My Top 10 Books of 2023

I plowed my way through 75 books in 2023. The thought of drafting a comprehensive roundup of all of those titles like I’d done in past years felt overwhelming, so I thought a good alternative would be to decide on a top 10 list.

I chose my top 5 fiction books, and top 5 non-fiction books. They are presented in no particular order in terms of ranking.

Non-fiction

  • To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick and How We Can Fight Back by Alden Wicker

  • Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

  • Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule

  • The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson

  • Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick and How We Can Fight Back by Alden Wicker

I’ve had a decades-long interest in historical fashion and textiles, so I occasionally like to get really deep in the weeds with texts on fibers. When an acquaintance I’m in a sewing group with recommended To Dye For to me, I instantly put it at the top of my TBR. It broke my brain in the best way. It’s a must-read, really. I’ve been recommending it to people like crazy, particularly all of my fellow fibromyalgia sufferers with multiple chemical sensitivities. Only truly top tier non-fiction leaves a lasting impact on my daily habits, and this one did. I have fully stopped buying synthetic fabrics for my son to wear after reading this and am feeling quite smug about my dedication to this specific brand of organic cotton dresses. This was very well organized nonfiction that presented cutting edge research and included the voices of many industry experts who you aren’t likely to have heard from anywhere else. The way the case study of the Alaska Airlines flight crews experience with their new uniforms bookends the chapters in this makes it a really satisfying read even when there are still so many open questions the science has yet to provide answers to.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

I picked up Uncanny Valley as research for a new fiction project I’m working on. I was expecting it to be a bit of a chore I had to get through, but I ended up enjoying it far more than I thought I would. I’ve been finding a lot of schadenfreude in the recent spate of documentaries about things like the founding of Über, the downfall of WeWork, the Fyre Festival, etc, and this tale of a young woman being an early hire at GitHub (which I’m familiar with due to my husband’s contributions to open-source code repositories) was such an intriguing window into a world that feels simultaneously far removed from my life and yet all-too-familiar. I liked the way the light, tongue-in-cheek tone ground up against the serious topics like sexism that Weiner engages with, and I especially connected with the treatment of the setting as its own character. This one is full of witty observations and fully relatable scenarios. The way that Weiner chose not to pin down the corporate entities that populate the story by naming them lent a universality to her ultimately very personal tale.

Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule

I had some great conversations about this book with my friend who is a professor in the Humanities. It was an interesting perspective that I appreciated more and more the further I got into the text. I learned a lot about both US military history and the politics of the contemporary US military that I hadn’t been aware of previously. I’d never had much insight into how and why things like ships and military bases were named, and this book had so much to say about how mediocre Confederate service members were so honored while many other deserving historical figures have been neglected. This book does not pull any punches when addressing the universal truths it lays bare, and the personal stories the author relates from his own life are no less unflinching.

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson

This is the “true crime” book we deserve! It’s got all the elements of a blockbuster true crime podcast without the glorification of murderers and re-victimization of families that make that genre so unpalatable to me. It’s got money, an obsessive subculture, shady backroom deals, a heist, a young classical musician who breaks bad, a globe-spanning manhunt… it is wild and riveting! And I want more!

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

This book made me furious in the best way. I picked it up expecting a first-hand account of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and got that and so, so much more. I’d never made the connection before between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ways in which we instituted martial law in Gulf states after Katrina. I knew there had been multiple breakdowns and failures, but this book took on the difficult task of drawing connections between the complicated societal and historical contexts and what actually happened on the ground to one family in the days before, during, and immediately after the disaster. The things that happened were appalling and should be so much more well known. This book makes you feel the very personal heartbreak and trauma of the Zeitoun family as if it were your own. I don’t think I can adequately praise how well it’s reported and how delicately it is structured to carry the reader through heavy topics with a light touch. I don’t care how much time and effort went into the creation of this book. Whatever the cost, it was worth it. We need to do whatever we can to make sure there will be dozens more just like it. Stick David Eggers into a cloning machine right now. I will take 20 more books like Zeitoun and 20 less profiles on Elon Musk, please.

fiction

  • Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

  • Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

  • The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary

  • Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

  • Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken by Nita Tyndall

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary had been on my TBR since it released. I had enjoyed The Martian by the same author, despite not preferring first person point of view, so I thought I’d give this newer title of his a chance as well. I’m glad I did. It was inventive hard science fiction with a similar tone and structure as Weir’s previous work without feeling like there were any regurgitated themes. It takes similar themes and finds something fresh to explore in them. I felt like what The Martian did for biology, Project Hail Mary did for materials science. And Weir’s habit of limiting the cast of characters allows him to do so much exploration of the rich interior life of the narrator which I enjoy. I think I can confidently say now that Weird is one of those authors I will instantly buy when I see they have a new title out.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Yellowface. Where do I even start to unpack the complicated feelings I had on this one? When an acquaintance asked my opinion on it recently, I simply said, “It’s a lot.”

I work in a publishing-adjacent space and found myself nodding along at a lot of the criticisms, but some of the more pointed criticisms felt so overwhelming that I had to take a break from the book midway through. It was challenging in ways I both expected given the thematic elements and in ways that totally blindsided me.

I went into this one with no expectations. I’d just heard there was a lot of buzz and some people whose opinions I really respect and trust were holding it up in stunned silence which got me curious. And of course the story took several turns I was not prepared for, but that’s not what I liked best about it. It rides the line of being unreadable with unlikeable protagonists and exploration of problematic themes, but the prose is so beautiful that it kept me turning the pages. I did have to dust off my Triple Constrain Rule for Books, though, because this book had two of the three criteria checked, and it was a tough read!

The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary

This was the February ‘23 read for Fat Girls in Fiction Book Club discussion group, and it kept my mind churning on all the layers for weeks. I wrote two full pages of notes to take to the club meeting and I think we talked for something like 4 hours that night about the book!

I remember when I read the back cover copy thinking that the concept of two people hot-bunking in a flat in London sounded cheesy and that it could either be terribly contrived and not really work… OR it was going to be brilliant because it would have to be in order to pull off that concept.

It was brilliant. There were several individual lines that I bookmarked because of the gorgeous language and insight into the human condition. Like this one:

There are a few people out here. Mainly smokers. They have that hunched look that smokers get, like the world is against them.” –Beth O’Leary in The Flatshare

It felt like a really solid story both structurally, and in terms of the concept being something I’ve never seen done before. Everything clicks together so nicely, the pacing and character arcs were brilliantly handled. And the writing style felt fresh. There are two POV characters, and each voice is very distinct. The way that the male main character uses unconventional sentence structure in his internal dialog makes it really apparent whose POV you’re reading.

This is definitely not one of those contemporary novels where the entire conflict could have been resolved if the main characters had had a simple conversation, and the queer subplot is a rare one that actually cannot be removed and have the story still work in any way, which is refreshing. So often with subplots added in as a diversity checkbox, if you take them away, nothing in the story actually changes. This subplot doesn’t need to justify its existence in the book, and I really liked that.

I liked how Tiffy discovered a lot about herself and her past relationships over the course of the book. We weren’t introduced to her as “damaged and traumatized from being emotionally abused”. She’s just someone who had gone through a breakup and slowly discovers how toxic and damaging that relationship was, and I’ve both seen friends come to that slow realization and come upon that slow realization myself.

On first reading, I thought the part where Leo climbed the balcony was abrupt, seemed out-of-character, was maybe just another way to emphasize his physicality, and felt a bit melodramatic, but I the more I thought about it, I eventually how symbolic the scene was. Putting himself at physical risk was a concrete way of showing his growth as a character, becoming willing to risk himself emotionally by opening tup to Tiffy. Looking at it from a symbolic perspective made a lot more sense than just viewing the scene literally. It’s actually a brilliant piece of writing to allow the reader to infer all of that internal growth through external action. 

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

I’m often a movie-before-book person (gasp!) so I knew I would eventually get around to reading Crazy Rich Asians before the China Rich Girlfriend movie comes out. I also knew I would love it. And I did. Having re-watched the movie at least half a dozen times already, there weren’t any huge surprises, and I don’t want to spend too much time doing a book-vs-movie comparison as there were things I liked about each storytelling approach.

But learning that there are chapters in the book that developed from a poem inspired by the author’s fathers’ deathbed reminiscences that was then adapted into a short story years later for a creative writing class which was ultimately included as a chapter in the novel, I will say you can feel all of it on the page - all of the development, and craft, and the literal years of work, and generations of experience that went into the story. It’s a story with depth that doesn’t feel like it drowns you in too much detail. You get just enough to deepen your appreciate of a scene and you get it at just the right moment. You’re not bogged down in backstory, but it’s all there. I will definitely be reading the rest of the trilogy

Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken by Nita Tyndall

Whenever I can, I try to read books written by the clients of the agency I do contract work for. This one happened to be on my library’s streaming service, happened to be set in Berlin, and I happened to be traveling to Berlin last spring, so of course I had to grab it! A quick read of the back cover copy made me anxious that this story might fall into that WWII narrative tradition of “Nazi apologists” tales, but I know and trust the agent who represents this author enough to know he wouldn’t have anything to do with a story that didn’t deal with history in a balanced and factual way, so I went ahead and jumped into it. It was fascinating to be able to be rooted in the locations while reading, and I felt like it treated what could be some tricky historical topics delicately while keeping the very personal story of the characters moving forward. The sapphic subplot and ongoing concerns about the political climate the characters were growing up in were central to the story without overwhelming it, and the ending was so unsatisfying, but in the best way.

I really wish I had posted my thoughts on this as I was reading because I can’t remember now all the nuances I enjoyed about this book, but I don’t post public reviews much anymore and I only take notes on what I’m reading for book club picks.

Perhaps for next years’ top 10 list, I’ll keep better notes throughout the year so I can do a better job at my year-end roundup post!