Best of 2023: Books

10. Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah

Earlier this year I read the massive, 800-page January 6th Report. It took me almost three months, mostly because I was writing summary notes as I was going along. (In case you missed it: Here’s a post with some of my reflections and key ideas from the report, and here are more detailed summaries: Part 1 and Part 2.) Afterward I needed a palate cleanser, so I turned from a huge tome about current events to incredibly short books of fiction. South Korean author Bae Suah’s slim book is hard to describe because it’s one of those novellas that’s less about plot and more about ~vibes~. We follow a nameless narrator as she reflects on her life, from working mindless jobs to a kind-of-but-not-really relationship with a guy. I sometimes found myself confused as to what exactly was going on (especially at the very end), but Sora Kim-Russell’s translation is really beautiful.

9. Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

This is another slim book, albeit not fiction. Táíwò’s thesis is that elites (and he defines “elites” in a way that encapsulates more than just wealthy CEOs) have found ways to rig the system so that they always benefit. The solution? A complete and total rebuilding of the system. It’s an ambitious argument to make — not because I’m skeptical, but because the solution feels so beyond anything we can do in this country.

My only real critiques are 1) that this book started as two articles, and it sometimes feels like Táíwò is padding out the pages to make his argument book-length, and 2) there were times when he spent A LOT of time on certain examples, and then other times when he glossed things over. I wish he reconfigured his examples so that he cut down on some and went deeper into others.

8. The Body by Bill Bryson

Last year we started a new tradition: When it was Kaitlin’s night to play with the cats, I’d read from Bill Bryson’s book At Home. It took us most of 2022 to get through that lengthy book, but it was such a fun and entertaining book to pick up and put down every couple days.

This year we kept the tradition going and ended up reading four other Bryson books. The Body was the one we started immediately after At Home, and it’s also his most recent. As the title implies, he goes through the entire body, head to toe, and explains all the wonderful and strange parts of our anatomy. I will say, it was a little disconcerting how often he’d say things like, “We don’t really understand how this works.” Really highlights that, regardless of all the medical advances we’ve made in the past 200 years or so, we still have a lot to learn.

7. A History of Present Illness by Anna DeForest

I’m a sucker for this kind of short, plotless novel that’s beautifully written. DeForest knows how to write a good sentence, that’s for sure. And what A History of Present Illness lacks in any kind of plot it makes up for in well-written vignettes. These moments accumulate and add up to something that doesn't feel quite as strong as the sum of its parts, but I enjoyed the journey. There's good commentary here on class and race within the medical community, even if it's fairly obvious that poor people and Black people don't receive the same kind of care and attention that affluent white people do.

This is the kind of book where, if you read the first three or four pages and aren’t hooked, then put it down. But if you do find yourself enjoying the prose (as I did), then you’ll be set for the rest of the book. Recommended if you like Sarah Manguso or Jenny Offill.

6. Uncomfortably Happily / Umma’s Table by Yeon-Sik Hong

I’m pairing these two graphic memoirs together because they’re all part of the same story, even if the two books have different approaches to the story. The first is a much more traditional graphic autobiography: Hong and his wife can’t afford to live in Seoul, so they move out to a remote cabin in the mountains. There they can both focus on their artistic endeavors (they both want to write comics/graphic novels), but the isolation and anxiety around failure really starts to take its toll on Hong. That’s more or less the scope of the first book, which is lengthy even by graphic novel standards.

The second book transforms all of the humans into anthropomorphized cats, but we essentially follow Hong and his wife and their newborn child as they continue to live in a remote cabin. However, the focus of Umma’s Table is Hong’s ailing mother. It’s a much more touching and poignant story, in my opinion, and I think the decision to make all the characters cats helps to lessen the pain.

Taken together, I felt like I got an intimate look into Hong’s mental and physical state as he lives his life and grows older.

5. Trust by Hernan Diaz

Here's how good Trust is: I read it the completely wrong way, yet I still really liked it a lot. When I say I read it the completely wrong way, what I mean is that I read the whole book in about five distinct chunks between May and October. Those chunks didn't coincide with the natural breaks in the four narratives of this book; instead, I would pick it up, get wrapped up in the story/world that Diaz builds, and then have to put it down because life suddenly became too busy for fiction.

This is a book best read all at once, because then you can see how the various narrative threads weave together to form a whole. Some of that structure was lost on me since I had to remember things I had read months and months ago. But even still, I found Trust to be really beautifully written, the first narrative in particular. Still, each section had great sentences and interesting narrative turns. I can see why this one got a lot of buzz last year.

4. The January 6th Report

I mean, it’s absolutely incredible. A meticulously thorough (and immensely readable!) report covering the two months after the 2020 presidential election and how Trump and his allies tried to illegally overturn the results. How the Select Committee was able to compile all of this information and turn it into a cohesive narrative is just astounding. It’s a shame that when the Republicans took control of the House after the midterms that the Committee was disbanded, because I can only imagine what more they would have uncovered had their investigation been allowed to continue. Truly frightening stuff.

3. Mothman Apologia by Robert Wood Lynn

The best book of poetry I read this year, and one of the best books of poetry I’ve read in a long while. After being rather disappointed with Ocean Vuong's Time Is a Mother, I practically burned through Mothman Apologia. An incredibly cohesive and powerful collection of poems — and a debut collection, at that! I don't think all of the poems hit as hard as the others, but each one had a moment or a line or a phrase that I really enjoyed. The “Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone” are the real highlights.

2. A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney

A short but powerful memoir about the death of his two-and-a-half year old son, Henry, from a brain tumor. I appreciate how Delaney doesn't use overly sophisticated metaphors to talk about death, dying, grief, and all of those other aspects of our lives that we try so hard to push aside and not think about on a day-to-day basis. Instead, his writing is almost painfully direct.

I read a good number of books about death and grief after my dad died when I was 19, and none of them felt true to what I was feeling at the moment. However, there were many passages in this book that made me go, “Yep, that sounds about right.” A very sad but very touching tribute to little Henry.

1. Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

This one was kind of a shoo-in. I mean, I was an English major. I’m a fan of Shakespeare’s work. Bill Bryson is at his best when he writes to inform. In some ways, this book felt like it was made for me.

As Bryson readily admits, the facts we know about Shakespeare are few and far between, so most of this book isn’t about Shakespeare himself but rather what life in Elizabethan England was like, or the places and things Shakespeare could have gone to or done during his lifetime. The last chapter is a great takedown of the anti-Statfordians, as he calls them — the scholars or individuals who simply can't believe that one person wrote all of Shakespeare's work.

Although this isn’t a long book, I appreciate its depth and range, especially after longer works like At Home or The Body. Highly recommended if you’re a Shakespeare nerd like myself.