We're reading again.
My 2023 favorites
For years I posted a year-end reading list. Then for various reasons, I didn’t do one last year, and almost didn’t again this year until a friend asked about it. It had seemed trivial in light of what’s happening in the world. And what’s happening in the world also left me unable to do anything but devour a very specific brand of non-fiction for the past months.
A day or so after that friend asked about my list, I was was on a walk and stopped at one of the Little Free Libraries that speckle our neighborhood. Among the standard fare of cast-aside parenting books was a like-new copy of Small Mercies. I brought it home, and for the first time since October, let myself indulge in something that held no greater purpose than the activity itself.
It was delightful. And now i’m back. But instead of the complete list, I’m just including my absolute favorites—all fiction—from the year. If, like me, you’ve had a hard time turning off and getting lost in something, one of the titles below ought to do the trick.
Small Mercies | Dennis Lehane
Grief, power, and racism, but make it Southie in the ‘70s, on the cusp of Boston’s decision to institute busing to desegregate the city’s public schools. A one-sitting crime thriller that proves how period pieces can, sadly, be timeless. Also a lesson in how a deeply flawed main character can still crack your heart open.
“… he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.”
The World to Come | Dara Horn
A Chagall paining is stolen from a museum during a singles cocktail hour. The suspected thief is a former child prodigy who thinks it was the painting that once hung in his childhood home in suburban New Jersey. In between that, and the best ending of a fiction book I have ever read, is a story of family history over generations. If you only know Horn from People Love Dead Jews — great start, but don’t sleep on her fiction.
“But the moment that everyone who was once a child will remember is not the story the unfathomably old person tells you, or the lullaby he sings for you, but rather the moment right after the story or song has ended. You are lying there with your eyes closed, not sleeping just yet but noticing that the sounds inside your head seem to have vanished, and you know, through closed eyes, that the person beside you thinks that you are asleep and is simply watching you. In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear -- a tiny rehearsal, though you do not know it yet, of what will eventually happen for good -- time holds still, and you can feel, through closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, small face in the darkness, has suddenly realized that you are the reason his life matters.”
Tom Lake |Ann Patchett
There is no more perfect summer book than this. Yes it’s set in the summer, on a cherry farm in Michigan, and explores a summer in the main character’s past, but that’s not what makes it a perfect summer book. It’s just a total escape, where the stakes are just high enough to keep it propulsive, but not so much so that it becomes existential. It’s tidy, with a perfect beginning, middle and end. Save this one for the first warm day of 2024.
“It’s about falling so wildly in love with him—the way one will at twenty-four—that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end, nor did it occur to me to care.”
Love Songs of W E B DuBois | Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
Jeffers is a poet, and I think probably most poets should write fiction, too. Jeffers’s debut is an exegesis on the experience of one African-American family and the American South, from before the Civil War, through the Civil Rights Movement, to the present. Do not be daunted by the page count (800+ pages) - the story churns along, and every page important.
“These are the incongruities of memory. It is hard to hold on to the entirety of something, but pieces may be held up to light.”
The Covenant of Water | Abraham Verghese
I had high hopes for this after Cutting for Stone, and for the first 100 or so pages I wasn’t sure if Verghese was going to be able to deliver again. But: He does. This is another epic (600+ pages), this one the story of a malady that afflicts a family over several generations in India. And again, I can’t imagine it being a single page shorter. Perhaps this is how long books are meant to be?
“We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.”
Until next time,
Courtney