Favorite Books of the Year: 2023

Every year, I post something like this on New Year's morning - a listing of the books I liked best the previous year. Some years I've read less, and keep it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

I had a really slow patch a few years back - coming off a Book-A-Day year in 2018, my reading dropped to nearly nothing afterward - but I'm back to what I think of as a sustainable level. The numbers aren't what they were back when I was an editor, or during my periodic Book-A-Day binge years, but I read 197 books in 2023, which is enough to find some themes and favorites.

First, though, I feel the need to link back to those past posts: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

And then, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic, and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

• This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
• These are favorites, not "best." I can't define "best." I can definite "favorite."
• This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's everything I read all in one stew.
• Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
• I try to chose to newish books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to other lists; it doesn't always work. I'm not focused on newly-published books, for example - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wants to do that, but I just don't read enough, or in that focused a way.

January

I usually start these monthly squibs with old stuff, so I'll kick off the year by mentioning The World of S.J. Perelman, a collection of great funny pieces by a master - count that as a general recommendation to read something, anything, by Perelman when you get the chance.

Newer was Figures in a Landscape, the recent collection of miscellaneous short non-fiction - a lot relating in some way to travel, but not all of it - by Paul Theroux, one of the world's great travelers, writers, and grumps.

And I start the year with one of my eternal problems: two books that are both worthy, when I can only pick one under my rules. So I think the also-ran will be Sunburn, a smart, moody historical graphic novel by Andi Watson and Simon Gane, which is brilliant and beautiful and deep and thoughtful.

Then the first favorite for the year is another GN - even bigger, even more ambitious, from a new creator from a different part of the world: Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed, a djinni story like no other that is also three stories of real people in an intricately constructed alternate world.

February

Something old: both the taut, tough fantasy-detective novel Finch by Jeff Vandermeer, whose work I need to read more of, and Joan Didion's 2000-era essay collection After Henry, another deep, circling collection of views into people and places and, more than anything else, the American penchant for self-admiration and self-delusion.

Something new: a great, very different linked collection of comics stories, Animal Stories, from the newer sibling team Peter and Maria Hoey, with a distinct visual style and a chilly viewpoint.

Something borrowed: John Porcellino's graceful evocation of his own life and grapplings with Zen practice in From Lone Mountain. (No, it doesn't fit the schema that well - Porcellino isn't really "borrowing," Zen; he's trying to live his life, and it's part of that.)

And my favorite of the month was the monumental graphic novel Ducks by Kate Beaton, large in size and personal in scope, deeply touching and darkly ominous, personal and real and true in all of the best ways, mostly happy like any life but with inescapable darkness at its core.

March

I finally read the '30s thriller Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, a captivating, taut little book that exquisitely balances the narrator's voice and external action - and builds its thrills out of mostly small moments and places in a story supposedly about an attempt to assassinate a major world figure.

Also towards the "old" end of the spectrum was The Shelf, a wonderful book by Phyllis Rose in which she read through an entire library shelf of books and wrote about all of the things she found there. I love reading stunts, and this was a glorious one.

Somewhat newer: Stewart O'Nan's just-post-WWII thoughtful thriller City of Secrets, set in what would become Israel among the Jewish militants who were trying to make that happen. Similarly, the mostly quiet collection of stories Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I again have two graphic novels battling to be my favorite. This time, I think I'm going for the smaller book, unlike January. Sammy Harkham's Blood of the Virgin is big and expansive and full of great characters and moments, set in an interesting moment in Hollywood history and telling a great story - it's the kind of book where everything is on the table, where Harkham puts it all in and it all works brilliantly.

But even more impressive was the deeply personal It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood, the story of six months in her life and (to put it reductively) her struggles with depression. There's a moment near the end - one line, one page - that has lived in my head since I read the book; those are the ones that have to be listed as favorites, the ones that change how you think and feel and look at the world.

April

This one was a tough choice - the kind of month where I look at the list and wonder "did I read anything new that I really liked?" I dove back into three great classic SFF stories of different eras - John Sladek's great satire Tik-Tok, the Nebula-winning planetary odyssey Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick, and the picaresque far-future adventure Cugel's Saga by Jack Vance.

And I found the wonderful Dog Butts and Love. And Stuff Like That. And Cats., collecting the single-panel cartoons of Jim Benton, but I got to it quite a few years later than I'd be comfortable putting it on a list like this.

But then I realized I'd read Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere that month: the first collection of a wonderful, varied, interesting daily comic strip by Liniers, and that would be a perfect choice.

May

The oldest "old book" yet - The Golden Ass of Apuleius, in the Robert Graves translation (which I suppose makes it only seventy or so years old, not two thousand) - was a great picaresque, maybe one of the type specimens of the genre.

I read P.G. Wodehouse's Full Moon again - I read several Wodehouse books a year, these days, so I don't mention all of them. But this is one of his best, and a book everyone should read at least once - maybe starting on a day when they really need something to cheer them up.

It's a bit more melodramatic than maybe it needs to be, but Blue Is the Warmest Color by Jul Maroh is a great love story and an impressive first graphic novel.

Favorite for the month is another strip collection - two in a row, in this era of zombie strips? maybe the field isn't quite doomed - in Will Henry's Are We Lost Yet?, standing in for his whole Wallace the Brave strip, which I've been reading avidly (both daily and in the collections, like this one) for the last year or two.

June

I got to a second Stewart O'Nan book this year - the elegiac, quiet West of Sunset, telling the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's twilight years in Hollywood and making a deeply readable, thought-filled novel out of daily life with an ending everyone already knows.

On the graphics side, I saw Hayao Miyazaki's Shuna's Journey, one of his few excursions into art on paper rather than on celluloid - it's a bit compressed, but very Miyazaki-esque and full of great moments.

Also of note: Will McPhail's first collection of cartoons, Love & Vermin. I was a big fan of his graphic novel In. the year before, and his single-panel stuff is just as well-drawn and often even funnier.

I finally got to Mark Alan Stamaty's Macdoodle Street, in the somewhat recent edition collecting not just that 1980-era strip from the Village Voice but also a long comics afterword about what he did later. It's weird and fun and random, a fine and-then-this-happened story told in comics form.

Favorite of the month was the monumental new graphic novel from Julia Wertz: Impossible People. It's personal and specific, conversational and detailed - and, as always with Wertz, much more carefully constructed than it appears.

July

Old things you should read someday, and I did this year: Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts.

Recentish things you should read someday, and I did this year: The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a fine French novel from about fifteen years ago by Muriel Barbery; The House, a family-focused Spanish graphic novel, of about the same vintage but more recently translated, by Paco Roca.

Other things I want to mention: the third Ralph Azham book, You Can't Stop a River, continuing some of Lewis Trondheim's best fantasy work; Unholy Land, a Lavie Tidhar novel that crams three viewpoints and at least one alternate universe into a short, zippy package; and Finder: Mystery Date, possibly my favorite piece of Carla Speed McNeil's thorny, compelling, distinctive SFnal graphic novel series.

The one that almost made the list was the lovely, zippy, madcap About Betty's Boob by Vero Cazot and Julie Rocheleau, a graphic novel about one woman and one bad situation that opens up to a vision of inclusion and love and happiness for all.

But I ended up picking Tsalmoth by Steven Brust, as his Vlad Taltos fantasy series steams towards its end in just a few more books, and he still finds new ways to complicate his story-telling and throw in new morsels of information about his people and world and past events.

August

Some frivolous things: Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron, collecting all of those related strips from Charles M. Schulz's fifty-year long run of Peanuts, and I Am Providence, a mystery novel by Nick Mamatas set at a horror convention that gleefully attacks everything within reach.

Somewhat more serious: Political Fictions, yet another collection of Joan Didion essays, as I got up to the modern day; Call for the Dead by John le Carré, as I made my way back to his very first novel; Onion Skin, a rollicking and wonderful first graphic novel from Edgar Camacho.

And my favorite for the moth was the new book from Peter and Maria Hoey: The Bend of Luck, a unified graphic novel told in chilly, distanced chapters. They have a unique visual style and a storytelling stance to go along with it, and I love seeing the things they can do with that. 

September

The token old book this month is Dawn Powell's 1948 The Locusts Have No King, a social satire set in the New York writing world, full of great lines and interesting insights and cruel but accurate characterizations.

For newer things, I was really impressed by Josh Rountree's debut novel, the historical fantasy - almost a Weird Western, but not quite - The Legend of Charlie Fish.

And, after reading a few Katie Skelly books that didn't quite click with me - but kept me interested and intrigued - I got to her most famous book, Maids, the story of two French sisters in domestic service and what they did to their employers nearly a hundred years ago.

The easy favorite was Jordan Crane's magnificent, major graphic novel Keeping Two, the story of one couple and one relationship that is universal and all-encompassing in its scope.

October

This month is a parade of "almost," starting with Michael Blumlein's final novel Longer, an exploration of life extension that I wish its creator lived longer to expand on.

The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate of the Artist brings together a new Eddie Campbell graphic novel in the same vein as his brilliant 2006 Fate with that original, but the new one, with all its pandemic-era complications and upheavals, suffers a little in comparison.

Ashes is a well-crafted graphic novel from Alvaro Ortiz: smart about people, drawn with verve and energy, telling an interesting story and doing it all well.

Another piece in a very impressive edifice: Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 5: Fog and Tears gathered two recent bande desineé in the central piece of this multi-threaded series, with great work from Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Boulet.

My favorite was a biography in comics form - more than that, in the form closely matching the way its subject worked, a brilliant concept that worked really well for Luca Debus and Francesco Matteuzzi in their Funny Things, a comic-strip format telling of the life of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz.

November

To start with the parade of old - I finally read Patricia Highsmith's 1950s noir, The Talented Mr. Ripley, which is sneaky and fun and a lot like many other things from that era I've already read. (Not that that's a bad thing.)

And then there were two very different books about twenty years old: Jeffrey Ford's historical thriller The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, the story of a society painter and one very unusual commission; and Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik's bestselling collection of New Yorker essays about spending the late '90s living in Paris with a new baby.

Do I count Paco Roca's Wrinkles as old? It's about fifteen years old, in the Spanish original, and I think the English translation was only a year or so later. Either way, it's a light-hearted look at a group of old people in a retirement home, and I think the creator's vastly most-popular book.

Alec Nevala-Lee's account of the Golden Age of SF and several of its most important figures, Astounding, was full of details and insights, particularly about that central, controversial (and often deeply annoying) figure of John W. Campbell.

And my favorite was the new biographical GN from Bill Griffith, Three Rocks, the story of Ernie Bushmiller and his Nancy comic strip, told in an almost collage-like way that repurposed Bushmiller art every single time his creations appeared in the book.

December

The token old book is Daniel Pinkwater's Borgel, a 1992 YA novel from an inimitable writer, full of weird ideas and culminating in one of his best moments of love and positivity.

Somewhat more recent were a couple of very nice SFF novels from a couple of years back: John Scalzi's wonderfully frivolous and deeply entertaining The Kaiju Protection Society and Walter Jon Williams's mid-trilogy picaresque fantasy Quillifer the Knight.

From the comics side of the world, I have three very different things to mention. Dan Nott's Hidden Systems was a thoughtful, well-informed, carefully constructed look at three of the major infrastructure pieces undergirding the entire modern world. Bea Wolf was a retelling of, yes, Beowulf for younger readers, written in alliterative meter by Zach Weinersmith and drawn in high-energy mode by Boulet. And Emilia McKenzie's But You Have Friends is a deep memoir of friendship, starting in their teen years, about that one person you just click with about nearly everything - and what it means when that person dies.

For the last time this year, I have two books to choose from for the favorite. I think the also-ran is by Paco Roca (him again! I read three of his books this year, and mentioned them all here, which is a good sign, I think) - Memoirs of a Man in Pajamas, collecting three batches of strips about a cartoonist who is not quite his creator, telling stories that are sometimes drawn from his life, and making a complex stew out of modern life while keeping it both funny and informative.

But the last favorite of the year is a novel in one of my favorite series, the book I was reading right before the end of the year: System Collapse by Martha Wells, the latest in the Murderbot series, a smart, voice-driven SF novel that spoils me for any other medium-future setting and makes me wish there were a half-dozen more books in that voice already.

So let me pull out the favorites into one list, in the time-honored way:

Top 12 of 2023

• Are We Lost Yet? by Will Henry
• The Bend of Luck by Peter and Maria Hoey
• Ducks by Kate Beaton
• Funny Things by Luca Debus and Francesco Matteuzzi
• Impossible People by Julia Wertz
• It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood
• Keeping Two by Jordan Crane
• Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere by Liniers
• Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed
• System Collapse by Martha Wells
• Three Rocks by Bill Griffith
• Tsalmoth by Steven Brust

And that's what I read this past year that was worth remembering and sharing. I hope you have similar books in your own lives, and, more so, that something I've mentioned will sound intriguing or compelling to you. Have a great 2024, in reading and otherwise.