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!

The Bookworm Tag Challenge

I’ve been tagged by Beth Overmeyer to participate in the Bookworm Tag challenge.

How is your bookshelf organized? By color, author, genre, size, etc.?

Non-fiction is organized by subject and then by size within subject. Fiction is alphabetical by genre, then author’s last name, and then chronologically if I own more than one book by the same author.

What’s the last MG book you read and did you like it?

Daughter of the Deep by Rick Riordan and I did like it. It’s a fun modernization/continuation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and I really like the sibling dynamics, it’s approach to tackling nuanced topics like betrayal, and its frank discussion of the main character’s menstruation.

Pirates or street thieves (or both)?

I’m a big Patrick O’Brian fan, so any sort of seafaring is right up my alley. Thievery I have less sympathy for. I grew up in poverty but integrity was always reinforced in my morality.

What’s one of the most fictional things you’ve ever done (went skydiving, played a character at a Renaissance faire, set fire to something, tamed a dragon, had high tea with the queen)?

I make historical costumes and attended costumed events. For one event, I wrote letters for the mail packet being delivered to sailing ship re-enactors with a quill and ink. With my handwriting skills, I’m sure the re-enactor who received my letter struggled to even read it! It was a mess!

Bookmarks! Do you use them? Do you memorize the page number? Do you have ticket stubs and old receipts you use instead? Or do you swallow a book whole in one sitting so nothing’s left to mark?

I use paper bookmarks in my planner and will use a receipt or post it note in my fiction books. The library return slip is always handy to use to mark my place in borrowed books. I also put bookmarks in audiobooks when I want to “highlight” a phrase I like, but I don’t use them to mark my place as playback just resumes from the last point.

The Mysterious Thrift Shop: What’s the weirdest/creepiest place you bought a book, and what was it? The better the find and the weirder the shop, the better.

I once bought a deck of tarot cards (with an instructional booklet) form a Wiccan gift shop in Salem, Massachusetts on a full moon Halloween. That night, the bedframe in my house in South Boston kept rocking like someone was pushing it rhythmically. It had never happened before and it never happened again after that. It was an unusually windy night and I later found out that the door in the closet that led to attic storage had been blown open, so … maybe it was “just the wind” after all, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.

What fictional world would you want to vacation in?

I just want the future that Star Trek has envisioned for us. It would be nice to chill in The Shire, too, though.

Do your librarians know you by name?

The children’s librarian knows me and my son. And the librarian who runs our library’s Makerspace knows me. He trained me on how to use the Glowforge and helped me fight with the Cricut machine a few times. I LOVE having a Makerspace at the library where you can use 3D printers, borrow a sewing machine, or a large format printer, laminator, and plotter cutter for occasional DIY projects. We have some people in the community who have started their own small businesses making and selling things that they produce solely at the library!

Hardcover, paperback, eBook, or audiobook, and why?

All of the above. I mostly consume audiobooks, but will pick up a paperback for a deeper study of a text so I don’t feel guilty about marking in the margins. I also buy collector’s edition hardbacks of my favorite books just to put on a “brag shelf” (as my husband calls it). They’re solely there to look at and I own paperback or ebooks of all of them that I actually read.

What’s one of the first books you ever read/the book that made you fall in love with reading (and the story behind it)?

I picked up Black Beauty when I was just a bit too young to really understand it all, but the challenge of piecing together the context of a world without electricity or motorized transportation was fascinating. I liked imaging that conveyances had feelings, too! I devoured it over a weekend trip to a motorcycle rally that my mom dragged me to. We would camp in our conversion van and the kids would hang out at camp while the adults rode during the day. I remember there was a dance in a pavilion at the camp site that night and there was dancing and a campfire. It was COLD, and there was a bright full moon, so I walked around a field and the woods behind the pavilion where the adults were drinking and dancing (and probably doing a lot of drugs). All day long I’d just read, and read, and read, and I’d finally come up for air when the sun went down. I can’t remember how old I was, but probably about 8 or 9. I think it was before I broke my arm in 3rd grade, and before we read A Wrinkle in Time as a class.

A NaNoWriMo WIN!

Every November since 1999, hundreds of thousands of writers have joined together with a common goal, to each write 50,000 words in 30 days during National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo has a special energy in the writing community. Sometimes it’s a frustrating energy, and sometimes it’s invigorating. I’ve experienced both sides of that coin.

The first time that I attempted NaNoWriMo was in 2017 when I was first starting to take writing seriously again after a long hiatus to change careers, get married, and start a family. I’d already been working on The Penitent Magdalene from about 2015 off and on, and wanted to use NaNo as a way to get into a more consistent writing practice and get more of my first draft done. I wrote about 12,000 words and I believe they’ve all been cut. I had no ability to meet the daily word count goal and gave up about a week into the month.

Though 2018 saw some improvements when I again attempted to add to my unfinished draft for The Penitent Magdalene. I was able to meet the benchmark word count goals… for about 7 days before losing all momentum. Still, I netted about 20k new words! Unfortunately, they weren’t driving the story forward in a meaningful way, and were again all cut from the current draft. I found participating to be really frustrating because I kept comparing my failures to everyone else’s successes.

2019 was a more serious attempt. I had learned a lot about how I write best, and tried to carry those lessons into doing NaNo as a “rebel” or someone who sets their own goals and operates outside the 50k words to win rubric. That year I was able to make sustained progress for about two weeks of the month and I ended up writing 25k words. I think some of them have even survived in the draft!

2020 was a wash. I didn’t even attempt to participate because I had contracted COVID at the end of October and was really sick until the second week of November.

When November rolled around in 2021, I had been toying with two alternate concepts that I’d been mulling over. I had started a new job and had already decided to step away from The Penitent Magdalene while I settled in. When that job went tits up on about October 24th and I ended up in a situation where I had several days of severe panic attacks due to that work situation, I wasn’t sure if I’d be in a good mindset to start a new writing project.

When the 1st came, I still hadn’t even decided which of the two concepts I had written very brief summaries for that I wanted to try to tackle. But I was feeling the need to chalk something up in the win column after my recent professional setbacks. So, as one does, I polled my writing group on our Slack channel, my book club on the Discord, and the Writing Community on Twitter.

One group chose the rom-com options. Another chose the fantasy adventure. Twitter chose the fantasy adventure.

I opted to start the fantasy adventure, not because of the Twitter poll, but because I’d only come up with the concept for the rom-com a few weeks before and hadn’t fleshed out the characters or story yet, whereas the fantasy adventure was something I started thinking about in January of 2020. I’d made several notes and sketches about it including roughing out two acts of an outline and a first pass at an opening scene. So it was already well-formed in my head, and I’d already begun taking it somewhat seriously as a project I wanted to put some effort into …eventually.

Well, I still wasn’t feeling up to going back to my main WIP after struggling to get a single 5k chapter finalized after working on it all summer, so no time like the present to just play around with a new project that I have very little invested in.

On day 1, I wrote a summary, and started a document to keep notes on character names and worldbuilding in. That’s always the fun part for me, dreaming up characters and settings, and I have a lot of fun naming things. But there was a lot of new territory I was covering in that first week because I’d never tried to write fantasy before. I was learning on the fly how to keep internal consistency while developing a magic system!

Right away, I could feel it going really well. The first week of writing sessions were fun. I didn’t use the material I’d already written because I’d already made some adjustments to the characters and world in my head and certain aspects of their dialog no longer made sense. So I re-wrote it and liked what I ended up with well enough.

At the close of the first week, having been able to meet the daily benchmark goals consistently and knowing that my four previous attempts at NaNoWriMo lost steam after the first week, I began to get worried. I’d also taken on a paid contract opportunity and had a report due before November 10th, so I had to make sure to manage my time really carefully. I had a little post-it note on my desk with daily goals for the project and I made sure to tackle that first before doing my writing sessions. I was very proud of myself when I was able to turn in the report a full day ahead of schedule, even though I’d sacrificed getting enough sleep to get it done and keep up the pace to stay on track with NaNo.

But if I thought clearing that other task off of my to-do list was going to make going into the second week of NaNo smooth sailing, was I ever mistaken! I was anxious that I’d lose steam as time went on, and I did, but I was also able to push through some bad days caused by my chronic illness and continue meeting the benchmarks.

The biggest problem I had going into week 2 wasn’t that I didn’t have the time to write, it was that I hadn’t started the month with a firm outline past a certain point. And the last thing I wanted to do was get caught in an eddy like in years past where there was movement, but no forward momentum in the story. So I spent some time digging up the outline I’d put together in the spring and re-working it with what changes writing the first 20,000 words had informed.

When I hit 25k, that was officially a personal best for me for NaNoWriMo attempts, and it was such a great feeling to be halfway through and not be woefully behind.

But things were getting difficult. My sleep schedule was completely screwed from staying up until I’d met the benchmark every night, and I was in a race to keep ahead of the story to plan scenes then write them instead of spinning my wheels going into a writing session with no idea where the story was going to go.

Around 40,000 words, I recorded these observations:

I've progressed to 75% of the goal of writing 50,000 words in November.

Is it a masterpiece?
No.

Is it actually readable?
Probably, if you like fantasy adventure stuff that's not real deep. I haven't actually tried re-reading much of it. It's coherent, at least. And I'm starting to get a picture of where it's lacking emotional impact and where the stakes need to be tweaked, but I'm going to let it all rest and try to address all of that AFTER I have a completed draft! I mean, it's derivative as hell, but originality wasn't the goal. Fast was the goal. And in that it's successful.

I've written my way into the second act where I ran out of outline to guide me, so I'm afraid the story starts to meander. This is not surprising because MESSY MIDDLES are my thing. I get 20k words into a novel-length work and lose all focus. However, I did set aside some time this past week to hammer out a roadmap to carry the story into the final act, so I'm hoping that will smooth the way for upcoming writing sessions.

That being said, some of the daily writing sessions have become a real slog. If I'm in the document for more than 4 hours, I'm just severely over it. So far I've been able to push through the frustration and stay with it until I meet the daily goals. Usually, by the time I have two pages filled, I'm stopping every few sentences and taking a count. As soon as I've hit the magic number I slam my laptop closed in disgust and go to bed! It's not a great way to work and I have severely screwed my sleep schedule and have neglected a zillion other things in my life, but I really want to see it through to the end of the month just to be able to say I did it!

I've figured out that 50k will probably get me through the second act of my outline, so then there will be maybe 20-30k more, which seems doable through December.

Going into the Thanskgiving holiday, I was still able to meet the daily goals consistently, and had even banked enough extra words to give myself a one day lead. But then things started to go slightly off the rails. I was still able to write every day, but there were several days when I didn’t meet the benchmark and I blew my lead and started getting slightly behind.

At one point I was only about 6k words from finishing, but was consistently missing the daily benchmarks and falling further and further behind. I was just so wiped out that I missed a whole day of writing by just sleeping through it. It was definitely a “neglect every bit of housework and ignore my family” weekend during the final stretch. On the final day, I had 3,500 words to write to win, and one panic attack and a skipped choir practice later, I did it!

It was technically 1:25am when I finished, so I didn’t squeak in under the midnight deadline, but I always writer after midnight and count those words on the previous day’s count, so I didn’t stress about it.

Despite the issues at the end of the month when I wasn’t meeting the daily counts, I was most proud about the consistency I was able to maintain all month long.

I've never been able to do that before. I’ve been working for a long time to try to get into a daily practice of writing and have challenged myself to meet a standing goal of 500 words per day. I consistently miss that goal, but I have been making improvements on writing for at least one 25 minute sprint session every day.

I’m much more proud of the consistency of writing every day than I am of the magical 50k number that means I “win” because that consistency has been a goal that I’ve been actively working towards.

I’m really glad I gave NaNoWriMo another chance after years of finding it a frustrating experience that made me feel bad about myself and my abilities. There were several things I did differently this year that helped me gain a new appreciation of the event. For one, I did it the “traditional” way, by starting a new draft on day one and doing no editing along the way. Usually when I’m drafting, I read back over what I wrote the previous day and make some line edits. I didn’t do that in the spirit of “noveling with abandon” during NaNo. In past years, trying to continue work on a WIP that doesn’t lend itself to fast drafting due to stylistic choices I’ve made and a complete lack of outline was not working at all, so I’m glad I chose a concept that I am a lot less invested in to work on to practice fast drafting.

Another big difference is that I’m not sure how many years I’d been living with an undiagnosed thyroid disorder, but it had probably been ongoing from the time I tried to participate in my first NaNo and possibly ever since I started writing my main WIP, The Penitent Magdalene. One of the main effects of this illness has been cognitive disorder, including an extreme inability to focus and memory problems bad enough that I exited the workforce in 2020 due to inability to be effective in my role. This is the first time I’ve participated in NaNo while on the appropriate medication and when I tell you that the difference has been night and day, I’m not sure such a trite phrase can really convey what I mean. All I can do is describe the frustration of sitting down at the keyboard to work and not being able to finish a single task, no matter how simple. There were times I couldn’t read because by the time I’d gotten to the end of a sentence, I had forgotten what the first words had been and couldn’t string the meaning together.

Same with sitting in on video conferences with my writing group. There had been times I really couldn’t follow the conversations very well and I felt quite stupid and not like myself at all, but now I’m even able to recall myself to a previous point if I get side-tracked which is not something I was capable of previously. My endocrinologist describes it to me as “reversible dementia” if that helps you form an idea of what I was up against. Needless to say, it’s debilitating for a writer.

This year, I could tell a HUGE improvement in the way my brain was able to plan the story, process words, and stick to the task until it was completed every day.

BLESS MY ENDOCRINOLOGIST WHO LOOKS LIKE JOSH GROBAN AND HIS MAGICAL PRESCRIPTION PAD FOR GIVING ME THE GIFT OF LEVOTHYROXINE SO MY BRAIN CAN FUNCTION AGAIN.

Wish me luck getting the final 30k or so words down to finish the story!