Best first reads, 2023

I read 101 books in 2023. My 20 favorite first reads of the year (chronologically organized; one per author; pre-2023 releases only):

The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins (1860)
Roderick Hudson, by Henry James (1875)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy (1891)
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James (1904)
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton (1905)
The Listener and Other Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1907)
The Subjugated Beast, by R. R. Ryan (1938)
Native Son, by Richard Wright (1940)
The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long (1946)
Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil (1947)
The Road Through the Wall, by Shirley Jackson (1948)
Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin (1956)
The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever (1957)
The Collector, by John Fowles (1963)
Julia, by Peter Straub (1975)
The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978)
The Ceremonies, by T. E. D. Klein (1984)
Soul/Mate, by Joyce Carol Oates [as Rosamond Smith] (1989)
Paradais, by Fernanda Melchor (2021)

Check out the rest of the list here.