What I read in 2023

A reading space at The Providence Athenaeum, February 2024.

For me, 2023 was about getting back into the groove of reading recreationally. I graduated from university in April, and after spending four years reading for a grade, it was a challenge both to motivate myself to read at all post-grad and to rediscover the joy of reading just because.

To cleanse my palette, I only read what I really wanted to read. At first, I mostly stuck with authors I knew wouldn’t let me down and I tried not to beat myself up when it took me weeks or even months to finish a book. I didn’t finish a book until March. Eventually, though, I got my appetite back and started reading not only all the books by my favorites that I could get my hands on but also a scattershot collection of new authors, picked mostly at random from the shelves of my local library. (If you make it to the bottom of this page to see the full list, you’ll see that I’m not kidding about scattershot).

You’ll see that two authors stand out on my list. Barbara Kingsolver and Louise Erdrich outpaced every other author I read this year by leaps and bounds. I couldn’t get ahold of their books fast enough.

I read The Bean Trees, Kingsolver’s first novel, back in high school, but – let’s be honest – it went way over my head. I rediscovered her books about a year ago thanks to a copy of Prodigal Summer I found in a used bookstore. Since then, I’ve torn through Flight Behavior, The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees again (it was much more powerful at 22 than at 16), Pigs in Heaven, and Demon Copperhead, plus two of her essay collections, Small Wonder and High Tide in Tucson. (It should be noted that my high school English teacher (bless him), once lent me a copy of High Tide in Tucson. At the time I found it slow and uninteresting, but today I see that he was right; it’s a book I needed to read, then and now). I’m reading Animal Dreams now and Unsheltered and Homeland and Other Stories are high priorities for me in 2024.

I discovered Edrich last year after winning a copy of Love Medicine in an English Department giveaway. I’ve torn through The Round House, Tracks, The Beet Queen, The Plague of Doves, LaRose, Four Souls, The Bingo Palace, and Future Home of the Living God and still have Erdrich novels left to read (they are all on my list for 2024). Over and over again, these books surprised me with their tenderness and their persistent attention to both the horror and the divineness of this world we’re in. 

For me, LaRose was a standout. It made me think about forgiveness, justice and mercy more deeply than any text that actually uses those words has been able to.

In addition to these reliable favorites, I read a variety of novels by new authors this year. My strategy for choosing them was this: 

  1. Walk into a library.
  2. Go to the fiction section, avoiding (for the most part) genre fiction.
  3. Read spines until you find a woman’s name.

This is a strategy I started using in 2022 after I stumbled across Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were and Miriam Toews’ Women Talking and started wondering “Where have novels by women been my whole life?” I realized with regret and anger that ever since I stopped reading American Girl books and Laura Ingalls Wilder, my reading lists have been dominated by men.

Reading only women novelists is a strategy I highly recommend. In 2023, it led me to stunning debut novels like Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (a long-overdue read) and Alice Winn’s In Memoriam, award-winning books like Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage and Jennifer Haigh’s Mercy Street, and many less prominent novels, like Jane Hamilton’s The Excellent Lombards, J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occassions, and Sujata Massey’s The Sleeping Dictionary. I’m not going to rank my favorites, for there were many. I’ll just tell you that if someone asked for a recommendation from my last year of reading, I would lend them my copy of LaRose without thinking twice.

And now, for the full list: everything I read in 2023.

NOVELS

  • Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doer
  • Normal People, Sally Rooney
  • Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
  • Beautiful World, Where Are You? Sally Rooney
  • Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Bingo Palace, Louise Erdrich
  • Four Souls, Louise Erdrich
  • Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia
  • Tracks, Louise Erdrich
  • LaRose, Louise Erdrich
  • Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
  • Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver
  • And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini
  • Libertie, Kaitlyn Greenidge
  • The Benefits of Being an Octopus, Ann Braden (Children’s Novel)
  • The Round House, Louise Erdrich
  • The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich
  • Afterlife, Julia Alvarez
  • The Sleeping Dictionary, Sujata Massey
  • Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng
  • Saints for All Occasions, J. Courtney Sullivan
  • An Observant Wife, Naomi Regan
  • An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
  • A Map for the Missing, Belinda Huijuan Tang
  • Mercy Street, Jennifer Haigh
  • The Excellent Lombards, Jane Hamilton
  • In Memoriam, Alice Winn
  • Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich
  • Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver

NONFICTION & POETRY

  • Of Bone and Pinion, Andy Saur (my friend!)
  • Say the Word, Andy Saur
  • Educated, Tara Westover
  • Penguins in The Desert, Eric Wagner (a more philosophical read than one might expect)
  • Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver
  • High Tide in Tuscon, Barbara Kingsolver

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