Year: 2023

WHAT I READ IN 2023

This year my favourite books are pretty clear.  AS MEAT LOVES SALT by Maria McCann, a wonderful, bloody love story set in the English Civil War, that made me feel weirdly proprietary about centuries-old battles (I’m looking at you siege of Basing House!).  Then IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn, which I see in all the bookshop windows and deservedly so: it’s a heart-breaker.  Big props to this author for having the guts to think there was something new to say about WW1.  Also BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler, a weirdly riveting account of the family of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin; THE SECRET RIVER by Kate Grenville, about the life of a man transported to Australia; and Honourable mention to AKENFIELD by Ronald Blythe, a lengthy, factual account of rural life in nineteenth century Sussex that was sort of boring at the time but which I have thought about often since. 

My real life included a lot of London and Europe, and a little of America and Southeast Asia, but my reading life was much more varied: not one but two memorable shipwrecks (both with cannibalism), shoplifting in Uganda, the decline of a Bavarian family in the 1800s, the journey of Livingstone’s heart out of the Congo, and etc.  It is also interesting to see which books I maybe did not ‘love’ as much, but which still stayed with me.  There were AKENFIELD, but then also a biography of the author Sybille Bedford, which introduced me to a life in which working-for-money played no part, and no one expected it to, a kind of mind-bending and liberating proposition for me.  Or there was the WHITE TIGER, a novel of rural Indonesian life, which I have almost totally forgotten other than this one haunting line, from a man who lies dying: “The years had gone by so quickly, life receding in the distance like a train narrowly missed”

This year was 66 books, surprisingly about three-quarters by women.   As ever, it’s been a relief from daily life and a solace, and I can’t imagine what I would do without it. 

DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT by Diana Athill

GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER by Caroline Blackwood 

SEVERAL SHORT SENTENCES ABOUT WRITING by Verlyn Klinkenborg

STAY TRUE by Hua Hsu

MONKEY BOY by Francisco Goldman

THE ART OF SCANDAL by Regina Black

MOSCOW STATIONS by Venedikt Yerofeev

BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry

HAPPY PLACE by Emily Henry

BEACH READ by Emily Henry

YOU AND ME ON VACATION by Emily Henry

THE ENCHANTED APRIL by Elizabeth von Arnim

YOU, AGAIN by Kate GoldbecK

ANGEL by Elizabeth Taylor

MISS LONELYHEARTS by Nathaniel West

BUDDENBROOKS by Thomas Mann

WILLIAM’S WIFE by Gertrude Trevelyan

THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT by Laila Lalami

ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT by Sarah Thankam Mathews

THE PRIVILEGES by Jonathan Dee

AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST by Iain Pears

SYBILLE BEDFORD by Selina Hastings

IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn

THE MARCH by EL Doctorow

THE L-SHAPED ROOM by Lynne Reid Banks

KINTU by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

THE RED AND THE GREEN by Iris Murdoch

AS MEAT LOVES SALT by Maria McCann

CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN by Coco Mellors

VLADIMIR by Julia May Jonas

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

IN THE CUT by Suzanne Moore

DEAR GIRLS by Ali Wong

THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS by Michael Finkel

FOREVER YOUR ROGUE by Erin Langston

BURMA BOY by Biyi Bandele

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDES OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler

THE WAGER by David Grann

RAINBOW’S END by Lauren St John

QUIETLY HOSTILE by Samantha Irby

BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY by John Le Carre

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES by Jane Austen and Seth Graham-Smith

OUT OF DARKNESS, SHINING LIGHT by Petina Gappah

THE RIVER AND THE SOURCE by Margaret A Ogala

A WREATH FOR THE ENEMY by Pamela Frankau

WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD by Barbara Comyns

AKENFIELD by Ronald Blythe

SARAH THORNHILL by Kate Greville

I’M A FAN by Sheena Patel

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder

THE CITY AND THE STARS by Arthur C Clarke

IT ENDS WITH US by Colleen Hoover

THE SECRET RIVER by Kate Grenville

FOR THY GREAT PAIN HAVE MERCY ON MY LITTLE PAIN by Victoria Mackenzie

THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY by Sarah Manguso

REALLY GOOD, ACTUALLY by Monica Heisey

I’M SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY by Rebecca Wait

TRESPASSES by Louise Kennedy

ACTS OF DESPERATION by Megan Nolan

CALEDONIA by Elspeth Barker

MAN TIGER by Eka Kurniawan

DRIVE YOUR PLOUGH OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD by Olga Tokarczuk

RIDDLEY WALKER by Russell Hoban

NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS by Angela Carter

FOSTER by Claire Keegan

DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT by Diana Athill

Athill’s writing is just so completely clean and unpretentious it feels like a near-miracle. I am close to having read all her books, and am going slow, because I don’t want them to be over. Her memoir INSTEAD OF A LETTER was a searing story of getting dumped, while SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END is an only slight more searing story of what it is like to get old. This is not memoir, but fiction, and I did not like it quite as much.

It tells the story of a young woman who gets to move to London after the second world war. The freedom that I, fifty years later, take for granted, is for her and her friends completely unexpected and thrilling. She gets a job (!), has sex (!!), and meets immigrants (!!!). She is also a pretty cold-hearted tease. She’s a very pretty woman, and is not too bothered about making it clear when she is not interested. I don’t want to be too judgmental, but I found it really pretty mean.

Let’s close with a lovely snippet, about her arguing with her mother as a child: “If I sulked and cried I could usually make my mother cry too – during our rows we would sob rage and frustration at each other – but she always won because an adult’s tears are more frightening than a child’s . . “

SEVERAL SHORT SENTENCES ABOUT WRITING by Verlyn Klinkenborg

A fantastic and pragmatic book about writing. The most interesting part was when he said most of what blocks you from writing is worrying about whether it’s in-general-good-enough. In fact, if you just work on fixing whatever sentences hit your ear oddly, then there is nothing to be blocked about. I found this quite inspirational

GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER by Caroline Blackwood

It’s incredible how any time a book is really weird you can tell it is written from life. This one is really loopy, being a thinly fictionalized account of the author’s great-grandmother and grandmother. The great-gran is pretty intense, being a rigid and lonely old woman who spoke to no one but her one-eyed servant for months at a time. Eerily she spends most of all day in a hard-backed chair, in total idleness, not even reading a book. Her grandmother meanwhile appears to have had some kind of post-partum psychosis, believing in fairies and elves and trying to kill her son who she thought was a changeling. A lot of the action of the book takes place in a crumbling Irish stately home, which her grandfather does not have the money to keep up. I find it strange how many books there are about how difficult it is to have an inheritance. I’d like to give it a try.

This book apparently was denied the Booker because Philip Larkin, chair of the committee, thought it could not be classified as fiction. I have no evidence but you just know he thought women talking about their own lives was low value. It’s a good thing I love AN ARUNDEL TOMB so much or I would have a lot more to say on this.

STAY TRUE by Hua Hsu

Here is a book about grief. It is written by someone born in the same year as me, and tells about his best friend in university, who died when he was a junior. It was eerie to read a book so exactly of my time-and-place. That rarely happens for me. I enjoyed this for example, something I had forgotten about:

Back then, years passed when you wouldn’t pose for a picture. You wouldn’t think to take a picture at all. Cameras felt intrusive to everyday life. It was weird to walk around with one, unless you worked for the school paper, which made picture taking seem a little less creepy.

I’d forgotten about a time before photos were the default.

The story was a sad one. What struck me was how much I now recognize what grief looks like: the guilt about what you could have done differently (oh GOD, the guilt), the retrospective wondering what your relationship meant, and etc. I can’t imagine how the author got together the emotional resilience to write it. I barely had the resilience to read it.

One thing I have been thinking about recently is how anytime someone dies, you read about them in the paper after a stabbing or whatever, there is almost always really bereft family and friends left behind. It’s kind of beautiful to think that every random person you see in the street is so surrounded by love.

MONKEY BOY by Francisco Goldman

It is strange how few books there are by immigrants, and how many by immigrants’ children. My theory is we immigrants are busy, trying to assimilate or live the capitalist dream or whatever, and it’s the children who have the free time to try and understand what just happened.

In this book an American man, the child of a Guatemalan and a Ukrainian Jew, puts the effort in. Some parts of it I found pretty interesting, like his flashbacks to middle school, and a particularly epic high school crush. Other parts were less interesting, like where he visits his mother in her retirement home, tirelessly grilling her about Guatemalan history despite her advancing dementia. I mean I get it: he is deep in middle age, and wants it all to have some meant something. Good luck with that I guess.

THE ART OF SCANDAL by Regina Black

This book sounded like it was going to be fun. A politician’s wife finds out her husband has been cheating on her, and agrees to a payment of $1M to stick with him till the next election cycle. It didn’t quite work for me though. I thought it was going to be fun and silly but in fact it was rather bleak and sad. And there was quite a lot of therapy speak. Not my kind of book I guess.