best books of 2023

I read 94 books this year and now I'm cruelly picking my favorite (novels, nonfiction, autofiction)

In 2023 I decided to “read seriously”—which for me meant reading a lot, and reading works that were interesting, intellectually stimulating, challenging. But I wanted to be open-minded about what those books might be, and where my literary interests took me. I ended up reading 94 books.

Laurets Andersen Ring, At Breakfast, 1898. Ring is one of the most iconic wife guys of 19th–20th century Danish painting

In 2023 I read a lot of fiction, mostly modern and contemporary. I’m kind of joking, but not really, when I tell people: “Culture, for me, began in 1900.” I do want to read older works; it just didn’t happen this year!

I also read a lot of literature in translation. My whole take on this is that the average translated novel is going to be much better than the average novel first published in English, since a translated novel requires that a literary translator (and they do have good taste, generally!) devote months or years of their life to bringing a work to a new audience. And it’s just nice to read beyond the Anglosphere, and read about other cultures and the particular ways that their writers sample from a different literary heritage.

I read some nonfiction, but not a lot. 2017–2019 were my heavy nonfiction years, and I read a lot about American politics, architecture and urbanism (my Jane Jacobs fangirl era), racial inequality, class inequality, both at once (Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow), critiques of capitalism, economics (my Yanis Varoufakis fangirl era), climate change and crisis…

After 3 years, I think I just got exhausted by nonfiction. I retreated into the novel (and into topics that can still be politicized but are less explicitly political: design history and literary criticism especially). But I miss the nonfiction—maybe in 2024 I’ll return to it.

But reading all those novels was immensely gratifying. Below:

• 5 best novels from this year (1 American novel, 3 European novels, and 1 Taiwanese novel)

• 5 best nonfiction books (2 literary criticism, 1 group biography, 2 self-help-ish books)

• An idiosyncratic assortment of other categories: best autofiction, best Proust fanfiction…

Best novels ✦

Ia Genberg’s The Details (2022, trans. into English this year) is a feverishly reflective novel about a woman remembering four great, lost loves in her life—an ex-girlfriend, a captivating and capricious ex-friend, a former lover and father of her child, and her mother. I don’t want to describe the novel as nostalgic—that suggests a text that is still, inward-looking, slow-moving. Rather, Gensberg’s writing is fundamentally intense, consumed with activity and energy. The characters feel unbelievably alive as they careen in and out of each other’s lives.

Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2010, trans. into English 2012) is about the Czechloslovakian resistance movement during World War II, and specifically about two men who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS and one of the architects of the Holocaust. But it is also about Binet’s attempt to write about this historical moment, and do justice to people who were not just characters but real, breathing, living humans, living ordinary lives and occasionally making extraordinary sacrifices for their ideals. So it’s about history and the act of writing history; about the indistinct boundaries between fact and fiction; and the work of research and reading and writing.

It’s also just beautiful to read (translated from French to English by Sam Taylor):

That night, I dreamed that I wrote the chapter about the assassination, and it began: “A black Mercedes slid along the road like a snake.” That’s when I understood that I had to start writing the rest of the story, because the rest of the story had to converge at this crucial episode. By pursuing the chain of causality back into infinity, I allowed myself to keep delaying the moment when I must face the novel’s bravura moment, its scene of scenes.

Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (1988) is extraordinary and perhaps the most phenomenologically sensitive and precise work of fiction I’ve ever read. It’s essentially the story of a young twenty-something man with a banal office job, who leaves his corporate building for a lunch break, runs an errand, and comes back. I love a novel with no real plot, where you’re simply carried along by the exuberance and eccentricity of great style and great interiority. Read this if you want to feel truly moved by a beautiful description of escalators (I have never been able to look at them in the same way after reading this). It’s also a deeply life-affirming novel with unexpected and profound insights into youth and becoming oneself and stumbling your way through life.

Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre (1996, trans. into English in 2014). Last Words is a novel told through twenty letters written by a young lesbian Taiwanese woman living in Paris. The letters, addressed to former lovers, describe her passionate and desperate unrequited love for them, her longing for them even after the relationship has ended—they’re so beautiful, perfect reading for anyone who has felt themselves transformed and swept under by the force of love:

I have an ideal love that can’t be realized. I devoted myself to someone completely, but it was something the world couldn’t accept. My devotion was so minor in the world that it was hardly worth mentioning; it was a joke. How could this [not] fail to wound the delicate heart? Yong, let there be no more mutual hurt in the world, all right? Can’t we just stop playing these hurtful games altogether?

Qiu herself lived in Paris while studying under the renowned feminist intellectual Hélène Cixous (“a brilliant beacon radiating art and life”), and was obsessed with European avant-garde cinema—the novel touches on Qiu’s affection for Theo Angelopoulos (“my personal God, without equal”) and Andrei Tarkovsky. It feels strange to describe this text as a novel, but if you love film and experimental writing and love and want to read a heartbroken lesbian writing about all these things, this is maybe the best novel in the world for you.

And finally—Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015; trans. into English in 2022). I wrote a bit about Solenoid in my last post (on mere description) but I don’t know if I mentioned that this is one of the most beautiful novels I’ve ever read. It’s 672 pages long (quite a commitment, I know!) but so, so worth it. Solenoid is a strange, surreal novel of a young boy in Bucharest, Romania, sickly and in love with literature, who becomes alienated from his poetic ambitions after a devastating critique in university. He becomes a reclusive, misanthropic Romanian schoolteacher, obsessed with a strange, almost Gnostic quest to understand the strange apparitions and fantastical spaces that seem to exist in his grimy, deprived life in the city—the school he teaches at, for example, seems to have infinite rooms that he keeps on stumbling in and out of on his way to class. It’s a novel that depicts the horror and sickness and betrayal and loneliness of existence in the most viscerally grotesque way; but it’s also about transfixing moments of beauty, and the ongoing joy of learning more about literature, math, and science (the protagonist is obsessed with George Boole, the mathematician whose work on Boolean logic is central to information theory and computing). Really, it’s a novel that asks the question: Why is there so much suffering in the world? What’s the point of living and continually encountering it? And it answers these questions with a decisive, affirmative vision of what a meaningful life can look like. So—a really, really good novel that probably saved me from seasonal depression earlier this year.

And an honorable mention for Jon Fosse’s Melancholy I–II, which is one of the most affecting portraits of the artistic impulse, mental derangement (and familial histories of mental health disorders), the agony of institutionalization, the disorientation of grief. All the typical Scandinavian topics! It’s a fictionalized account of the Norwegian painter Lars Hertevig and his mental breakdown, while studying art and pursuing an unattainable girl (in a slightly creepy but also very moving way).

Best nonfiction ✦

For most of this year I’ve been slowly working through Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946; trans. into English in 1954). Auerbach was one of those incredible Jewish-German intellectuals fluent in basically every language (well: German, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, English), and was a noted literary scholar in Germany before being forced to flee during World War II. Exiled from the country of his birth, deprived of his usual scholarly resources, he lived in Istanbul for most of the war while writing Mimesis. It’s an amazing work that begins with a consideration of Homer’s Odyssey and and the Book of Genesis, before continuing through 2,000 (!) years of Western literary history to consider how people’s romantic lives, class positions, interiority, and aspirations have been portrayed in various French, Italian, German, and English works of literature. In each chapter, he quotes some passage, provides his own translation (!!) and proceeds to do these amazing (and intimate, sensitive, critically perceptive…) close readings. Reading Auerbach on Dante and Flaubert (even though I haven’t read either) is just incredible. It’s just intensely pleasurable reading and has a very striking thesis: that, over time, Western literature has developed an interest in the lives of ordinary people, not just the aristocratic and heroic, and has increasingly become committed to describing their reality in all of its socioeconomic and historical detail—including the class relations involved.

Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (2017) was so profoundly good—I’m really glad I came across it. It was mentioned in Merve Emre’s “Two Paths for the Personal Essay” for the Boston Review, where Emre discusses two approaches to the personal essay—and picks a side. The first approach is to write in a style that is hesitant with argumentation and aesthetically committed to approximation, not accuracy. The second approach is to write with aesthetic rigor and a sometimes unsparing severity, an actual critical gaze. Nelson’s Tough Enough argues that Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and the 3 other women of the title all devoted themselves to the second approach, because they believed in “the aesthetic, political, and moral obligation to face painful reality unsentimentally.” Nelson’s book is a really great introduction to the lives of all 6 women, their aesthetic and political commitments, their relationships to each other (where applicable), and the controversies around their work. I’ve been meaning to read Simone Weil—I still haven’t, but this was a useful summary.

I already wrote about Stuart Jeffries’s Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (2016) last week, so I’ll keep this short. An immensely enjoyable group biography of figures like Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, &c—how they rejected the bourgeois capitalist values of their fathers in favor of anti-capitalist critical theory (but often with parental financial support, lol), how they developed the ideas that made them famous, plus some extremely useful introductions to those ideas…

And now for two books that are self-help-ish books. I read Nancy McWilliams’s Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner’s Guide (2004) because I became very interested in psychoanalysis this year (as Joseph Bernstein noted in “Not Your Daddy’s Freud”, psychoanalysis is in! that’s the real vibe shift of 2023, everyone becoming disenchanted with cognitive behavioral therapy and going back to the very trad, very chic methods of psychoanalysis). It’s a book meant for psychoanalytic practitioners, but the first ⅔ of it is a brief history of the field, a summary of its key values and ideas (transference, integration), and how psychoanalysis can contribute to someone’s well-being and mental serenity. I really, really enjoyed this and it’s quite interesting even if you have no plans to ever be a psychoanalyst—an interest in psychology and therapy is enough.

And then I read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving (1956)—Fromm, by the way, is also discussed in Grand Hotel Abyss!—which is such a beautiful, moving text on what it means to learn to love—without the desire to control someone or possess someone, without anxious/jealous disturbances, but rather in a patient, active, tender, nourishing way:

Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.

Harold Gilman, Lady on a Sofa, 1910. Image from the Tate Museum

Best…

Autofiction ✦ Proust extended universe content ✦ Experimental writing ✦ Sexually charged fiction that is not! explicitly centered around sex ✦ Essays ✦ Short stories ✦ Disappointments (that I still loved reading)

Now for the extremely idiosyncratic award categories (really, an excuse for me to talk about more books that I really loved).

Best autofiction

I read 6 books that could basically be characterized as autofiction. Instead of picking a favourite (which I’m hesitant to do, they were all so different!) I’ll just describe what each one is about…

• Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School (2019)
  On masculinity, small town America, high school debate competitions, psychoanalysis, and the threatening aspects of transference. Earlier this year I had a conversation with a number of poets (and some fiction writers) where we all quietly agreed that Lerner, despite being (for some reason?) the poster child for white male American self-obsession, is actually really…great. A luminous writer.

• Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010)
  On struggling to do art and make a living, devoted but conflicted female friendships, sexual obsession as distraction, and finally figuring out what you want to write. There’s something about the raw, unfinished quality of the text (the emails between Heti and others; the transcripts of conversations with the painter Marguax Williamson, her close friend) that is quite interesting. And it’s so, so tremendously sincere about the effort of figuring out what you want from life, art, your art, your life…

• Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood (1980, trans. into English this year by Maureen Freely)
  For Annie Ernaux fans! This is so moving and painful and exhilarating and fascinating to read, I’m actually upset it hasn’t received more attention. On seeking salvation in men versus salvation through one’s own choices, the cosmopolitan existence of the Turkish literati, disdain for Paris, electroshock therapy, psychiatric wards, and the will to live. If you have read this, please DM me immediately, because it is agonizing to not be able to discuss it with more people.

• Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga (2020, trans. into English in 2022 by )
  A self-contented, self-satisfied expert meditator is diagnosed with bipolar, his life falls apart, he pieces it back together, and extracts from the wreckage of the past few years. There’s quite a lot of controversy surrounding Yoga; Carrère’s ex-wife specifically asked him to not write about her in it, and he discreetly slid in a mention of her anyway; so once you read this, you can read all the discourse around it.

• Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2009–2011)
  My girlfriend and I both read the first volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle this year. It’s good, really good; Knausgaard lives up to the hype. It opens with an unsettling description of how removed we are, as a society, from the grim reality and physicality of death; it then shifts to an extended description of Knausgaard’s childhood, his youthful attempts to get drunk, early adulthood and marriage, struggling to write while his wife is pregnant with their first child—and then a harrowing, viscerally disturbing description of his father’s declining mental state, death, and preparations for his funeral.

• Rob Doyle’s Threshold (2020)
  Former good Irish Catholic boy turns to a dissolute, drugged-out lifestyle while writing novels, obsessing over Bataille and Cioran and Nietzsche, skeptically experiencing contemporary art, and making a pilgrimage to Berghain.

Best Proust fanfiction ✦

I’m using “fanfiction” loosely here—essentially, this category is any work that takes Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (which I read in 2022 and have since made into my personality, perhaps obnoxiously, perhaps endearingly…) as a starting point.

Early in 2023, a dear friend and fellow Proust devotee mailed me a copy of Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout (2014), a slim chapbook that mostly focuses on the character Albertine Simonet. In the novel, Albertine is a young woman that the narrator becomes infatuated with and then jealously obsessed with. Carson reveals Albertine’s origins as Alfred Agostinelli, who was Proust’s chauffeur and great love. There are also some sublimely fascinating passages that look at the very particular vocabulary that Proust uses

Adjectives are the handles of Being. Nouns name the world, adjectives let you get hold of the name and keep it from flying all over your mind like a pre-Socratic explanation of the cosmos. Air, for example, in Proust can be (adjectivally) gummy, flaked, squeezed, frayed, pressed or percolated in Book 1; powdery, crumbling, embalmed, distilled, scattered, liquid or volatilized in Book 2; woven or brittle in Book 3; congealed in Book 4; melted, glazed, unctuous, elastic, fermenting, contracted, distended in Book 5; solidified in Book 6; and there seems to be no air at all in Book 7. I can see very little value in this kind of information, but making such lists is some of the best fun you'll have once you enter the desert of After Proust.

I also read, and loved, Józef Czapski’s Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp (2018). The origin story of these lectures, from Gabriel Rom’s European Review of Books essay about Czapski:

As a Polish officer during World War II, Czapski spent nearly two years in a cluster of Soviet prison camps, one near the town of Starobielsk (Starobil’sk) — located in what Vladimir Putin now calls the Luhansk People’s Republic. Surrounded by death and without a homeland, Czapski devoted himself to the art of observation. He sketched portraits of himself and his emaciated comrades, prodigiously transcribed his thoughts from the color of sunlight to the place of the soul in Russian literature, and delivered a series of prison lectures on Marcel Proust purely from memory.

Best experimental writing ✦

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) is well-known as an essay about the financial and material conditions needed to create art and literature, and an argument as to why women—who were historically denied, in most societies and certainly in British society, financial autonomy—have been unable to write themselves into the canon. But I can’t believe no one told me that it’s also a really inviting, inventive work of writing! It’s really playful, shifting between scenic description and argumentation…between fictive narrative and feminist theorizing…it’s actually quite fun to read.

Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait (2005) is a strange, alluring text composed of various autobiographical statements about Levé, who studied business (much to his regret) before becoming a self-taught artist and writer. This is how it opens:

When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die.…The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste, the same as the end of a novel. I forget things I don’t like. I may have spoken, without knowing it, to someone who killed someone. I look down dead-end streets. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life. I don’t really listen to what people are saying…I am slow to notice when someone mistreats me, it’s always so surprising: evil is somehow unreal.

If you can’t commit to reading the whole thing yet, but you have already committed to a Paris Review subscription, you can read a longer excerpt here: “When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue”.

Best sexually charged fiction ✦

I read two very good, novella-length works about a young girl coming of age and learning to understand her sexuality. And interestingly, they both have a little bit of homoeroticism while being largely centered around the young protagonist’s fascination with an older man…both also depict difficult family dynamics…both are a bit autobiographical…

Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (1984) is set in Saigon during the French colonial era and focuses on a young, impoverished French girl who enters into a strange, illicit romance with a wealthy Chinese man. The racial and class dynamics are fascinating, as is Duras’s unsparing portrait of the girl’s difficult family dynamics (a rather unmotherly, severe mother and a coddled, violently untrustworthy elder brother). Beautiful prose, obviously; like a cold, brilliant flare of energy.

Rikki Ducornet’s Gazelle (2003) is set in Cairo. There’s an absent-minded father, an academic historian (and conflicted expert advisor for the CIA, or something like that), who brings his family to Cairo for a fellowship; a vivacious, alluring mother who leaves the family to carry on increasingly glamorous and public affairs with other men; and a young girl, the protagonist, tiptoeing around her parents’ disintegrating marriage, developing a crush on an older man who teaches her about perfume, and experiencing Cairo with wide-eyed American naïveté.

Best essays ✦

I loved Mary Gaitskill’s Somebody with a Little Hammer (2017) essay collection. I really revere Gaitskill; she writes about sexuality and agency and literature and music in a style that is intensely interested in others, fascinated by others, concerned with morality and politics but in a searching way, not in a self-satisfied and overly simplistic way.

At the SF Art Book Fair, I came across Tim Carpenter’s To Photograph is to Learn How to Die (2023). It’s a truly gratifying book-length essay on photography, and how photography—and all art, really—is an exercise in understanding one’s technical limitations, choosing one’s formal strategies and moves in pursuit of some aesthetic goal, and how all of this is a way of honoring the limitations of our art, ourselves, and our lives. It’s also beautifully typeset.

Another book-length essay I loved is Amina Cain’s A Horse At Night: On Writing (2022), which is just Cain meditating, beautifully and serenely, on some of her favorite works of literature and how they have moved her and shaped her own practice as a writer. I haven’t read Cain’s nove Indelicacy, but I really want to now! It’s about a woman, Vitória, who works at a museum cleaning and scrubbing the galleries. She ends up marrying a wealthy man, which puts her in a different relationship to the art world—no longer invisible, but someone whose class position makes her a more natural observer and even creator of artistic works. Which all seems very thematically intriguing…

And then I loved the psychoanalyst and literary critic Adam Phillips’s Unforbidden Pleasures (2016), which is loosely about: forbidden desires versus unforbidden ones (normative, encouraged by society); Oscar Wilde; how we relentlessly criticize ourselves; and how to stop. This passage, where Phillips imagines what it would be like to meet our internal critic, is seared into my memory (and apparently seared into the memory of the New York Times reviewer, too):

Were we to meet this figure socially, as it were, this accusatory character, this internal critic, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him. That he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout of some catastrophe. And we would be right.

Best short story collection ✦

I only read one this year: César Aira’s The Musical Brain. It was perfect, a totally complete aesthetic experience, wholly satisfying. Aira is tremendously inventive and playful—if you love Italo Calvino’s short stories, you’ll probably love Aira too—and his stories often take some concept from mathematics or physics or art history or the literary world and unfurl them into a strange, dazzling little narrative.

Best disappointments ✦

Let’s call these the most intriguing disappointments, because the obvious and unremarkable disappointments were simply books I didn’t finish. I liked both of these books, mostly—I just expected more.

First up is Brian Dillon’s Affinities (2023). This is very unfortunate because I am a Dillon devotee. His two previous essay collections, Essayism and Suppose a Sentence (about essays and sentences respectively) have shaped how I think about literature, literary criticism, and how literature intrudes upon and sustains the self. But Affinities, which takes on art and visual culture and film and image—was just okay. It wasn’t luminously beautiful and moving and I can’t say that it changed my life, it only helped me pass the time. Ryan Ruby’s Bookforum review, ‘Brian Dillon’s anti-critical criticism’, helped me articulate why: it’s because Affinities doesn’t really go in for sustained argumentation or a critical point of view that gets anywhere close to a value judgment, and that kind of hesitancy is just—not what I’m into now.

The second disappointment was Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (2021, trans. into English this year). A young woman (theatre student) and an older man (radio writer, novelist) meet in east Berlin, in the final years of the GDR. They fall in love. They have sex; he dominates, she submits. It’s all very heterosexual, against the backdrop of a disintegrating communist state, and—towards the end—the reunification of Germany.

The opening scene, which frames the rest of the narrative—it’s of the woman in middle age, going through the man’s papers and remembering their romance—is sublime, as is the scene right after where they meet. From a technical perspective, it’s an amazing accomplishment of split perspective: each sentence switches between his perspective and then hers. It was so good that I expected to be obsessed with the rest of the novel, moved by Erpenbeck’s unexpected and masterful use of language. But the story actually drags on quite a bit! And the romance is a bit tiresome, and some of the political and historical themes feel a bit heavy-handed…that said, I still plan to read more Erpenbeck in 2024.

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Well, that’s 2023. Another year of reading, another year of pursuing, impulsively and joyfully. I can’t help but think of all the books I wanted to read, but didn’t—like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which I only began today…

And all the nonfiction I intended to read! Like Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method (2020), which I was so excited about—it seemed like it would usefully flesh out my understanding of post-WWII American imperialism and interventionism, especially in Latin America and Indonesia.

And I also wanted to read Sofian Audry’s Art in the Age of Machine Learning (2021), published before the current fascination with DALL-E and ChatGPT and the sudden acceleration in the quality of large language models, text generation, image generation, and even video generation—but despite being “older” for a text about AI and art, I still feel it’s useful. Discourses about technology can be terrifyingly ahistorical, even though human nature changes much more slowly than our technological capacities—and present-day technological capacities are always built on the foundation of old, apparently uninteresting, dated, naïve technologies…

But there’s always next year. Wishing you all a beautiful end to 2023, a beautiful year of literature and art and culture and social relations and interior serenity…and sorry this post ended up being so long!