What I Read in 2023
Devastatingly little. A tragic case of dry rot: it comes for vintage leather goods, it comes for the untended brain.
(Books, anyway.)
January
Stefan Zweig (transl. Anthea Bell), Confusion
💛 Colin Barrett, Homesickness
Can’t wait for Wild Houses. His writing makes me feel so dim, in a good way. A floodlight of language. (I think I remember seeing him described as a “debut novelist” in some upcoming-releases! listing, which made me chuckle because it’s sort of like Chance the Rapper or Phoebe Bridgers getting nominated for Best New Artist 4 years after Acid Rap and Stranger in the Alps, respectively, but about 10 times more so. I get it, but come on.)
February
Natalia Ginzburg (transl. Jenny McPhee), Family Lexicon
March
Edward Jay Epstein, The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies
Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
💛 Nada Alic, Bad Thoughts
Thought this collection was excellent; loved its last story, “Daddy’s Girl,” best.
💛 Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
I liked The Topeka School enough, but this was so . . . I texted everyone. I didn’t shut up for weeks. I think I literally emailed my former torts professor about it; embarrassing. That’s what I deserve for avoiding novels just because they seemed too on-the-nose for me. “‘You are fluent in Spanish, Adán,’ she said, maybe sadly.” (!!!)
April
💛 Percival Everett, The Trees
Brilliant. Came across some extremely dull galaxy-brain hand-wringing takes on Instagram that I shan’t go into here, but literacy is wasted on some people, and in 2024, I won’t be making that my concern. (I will.)
Sarah Moss, The Fall
I loved The Tidal Zone so much and don’t really understand this quasi-trilogy of slender little Britain-and-the-conservative-why-🤔 novels? Sort of feel like Ghost Wall did the job . . .
Roger Reeves, Best Barbarian: Poems
Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends
Tried to write a longer review over the summer but realized I just didn’t care that much. One particular plot point did irk me, though, wherein a positively saintly acquaintance of one of the protagonists is deported after getting into a fistfight — that didn’t result in even a police report, let alone an arrest or conviction. At the risk of pedantry and US arrogance, I found myself distracted and wondering what the British counterparts to cancellation of removal or prosecutorial discretion/administrative closure might be, how habeas works in UK immigration detention settings, whether US inadmissibility and deportability grounds translate, and whether post-order options do. Certainly, the Department of Homeland Security and the Home Office are different entities and operate under different bodies of law (and importantly, fundamentally: I’m stupid 🥰) but our common law heritage is English. I am under no indignant delusion that “innocent” people are not vulnerable to the violence of deportation, or that litigation doesn’t have limitations and immigration courts never produce incorrect decisions; rather, I know that immigration relief can be available to those with arrest and conviction records, where due process demands. The protagonist in question is the well-connected director of a prominent civil liberties/human rights organization but gives up before she even sees her friend at the detention facility, the conditions of which she is somehow shocked by? I was just so enraged at her resigned inability to develop a solution, or find anyone who could, reading not as tragedy but inexplicable ineptitude. Moral grandstanding aside, what a dull fightless intellectually incurious loser move inconsistent with the character. Found this just so bizarre; could not look past it. Maybe I did care that much.
Moreover, the two leads’ intimacy, one of the novel’s best-drawn features, prompts unfavorable comparison to not only Ferrante’s Neapolitan series but to Shamsie’s own Home Fire, which I love. Someone practical cleaning up, unbidden, after someone else who cannot accept the world as it is, for better and worse. Ends hurriedly on the idea that we’re liable to hate most those we love, which is one of those things that sounds sort of provocatively true only because it’s too vague to disagree with.
💛 💛 💛 Alba de Céspedes (transl. Ann Goldstein), Forbidden Notebook
Best of the year (alongside Enter Ghost). Loved so much I don’t have anything to say.
June
Stuart Turton, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
Fun!
Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
Myopic, believing itself clairvoyant. On June 30, I texted my friend regarding an awful poem (by someone else) we’d both involuntarily seen: “it’s giving (from the worst poetry collection I’ve ever read in my [life]) [screenshots of “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History”] . . . never reading poetry again, she should consider it an accomplishment that she’s spoiled an art form for me) i will not mock vulnerability but self aggrandizement is a very different thing.” Oh, why, yes! Bad things are bad! I loathed this — staid, unmusical, laced with impotent guilt — but that was my fault, because I should have known I would; it isn’t For Me, thank God. Finished out of morbid spite. Granted, reading this unfortunately coincided with an avoidable work tragedy that only underscored how allergic I am to the arrogance of self-conscious radicalism, loudly and vainly proclaimed such only for cover, for belonging. Maybe I would have been more open had the timing been different. But probably not.
Jennette McCurdy, I’m Glad My Mom Died
Well-earned popularity. Very compelling.
Sara Nović, True Biz
July
💛 💛 💛 Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost
Favorite alongside Forbidden Notebook. Just crushing, with wonderful passages on theatre-making and futility, and intraethnic/-diasporic shibboleths and shame.
💛 Mark O’Connell, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder
Olga Ravn (transl. Martin Aitken), The Employees
Max Porter, Shy
💛 Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool
Was expecting something completely different, but this was soo fun.
September
Kevin Barry, That Old Country Music
My no-reading era! Redacted personal loss, plus work hit a months-long breakneck hellish patch.
October
Andrew Boryga, Victim (out March 2024)
I enjoyed this a great deal. Have more thoughts that I may or may not wrangle into more cogent words later, but basically: 1) I found it very truly funny, not just book funny; 2) was quite moved by the protagonist’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend and the pain of distinguishing sometimes between justified contempt and disproportionate cruelty (or failing to); 3) don’t think it . . . structurally overcomes a fundamental plot problem, which is that no one cares that much about writers (this, after all, is part of its conclusion, but the “turns out” can’t quite work if I wasn’t sold on the in-between in the first place).
December
James Joyce, Dubliners
Shout-out to Lisa.
I hope I’ll read more in 2024. And, as always, I hope more of it will not be in English, but I am weak, so we’ll see. In addition to not getting far with most books I’d intended to read, I also failed to respond to many kind emails and texts and am declaring Chapter 7 inbox bankruptcy. I am so sorry. I don’t think I can do better but will try nevertheless.