My Favorite Books of 2023
It's been 2 months since 2023, but here are my favorite books of 2023. To be clear, these are the books I read in 2023, not books that were published in 2023. And the books are (in no particular order):
The Celebrants, by Seteven Rowley
Anyone who knows me knows how I’ve been obsessed with the idea of death. The last book by Steven Rowley that I read was The Guncle, and I loved how he tackled the idea of a loved one dying with this bittersweet angle - like the heart expands to make room for the grief in addition to all the love you have for this person. The Celebrants had the exact same effect on me.Â
It’s a story about six friends who met in college and made a pact- to throw each other living funerals so that they don’t doubt how much value they each held in the world. I will think about this book (like I think about The Guncle) for a very long time. Â
Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
This was my very first Ann Patchett (I know!) and I just know I’ll be reading so many more books from her. It’s about young love and the fresh and gutting memory of it. It’s about parenthood and how you will never truly know about your parents. It’s about (the complexities of?) family and of relationships that you are bound by whether it be via blood or via memory. Meryl Streep needs to do more audiobooks, that's for sure!
Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner
To call it a memoir about losing your mother is a disservice to the expansiveness of this book. I would call it a memoir about belonging, independence, and food. It’s also about the complicated feelings you have with your mother, especially when the mother’s worldview is very different from yours. It’s about how particular food brings out particular emotions and memories. It’s about hardship and reconciliation at a breakneck speed. What I’ll also say is: everyone was right about this book and it is truly what you should pick up if you want a good snotty cry. I should most definitely not have read it at the tail-end of my trip home. I think I’ll be haunted by the raw emotionality of this book for a long time.
Paris: The Memoir, by Paris Hilton
I don’t remember the early 2000s, and after reading this harrowing book, I am so glad I don’t remember. I also don’t remember Paris Hilton from that time and don’t know what she’s up to at any time. This is probably why I assumed it would be a pink frilly fun book, but it devastated me (girlhood!). There is a lot that needs to be said about how we treat girls and young women in our society, the expectations we have from them, and the sharpness of the steel of the knife we use to cut them open with. I thought this book is important and should be read by anyone who is fascinated by celebrity culture.   Â
All the Lovers in the Night, by Meiko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd)
Meiko Kawakami’s books always have a way to uncannily linger long after I’ve finished reading them. All the Lovers… was no different. It is a poignant narrative written in masterful prose about a copywriter in her mid-thirties living in a city where it’s difficult to form new relationships. It’s a book about the unsettling comfort of loneliness, and about feeling like your life is slipping away from you so fast that you don’t recognize the person who is staring back at you in the mirror. But then again, to me, Kawakami has always painted a vivid picture of the yearning for connection and solitude and striving and failing to find the delicate balance between the two.   Â
Pyre, by Perumal Murugan (translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan)
This is a sobering novel about the harsh realities of intercaste marriages and how marriages are somehow everyone’s business in India, and how everyone somehow has an opinion about the people within them. Everyone at Kumaresan’s family and village have something biting to say about Kumaresan and Saroja’s marriage. You always think that the annoying little remarks and the constant nagging and scornful quips are trivial, but they simmer until they burn into a pyre. And that’s where Perumal Murugan’s excellent writing (and Aniruddhan Vasudevan’s seemingly-effortless translation) shines. Â
Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors, by Aravind Jayan
This is a novel about the aftermath of an illegally-shot video of Sreenath and his girlfriend Anita posted on an adult website(s) and going viral. Where do you (and your families and friends) go from there?Â
I’ll be quite honest, I initially did not think of this book as one of my absolute favorites from the year. But it seeped in slowly- I periodically kept thinking about the book. The author has somehow perfectly captured the sense of annoyance you feel when dealing with an arrogant young adult who thinks they know everything, the always-present tangible tension between siblings, and the absolutely wretched and unsympathetic allure of other people’s mistakes and misfortunes.Â
I first read Ducks because I loved Kate Beaton’s hilarious comics about Jane Austen. I don’t think that prepared me, because Ducks is about Alberta’s oil rush. I don’t know how to talk about a graphic novel about what seemed to me the most boring thing on earth- working in your twenties in an oil sand. And yet, this one is gripping in a very bleak way. Beaton is one of the very few women in a freezing-cold and isolated camp. She has just graduated from college with an arts degree and massive debt. She comes from an area where people have to leave to other places in order to make a living. I don’t know how anyone can write about this experience, let alone draw and create a graphic memoir.  Â
Uncanny Valley, by Anna Weiner
At the height of the tech boom, Anna Weiner leaves a job in publishing for one in a big-data start-up. The bubble seems surreal and extravagant and abundant at first and from a distance. And then comes disillusionment. I’ll tell you it had me sat! I am always so fascinated by culture and tech, and this one scratched all my itches about a non-tech role in a tech space. As someone who grew up surrounded by tech people who love behaving like just studying engineering in some unknown college makes them god’s gift to earth, this book just felt oh-so-familiar.Â
Palo Alto, by Malcom Harris
I just wanted a light book about California, but this was just the opposite of it, in an excellent way. (I am entirely at fault here; who reads the subtitle “A History of California, Capitalism, and the World” and thinks, oh yeah, light reading?). I came out enraged at everything and everyone. I wish there were more history books with this level of analysis and expertly-crafted narrative, because it was so gripping. I was not bored once, even though it was a 720-page tome. Riveting stuff.  Â
Shubeik Lubeik, by Deena Mohamed
Shubeik Lubeik is a gorgeous graphic novel with magical elements woven so effortlessly and seamlessly that I know I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about this book for a long time. In the novel’s world, wishes (like wishes from a genie in the bottle) are real. However, these wishes are monetized and commodified as a part of a quintillion-dollar industry. What happens when wishes can be licensed by world governments, have a frustrating bureaucratic process, and mirror the all-too-familiar prejudices ingrained in our society? What if you could pool your resources to buy a wish to use literal dragons as a war weapon? Shubeik Lubeik is exasperating and heartwarming- exactly what it sets out to be. Â
Heartstopper: Volume 5, by Alice Oseman
What do I even say about Heartstopper that hasn’t been said a million times? I love this universe so much and I am so upset that it ends soon. What do you mean Heartstopper cannot go on and on indefinitely?! These books have been filling me with so much tenderness and joy since I’ve been seeing snippets of them back in the day. My heart is always brimming when I am reading these books- I want these characters to be so happy forever. The plotline in this book hit me a bit too hard that I wanted to sob, but Alice Oseman being Alice Oseman dealt with these themes with so much consideration and affection that I physically could not sob. Instead, I felt calm and affirmed. And that is a typical Heartbreaker reading experience for you.
Shout out to my local public library and the Libby app for making it available to me the day it was published! Lifesavers! I was in anguish thinking I’d have to wait the estimated 10 weeks! Â
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