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Tom 2023 Top 10
Tom’s 2023 Top 12
Tom’s twelve favorite reads from 2023 (not necessarily published in 2023) in alphabetical order by author.
Featured
Dayswork
by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
When I say that Dayswork feels like it was written for me, that doesn't mean it wasn't written for you too. Written by a married couple, both writers, it is the story of a married couple, both writers, making their way, as we all did, through the stir-crazy days of the early pandemic, but it's really the story of the heroic and tragic life of Herman Melville, and the death and afterlife of his work in the minds of readers, told through tiny facts from his life and from the century and a half he has remained alive for those who care about him. I'm not sure how to explain that this collection of facts, hung loosely on a story of married life that is hardly a story at all, manages to be the funniest and sweetest and most moving book I've read all year, but it is. I loved it so much.
Jigsaw
by Sybille Bedford
Bedford's few novels rarely stray far from the facts of her own history, but with a family like hers, you can understand why. She was raised in the fertile (for a novelist) ground of a family with more culture than money, and spent her childhood shuttled among parents and friends in Germany, London, Italy, and, most memorably, a small town in the South of France. The characters and incidents in this story are too deliciously varied and interesting to list; her character has a genius for befriending her elders, which means she witnesses the messy lives of adults far before she is one herself. Her style is exquisite, and her assessments of others and herself are incisive but generous. With her adolescent perspective, this wonderful book reads like a series of Henry James novellas (this Maisie knows a lot), until her brilliant mother's hunger for morphine turns it into something by Zola.
The Magicians
by Blexbolex, translated by Karin Snelson
Monica
by Daniel Clowes
How to describe the work of Dan Clowes for those who haven't been reading him for thirty-odd years? Cranky, biting, hilarious, and tender: he often puts his jaw-dropping drafting skills in the service of detailing the most banal varieties of human grotesquerie, and he is both a more sturdily traditional storyteller than most of his fellow indie-comics visionaries and utterly willing to turn his story inside-out on a dime (e.g. the stunning but fully earned twist in this book's final frame). Monica is a mature work in the very best way, full of the perspective of lives lived and dreams found and dashed, and I would say it was the best in his wonderful career, if Ghost World wasn't such a stone-cold masterpiece.
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
by Claire Dederer
We haven't been short of think pieces on the subject of, to borrow the title of Claire Dederer's viral 2017 essay that was one of the seeds of this book, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men," but perhaps that makes a book like this even more necessary. It's the opposite of the quick takes we're used to: she turns her subject over and over, looking at it, and herself, and ourselves—the people who make art and the people who love it—from every angle. It's the first book of hers that likely won't be shelved in "Memoirs," but it's still deeply (and, as always with her writing, appealingly) personal, and ultimately a moving examination of why we love art, and why we keep loving it. I'm tempted to call this the last word on the subject, but her passionately open-ended approach makes clear that there's no such thing.
Kairos
by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann
You could describe Kairos as a Manhattan story—an ill-fated romance between a 50-something man and a teenage girl—or as an allegory for East Germany before, during, and after unification, but neither summary does full justice to this subtle and humane novel. More than anything it is the story of two vivid, individual people caught in time—historical time and their own mismatched, contingent lifetimes—and if their story happens to resonate with the national drama they find themselves part of, as it so brilliantly does, that just adds to its particular, personal depth. It's romantic and a bit austere, it's lovely and brutal, and it's the best novel I've read in quite a while.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder
by David Grann
If, like me, your idea of fun is reading stories of others going through almost unfathomable hardship, you can hardly do better than David Grann (the expert nonfiction yarnspinner behind Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z) and the horror-filled tale of the Wager, a British warship sent to attack Spanish treasure ships on the far side of South America. First typhus, then scurvy, then a shipwreck while rounding Cape Horn, which in turn led to murder, cannibalism, mutiny, and—with the help of multiple groups of indigenous locals—the ultimate return to England of a tiny fraction of those who began the voyage. From those survivors' contradictory accounts of misery, betrayal, and survival, Grann has woven a rousing story that doubles as cautionary tale of the folly of imperialism.
Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America
by John Langston Gwaltney
To title this superb oral history, collected in the early '70s and published in 1980, Gwaltney chose a word that means "ordinary," but that also, unlike many terms in black English, has never quite crossed over into general use in American English. The conversations he shares have those same qualities: even though he was an academic anthropologist, Gwaltney came to his speakers not as some neutral outsider but as a friend and a fellow black American, gaining their trust through shared bonds of "kinship and amity." The results are vivid, individual, thoughtful, and frank, self-portraits of solidarity and ingenuity and of weariness and frustration. As one of his respondents puts it, "I have grown to womanhood in a world where the saner you are, the madder you are made to appear."
The Bee Sting
by Paul Murray
The unhappiness of families is a gift to novelists everywhere; the particular unhappiness of the Barnes family, one of the most prominent in a dull town not far from Dublin, is surely made worse by the crash of 2008, but its roots go deeper than that, in bewitchings and betrayals that are unearthed as their family ties unravel and are tightened again. With his capacity to inhabit each family member's hopes and humiliations in turn, you could see Murray as an Irish Jonathan Franzen, but he's a looser stylist, more willing to ride the voices of his characters, although all the time he's orchestrating their drama in an almost old-fashioned, and quite wonderful, way.
I Could Read the Sky
by Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke
What a beautiful book. First published in 1997 and reimagined and republished this year with the cooperation of its two authors, it brings together story and photos to much the same hauntingly evocative effect as John Berger and Jean Mohr's A Fortunate Man (one of my favorite Phinney by Post picks), in this case pairing Pyke's photographs of Ireland and Irish people with O'Grady's novel of the often brutal, but not unjoyous, life of an Irish migrant laboring in England. O'Grady's story is individual—particular labors, a particular love, particular sadness—but made collective by its spare language, its sense of fellow feeling with other migrant workers, and most of all by Pyke's photos, portraits both individual and collective of joy, weariness, hope, and perseverance. I imagine reading this many times, each time letting the words or the pictures take the lead and then returning to the other.
The Fraud
by Zadie Smith
The first historical novel in Smith's spectacular career is built from the bones of two true stories from Victorian England: the forgotten literary life of William Harrison Ainsworth, a friend and rival of Dickens, and the once-celebrated Tichborne case, in which a man appeared to claim the fortune of a missing nobleman. But it is really the story of two other true—and usually secondary—figures: Eliza Touchet, Ainsworth's cousin and housekeeper, and Andrew Bogle, a black Jamaican servant who stood as one of the Tichborne claimant's main witnesses. And the real drama comes less from the story's public events, or from Smith's brilliance and language, which spark on every page, than the encounter of these two sensibilities: the thoughtful, liberal, and often brilliant Touchet, who chafes at injustice and the limits to her own freedom as a woman, and the equally thoughtful Bogle, whose life and testimony test the limits of Eliza's sympathies.
Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City
by Jane Wong
Jane Wong grew up in her family's Chinese restaurant in New Jersey (until her father's gambling obsession drove it into failure); now she's a poet and professor at Western Washington in Bellingham. But this isn't the sort of memoir that draws a bright line between an immigrant, East Coast past and an educated, assimiliated, West Coast future: It twists and turns and digresses and remembers, full of ghosts and ex-boyfriends, of dragon fruit and fish-head soup and Lunchables. And at the heart of it all is Jane's mom, still commuting an hour each way to work the USPS night shift in Jersey, and still sending daily advice from afar. Her daughter's book is a spiky, angry, hungry, silly, sweet love letter to her and a manifesto for her own love of language and her right to use it.