We’re a little late with this one, but year-end posts are still fair game anytime before February (right?). As is tradition for, well, all book blogs ever, we compiled a list of the best books we each read in 2023.

Janes

My partner jokes that my bookshelf is “the shelf of staring women” because all of the books I’ve displayed have a woman staring at him–and lo and behold, four of the six books I’ve chosen this year have staring women on the cover. All six of the books I loved in 2023 were about rebellious, hard-to-love women who eschew polite society–women who unsettle everyone around them (sometimes even their readers).

A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector

2023 was the year of “men losing control of their own creations” (Barbie, Poor Things, even Oppenheimer). A Breath of Life plays on that theme with several layers of meta-commentary: woman novelist Clarice Lispector wrote this novel about a male writer who has created a female character, Angela Pralini, and spends the entire book in dialogue with her. He resents her and wants to destroy her, but he can’t separate her from himself. Lispector wrote this while she was dying, and the result was a strange, abstract, poetic meditation on feminism, mortality, and the creative impulse.

Mona by Pola Oloixarac

I’m usually reluctant to read books about writers, let alone a book that takes place at a literary festival. But I heard Mona was “hallucinogenic” and weird and I wasn’t disappointed. Mona follows a Peruvian writer who is invited to an awards festival in Sweden where other writers and their enormous egos are waiting to hear who won a prestigious award (aka a thinly veiled fictionalization of Nobel week). As one would expect, it’s a funny satire of the literary world, but then takes a bold surrealistic turn that transforms it into something darker and more unsettling.

Sula by Toni Morrison

A classic, and also one of the original “shiny friend and less shiny friend” female friendship novels. Nel and Sula are teenage girls in The Bottom, a black neighborhood in Ohio that is tight-knit but also extremely rigid in enforcement of social norms, especially for women. Sula is free-spirited and independent, and seems to threaten the fabric of the community itself with her defiance of convention, while Nel grows up to be a conventional wife and mother. The novel is a fascinating portrayal of community dynamics and collective trauma, but is ultimately a love story between two women who are shaped by gender norms in very different ways. 

The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld

The Discomfort of Evening won the International Booker Prize in 2020, so I was expecting it to be well-written, but I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so fucked up. Based on the author’s experiences growing up on a Dutch dairy farm, the novel follows Jas, a ten-year-old girl whose religious, severely repressed family falls apart after suffering a tragedy. It’s essentially a cautionary tale about what happens when children aren’t given the tools to process trauma: Jas becomes obsessed with death, sex, and violence, and her inner life devolves into a nightmare. It’s pretty shocking at times, but, since Rijneveld is also a poet, strangely beautiful.

Assia by Sandra Simonds

After reading several great books by poets last year, I resolved to read more books by poets, because I love their attention to imagery and the music of language. Assia by Sandra Simonds, which follows Ted Hughes’ second wife, Assia Wevill, has beautiful language and almost reads like a series of poems, but also creates a satisfying character arc. Wevill has often been cast as a Medea-type villain in literary history, so it was refreshing to read a novel that delved deep into her subjectivity and creativity (it’s easy to forget that she was also a poet), even as it never excuses or attempts to fully explain her actions at the end of her life.

Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

This was the last book I read in 2023–my partner gave it to me for Christmas because it was, in his words, “a young woman causing controversy.” My favorite genre! Wetlands is basically Ottessa Moshfegh on steroids–the entire book takes place in the hospital, where the brash, hilarious, utterly unashamed 18-year-old protagonist is getting anal surgery and reflecting on her sexual exploits. The novel caused controversy because of its frankness about the female body, and it’s definitely intended to be provocative. But since the protagonist is so young, it’s also weirdly touching, as by the end of the novel you realize she’s just as vulnerable as any other 18-year-old child.

Nerdy Spice

I had a truly wonderful year reading-wise. I happened to pick up so many books that were funny, sexy, smart, weird, devastating, and/or hopeful, and the amount of pleasure and emotion and edification I got from the books I read this year was unmatched in my recent experience. On this blog I set out to do “monthly” recs and naturally only completed this task in 2 months! Yet where were way more than 12 books that I couldn’t stand to eliminate from this list, so here’s a list of nineteen books I read and absolutely adored in 2023.

Top 4:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

I kicked off a year of excellent reading with this unforgettable book, which combines subtly elegant prose with indelible characters written from an utterly humane perspective, and the fascinating, well-researched story of a video game development partnership between a man and a woman who love each other dearly as friends. It came out in 2022 and has been read and recommended everywhere for very good reason. I love when people write with conviction about work, and about art, and about technology; video games are all three. As a white-slash-Asian person, I also love a book with great representation of mixed-race and Asian characters.

The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin

I was a bit later to the party on this one because I have not historically been a fantasy/sci-fi reader (in large part because when I first tried the genre out, people like NK Jemisin were not the writers that I had heard of). It deserves every bit of all the amazing things I’ve read about it. The basic concept is about a group of people with magical power over rocks, who live on a planet where their power can set off long ice ages, and the oppression they experience as a result. Jemisin is a genius (she has the MacArthur to prove it!) and the prose, thoughts, and story are all as brilliant as you’d expect. I inhaled the entire trilogy in the space of a few weeks and look forward to reading more of her work.

Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal

One of the reasons I had a great reading year was that I became a subscriber to a nonprofit publisher called And Other Stories, which has an unusual model where you pay an annual fee and then receive six books. I signed up for it after reading Oldladyvoice, which I posted about here in 2022. Traces of Enayat was a book I received from And Other Stories which I’d never have picked up on my own — a nonfictional “novel” about a writer who searches for the life story of a novelist who committed suicide in the 1960s in Cairo. It sounded heavily metafictional and I feared it’d be boring and cerebral. Instead, what I found was erudite, sparkling, entertaining, and genuinely suspenseful. Would Iman (the name of both the author and the protagonist) find the information she sought? Would she understand herself better through finding more about the dead writer, Enayat al-Zayyat? I turned the pages eagerly, hoping to find out. Fave quote: “She said that a woman who was an artist must harden her heart.” 

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

After several failed attempts in the past, 2023 was the year I finally completed this book (for a very ambitious book club). It is completely worth the effort, which is significant. Reading it is like taking a very long seminar from an expert writer on how to create characters who have as many layers and contradictions as living human beings, and how to put them in situations that reveal those characters and test their moral and emotional worth. (In exchange, you also have to suffer through the old windbag’s 200-page epilogue on how astronomy proves predestination or something. Clearly, his editor had long ago collapsed of exhaustion.) Pro tip #1: If you’re short on time, skip the war parts. The peace parts are way better. Pro tip #2: probably only listen to pro tip #1 if you, like me, prefer Kevin Williamson to Steven Spielberg.

Other Amazing Books

Trust by Hernan Diaz

This was long-listed for the Booker, and is anotehr surprising page-turner of a metafictional book with multiple novels-within-novels and at the center of it all, a rich dude doing rich-dude things.

The All of It by Jeannette Haien

A flawless, lovely, compact novel you can read in an afternoon about a rural Irish woman whose husband has just died, who confesses her deepest secret to a local priest.

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga

This absorbing, experimental, complicated, and tender yet violent novel is told in alternating perspectives between an Egyptian-American woman who moves to Egypt and the impoverished revolutionary she falls in love with there (with a final, bravura, hilariously depressing section set in a writing workshop in the US). 

The Sorrow Proper by Lindsay Drager

This is an experimental novel about libraries, specifically libraries that close. I’m a huge fan of Lindsay Drager, and recommended her earlier book The Archive of Alternate Endings in 2022.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

This one has been a huge “romantasy” hit (aka, it’s like a romance novel but before getting to the steamy bits you have to learn a bunch of rules about how dragons work in this particular universe). I read it out of curiosity in an attempt to branch out in my reading choices, and I have no regrets. This one’s sexy and swashbuckling, with a protagonist who thrives despite a significant physical disability — lots of fun!

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

More branching out for me: this time-traveling LGBTQ+ romance is sweet, sexy, and subway-themed; what more could I want?

Roxana, the Fortunate Mistress by Daniel Defoe

It’s a 1724 novel about a woman who succeeds in life by becoming the mistress of rich men… with some light pimping on the side. Totally bananas.

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima

A beautiful yet brutally honest book about a struggling single mom by the author of Woman Running in the Mountains, which I recommended last year.

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

I missed my subway stops multiple times because I was so absorbed in reading this upmarket mystery about a true-crime podcaster who returns to her boarding school and begins looking into an old murder case there.

Sedating Elaine by Dawn Winters

The pitch for this one says it all: a broke woman drugs her clingy, rich girlfriend in order to embezzle her money to pay rent.

Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith

An under-rated, clever and discursive modernist novel about a young woman who works as a typist while writing a novel on the side.

How Should a Person Be? By Sheila Heti

A brainy, funny, intimate and chaotic novel about a woman trying to figure out… well, see the title.

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara

An elegant, humanistic, literary tech dystopia, with a brilliant father/daughter pair at the center of it.

Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler

I recommended this mid-century nuclear apocalypse thriller in August as a “hell of a fun read.”

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

I recommended this queer cult classic in March as “nakedly, unashamedly passionate.”

Wishing you all an excellent year of reading in 2024!