The Best Books I Read in 2023, Part 1
Literary Fiction
The holiday shopping season is upon us. As I have written before, I am just wretched at selecting gifts, and so my solution is books. As an inveterate reader and also an insomniac who has ample spare time many nights between 2 and 6am, I have read a tremendous heap of books this year and have many recommendations for books to satisfy every interest and every kind of reader.1
In fact the list is so extensive that the third-annual Happy Wanderer book recommendations will be split into three parts: Literary fiction today, genre fiction next week, and nonfiction the week after that. I hope readers will find some great choices for gifts, and possibly for yourselves!
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton (2023)
Sometimes, when a book is the top recommendation in every publication, I’m left scratching my head. Why is everyone saying this book is so great? I wonder to myself. Does the author have a really great publicist? Or lots of friends in high places? Or is s/he especially charming and attractive?2 But then we have a book like Birnam Wood, which is every bit as good as we’ve been led to believe—full of ideas that make us think, compelling characters that cause us to shift our loyalties, and a plot that just races along.
Mira runs Birnam Wood, a collective that appropriates and cultivates untended public and private land. Her intentions are good, but she can be arrogant and puritanical. Shelley is her best friend—and the one who gets stuck with all the thankless scut work. Tony, a former member of Birnam Wood, returns after five years, full of dreams of making a career as an investigative journalist. Reviewers in both the New York Times and NPR describe Tony as a mansplainer and a Bernie bro, but they are being unfair. Tony turns out to be right more often than wrong, and when he’s wrong he rolls up his sleeves and investigates until he figures out the real story. Lastly, Roger Lemoine is an American billionaire whose motto is “I’d rather pay a fine than a fee.”3 Catton puts these four people together, and trouble brews. To avoid spoilers, this is all I will say about the plot.
Along the way, the book considers such themes as the struggle to protect the environment from the ravages of capitalism, the temptation to do the wrong thing rather than the hard thing, and the difficulty of preserving our relationships in an online society. The book is also full of wonderful details, including a great idea for a Halloween party: Rubik’s Cube, for which guests wear items in the six colors of the cube and then, during the party, everyone trades clothing so that by the end of the party each guest is wearing a single color. Sounds fun, right?
Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr (2021)
I was late to this book out of sheer cussedness. Critics, friends, even my Kindle kept recommending it, and for some reason I dug in my heels. Silly me, because Doerr’s brilliant and powerfully moving book is a tribute to the power of stories to carry us through suffering: “That’s what the gods do, they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.” Stories are “a machine that captured attention, something to slip the trap.”
The novel interweaves three stories, in the past, present, and future. Anna and Omeir are young teenagers on opposite sides of the siege of Constantinople. In the present day, Zeno and five children are putting on a play in an empty library when an ecoterrorist bursts in. And Konstance, a young girl, is on a spaceship headed away from a doomed Earth and toward a new planetary home several light years away. All three stories feature prisons, gardens, libraries, the struggle for truth, and owls (you’ll understand why when you read the book); and all the heroes’ lives are touched by the manuscript of an ancient adventure story about a man who explores the world in search of paradise.
Dear Edward, by Ann Napolitano (2020)
Many years ago, a colleague told me about a couple she knew who had been killed in a car crash. Their three teenagers were parceled out to various relatives because no one was able to take in all three kids. I’ll never forget what she said at the end: “I wish I could say that they will be ok, but I don’t think they’re going to be ok.”
Dear Edward tells the story of a twelve-year-old boy who is the lone survivor of a plane crash that killed almost two hundred people, including his parents and brother. The book reminds us that no one is ok after a devastating loss. Grief is a lifelong process, and everyone needs to find his or her own way. As Edward’s therapist tells him,
“What happened to you is baked in your bones, Edward. It lives under your skin. It’s not going away. It’s part of you and will be part of you every moment until you die. What you’ve been working on, since the first time I met you, is learning to live with that.”
The strength of Napolitano’s book is threefold: First, that she is honest with readers about the extent of the loss. Chapters telling Edward’s story after the crash alternate with chapters about the other passengers before the crash. The dead are not just an empty statistic, but human beings full of potential that was tragically cut short. Second, that in spite of its dark theme, the book is surprisingly hopeful, entertaining, and filled with complicated people we would enjoy having as friends. And finally, that the book’s solution to Edward’s grief is one we all can use in our daily lives, even though we, thankfully, don’t face Edward’s terrible loss:
“I want to know what to do,” he hears himself say. . . .
She taps the center of his hand. “That’s easy. The same thing we all must do. Take stock of who we are, and what we have, and then use it for good.”
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver (2023)
If there is a more Dickensian writer than Kingsolver, I don’t know who it would be. So how perfect that in this book she has transported David Copperfield to her native Appalachia. She aims her righteous indignation at the foster-care system, Purdue Pharma, the injuries football inflicts on young bodies, bigotry against “hillbillies,” and many other deserving targets. Readers who are familiar with the Dickens classic from high school English (or their own reading pleasure) will find Kingsolver’s updates fascinating and apt—Uriah Heep becomes the pedophile U-Haul Pyles, while Barkis becomes Miss Barks, an inadequate caseworker from Child Protective Services, for example. But to my mind the best change Kingsolver makes is to the character of David. In Dickens’s novel, David is a bit of a cipher who is buffeted about by the winds of fate. Kingsolver’s Demon, by contrast, is a real pistol. Demon has enormous forces marshaled against him, but his canny intelligence and compassion for others make us root for him and hope that he will one day become the hero of his own story.
The Hollow Land, by Jane Gardam (2015)
This lovely and dryly funny collection of interlinked stories centers around a small farming community in the unfashionable part of northern England, just east of the Lake District. A farm family can no longer afford their big house, so they let it out to some posh Londoners, and complications ensue.
I had so many favorite moments in this book: The letter rescued from the trash that changes the course of everyone’s lives; the torrentially rainy and blustery day when the town’s chimney sweep and fish-and-chips vendor (yes, I agree that this is an unusual combination of professions) comes to take the London men fishing and is so oblivious to their excuses that they are all stuck out in the rain for more than twelve hours and come back chilled and drenched and with only three meager fish for dinner; how the theft of an antique table sends its owner on a journey to Argentina; or the time that James, a teenager, watches Old Hewitson, who is in his eighties, hacking at thistles:
“Funny,” he said, “so many thistles.”
“Funny’s what it’s not.”
“They ought to have discovered a selective weedkiller.”
“They have, it’s called a donkey.”
“Why doesn’t Mr. Teesdale get a donkey?”
“He’s got one. It’s called Old Hewitson.”
The book is a delightful example of one of the two universal plots, a stranger comes to town. (The other is a hero goes on a journey.) The daughter of one stranger who came and never left gives the book its moral:
“What sort of a world would this be if people had stayed where they was born? What sort of country this? There’d have been no Vikings bringing bees and honey and no Christians bringing Jesus Christ and no Celts with bronze and jewels and no Romans fixing up the roads and laws and no Saxons with books and painting and lovely clothes and no new ideas from nowhere. No gypsies for excitement, all the way from India. No Italian prisoners Grandad talks about in the last war bringing songs and that and no Chinese like over in Appleby cooking new food.”
North Woods, by Daniel Mason (2023)
At the outset, this book reminded me of three other books I love and greatly admire: Visitation, by Jenny Erpenbeck, in which the previous century of German history is told via the people who live in a little house; The Overstory, by Richard Powers, in which US history is told via Powers’s keen and scientific eye for natural detail; and The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, in which ghosts from the past impose their will on the present.
But as I continued reading, it became clear that Mason has created a masterpiece that is all his own. His connected stories, beginning before the Colonial era and continuing into the distant future, chronicle succession and evolution in both nature and history. The little house in the big woods begins as a refuge for two lovers fleeing Puritans, and in its centuries-long history it is also a stop on the Underground Railroad, a failed hunting lodge, a love-nest for an affair that is tragically cut short, and the site of a true-crime investigation—among many other stories. Mason is a gifted ventriloquist, and he writes each section in its own unique voice, including those of a doctor writing up case notes, a nineteenth-century poet, a pompous amateur historian, an eighteenth-century farmer, a con-woman posing as a medium, and a young man suffering from schizophrenia.
This beautifully-written and moving book makes the case for the healing power of nature. A young student suffering from depression goes for a walk in the winter woods and
suddenly she knew exactly what it was—sugar maple, . . . recognizable by the rough, vertical seams that appeared to open as if something inside was trying to get out. It was then that the winter forest underwent a transformation. As if something she had thought was dull and monotone had revealed itself to be a place of secrets and discoveries. As if the world were restored to what it was meant to be, a place much greater than herself.
The Short End of the Sonnenallee, by Thomas Brussig, trans. Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson (2023)
This delightful novel, published in Germany in 1999 and set sometime in the late seventies or early eighties in East Berlin, is newly available in English.4 Brussig, looking back on his own experiences as a child in East Berlin, says that memory “lays a soft veil of nostalgia over everything that once felt sharp and biting.” The novel takes place in the literal shadow of the Berlin Wall. Several kilometers of Sonnenallee run through West Berlin, but a tiny stub is walled off in the East, where the teenage hero, Micha, and his friends and family live.
A series of darkly amusing episodes radiate out from the novel’s central conflict: Micha is in love with Miriam, the prettiest girl on his street. He receives what he thinks is a love letter, from someone he thinks is Miriam, but he doesn’t know for sure, because before he can read the letter, a gust of wind wafts it away to the “death zone” next to the Wall, where it sits for (almost) the remainder of the book. Interspersed between Micha’s foiled attempts to retrieve the letter and his friends’ equally hopeless and quixotic quests (one friend engages in absurdly escalating attempts to acquire an original pressing of Exile on Main Street, for example) are stories of petty rebellions and assertions of freedom in an oppressive society.
I laughed over and over again while reading this book (and also pestered my husband by reading bits of it aloud to him). The book illustrates the power not only of humor to thwart oppression, but also of love to connect us across the most brutally-enforced boundaries. A representative episode happens when boys on the West side (who can see Micha’s street from their school window) mock Micha because he has outgrown his suit. Micha’s uncle, Heinz, who lives on the West side and often smuggles items across the border into East Berlin, hatches a scheme to get Micha a new suit. He starves himself for a month, and then, when he has become so skinny that his own suit hangs off him, puts on a new suit for Micha under his regular suit and crosses to Micha’s side. He gives Micha the suit, only to learn that he didn’t need to starve himself after all—it was legal to bring a suit across. D’ohh!
Wellness, by Nathan Hill (2023)
Jack and Elizabeth meet at a Liz Phair concert (this is 1990s Wicker Park in Chicago, after all), stay up all night talking, and fall in love. After a blissful whirlwind of a first chapter, we leap forward to middle age, to “the bottom of the U-shaped happiness curve,” as Elizabeth puts it. All is not well in Jack and Elizabeth’s world, in part because they were raised in messed-up families (Jack’s mother is a real piece of work, and Elizabeth’s old-money family exemplifies the maxim that behind every great fortune lies a great crime). But, even worse, Elizabeth is enmeshed in the destructive belief that we must maximize our “wellness,” while Jack just wants Elizabeth to be happy and to love him.
This book is large, it contains multitudes: An infuriatingly supercilious millennial waiter; a polyamorous young trophy wife (possibly modeled on Aella) who is given to sententious lecturing; a visit to a sex club (with the redundant name of The Club: The Private Club) that bears a deflating resemblance to an intake appointment with a new therapist; a condo building that reenacts the story of the Ship of Theseus; a product called Peat Bog Belly, which has been harvested from the colon of the eponymous Peat Bog Man and is now administered to clients in smoothies; a painterly evocation of the subtle beauty of prairies; a heartbreaking account of how algorithms can poison vulnerable souls; and a convincing hypothesis for why airlines now charge for every dang thing.
How can one book be so informative, bitingly funny, terribly sad, and also brimming with hope? An overarching metaphor and dubious solution for our problems is the placebo. As Elizabeth’s mentor asks, “If people are capable of that kind of self-healing, why don’t they just do it? By themselves? Why do they need the placebo?” He concludes, “placebo doesn’t cure you—rather, placebo creates the emotion required to cure yourself. And that emotion is certainty.”
How about you, readers? What were the best works of literary fiction you read this year? Please share your thoughts (and recommendations) in the comments!
The Tidbit
What sort of tidbit can possibly respond to such a diverse group of books? Is it possible to allude simultaneously to both Kingsolver’s Appalachia and Doerr’s spaceship? Challenge accepted! My family teases me because I love this song so much, but I promise you will love it too. As the top commenter says, “Can we all please just take a second and consider how hard this banjo player just CRUSHED this song?!”
The book-recommending season is upon us too: The New York Times just released its ten-best list. My list, unlike highbrow lists like the Times’s, includes funny, cheerful, uplifting books as well as bleak ones. As a top-rated commenter to the Times list, Heidi, laments,
It feels like every recommended book list these days is full of dystopian novels, books about death and hard times, or deep dives into the most horrible challenges affecting humanity today. Where are lists of books that provide a respite from the weight of those things in our everyday lives with imaginative and inspiring stories?
Look no further! My recommendations are here to help!
Yes I will name names: I’m thinking in particular of Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff (2015), and The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach (2011). Reviewers were in absolute raptures over these books, but they seemed quite flawed to me. The “shocking twist” in Groff’s book is banal and was done much more effectively back in 2003, in Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife; while The Art of Fielding contains a grisly exhumation scene that departs abruptly and for no apparent reason from the book’s tone, characters, and theme. Kinda seems like the reviewers ought to have acknowledged these problems.
If this book is made into a movie, Edward Norton really ought to play Lemoine.
I read the book in the original German. I would translate its title, Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, as “At the Shorter End of Sun Avenue” to preserve the poignancy of “sun avenue” in such a dark place.
[also: I'm a native West Virginian. As someone who has danced through many evenings in the Appalachian hills, I can confirm that the banjo player CRUSHED "Rocket Man."]
Nice list, Mari. I was just having coffee with a friend and we were talking about taste and timing and how much both have to do with our reactions to books. I also loved BIRNAM WOOD, until the end, which made me feel like the author just gave up (that's not a spoiler--an opinion only). I could not get past the beginning of THE OVERSTORY, but my friend loved, loved, loved it, as did Arthur. Probably my favorite fiction book this year was THE EXILES by Jane Harper. A murder mystery, yes, but so much more. I also loved YELLOWFACE for it's unstinting and hard-nosed look inside the world of publishing. Thanks for the thought-provoking recommendations.