I’ve been devoting most of my free time to writing since New Year’s, so reading has fallen by the wayside, but I did fit in a few novels and one excellent poetry collection.
The Joy Luck Club has been on my to-read list for years, but the library didn’t have it. When I found a cheap used copy, I snatched it up. It did not disappoint. Dynamic, fully-fleshed-out characters; smart, incisive look at mother-daughter relationships; seamless fading between timelines.
Learned By Heart, on the other hand, was a letdown. I love coming-of-age novels but, honestly, period fiction really has to earn my trust. This one failed to do that. The characters (based on real people!) had plenty of potential, but it went mostly unrealized. The story wandered and the characters changed little despite the long timeline. Most of the plot was revealed early on, which didn’t leave me much to read for.
As for the other three novels, I left each of them feeling that some piece of the story was missing – like they didn’t quite close the loop. BUT the lifelike characters and striking images made them well worth the read regardless.
And on the poetry front, I read Christian Wiman’s collection “Once in the West” on the recommendation of a friend with very good taste. It’s been a while since I’ve read through a whole collection, and it was so nice to do it again! It gave me time to get to know Wiman’s style and watch him explore. The wordplay was at times excessive for my taste, but at least one line in every couple of poems truly knocked my socks off.
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:
Walk into a library.
Go to the fiction section, avoiding (for the most part) genre fiction.
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)
Abbie Ham 