. I used to play a turn-based mail game (you write down what your character will do, post it off, and the master of the game writes back with what happens next) so this really spoke to me. I don’t like the idea that all second lives have been claimed by the digital world. The kind that live only between two people, on paper – that’s powerful stuff. I’ve become very interested in that since writing my own co-operative book, and maybe thoughts about that, informed by Darnielle’s take, will bleed into my next project.
Junji ito! This year I read his Black Paradox and was suitably disgusted, appalled, freaked out, amused and blown away. I also recommended his Remina (which I first read a while back) as one of my Five SF/Horror Books for the Five Books website. I reread all of those books one after the other, and it made for a disturbing run throughout October.
What could possibly calm me down after that? The discovery of a new favourite author did it for me, although I doubt he’d be new to many regular readers. I picked up Damon Galgut’s The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (I know, I know, it doesn’t sound like a relaxing title, but I can’t help myself) from the library and fell in love with it, so I followed it up straight away with In a Strange Room, which instantly cemented itself as one of my favourite reads of recent years. Journeys go wrong, journeys demand much of us. These journeys changed me.
Travel. It happens in time, in space, in place, and it has unforeseen consequences, but when you look back it seems like that road was always laid out before you. This is a big theme of Three Eight One, and the theme of my reading year, too. Travelling took place, and thanks for reading this glance back along the path. Now I get to read the books I received as gifts this Christmas, and the ones that await me up beyond this first glimpse of 2024! Here goes.
I hope you had a great reading year, too, and here’s to your 2024, wherever it leads you.
