2023 Reading Recap

This is my favorite post of the year. I’ve been doing recaps like this since 2015 and I love looking back on the books that stood out to me each year. Here are the ground rules:

• I include any book I read for the first time this year (no rereads!), regardless of when it came out.

• The lists are in no particular order.

• Links to my longer goodreads review of each book are linked in the title.

This year I’ve got two categories with five entries in each—fiction (including fantasy and sci-fi) and non-fiction—with a notable poetry highlight.

Last year was a drier reading experience for but this year was a feast. I didn’t let myself read any intellectual non-fiction during January since I’d just graduated and needed a brain break. My word for the year was whimsy and that theme threaded through my reading life too. I revisited three fantasy series that I loved in high school (Tales of Goldstone Wood by Anne Elisabeth Stengl, Beyonders by Brandon Mull, and Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin) and dove into good contemporary novels (Frederik Backman, Ben Winters). I reread some Anne of Green Gables, let Brandon Sanderson take me on more adventures (finally read Warbreaker!), and listened to Bono reflect on his life in his new memoir Surrender (audiobook version is a must).

My winter and spring of mental rest did their trick, and by summer I found myself ready to dive back into more challenging reads. I’ve especially enjoyed reviewing every book I read on goodreads. The reviews aren’t always robust but I don’t want to lose the ability to synthesize arguments and articulate my responses to ideas now that I’m out of school, and reviews have been a great place to keep that up. But boy has it been delightful not to have deadlines and grades to worry about.

And of course I want to know—what were your top reads of 2023? Was it a famine year or a feast year or somewhere in between? Have you read any of these? There are few things I love more than discussing books, so let's chat in the comments!

Okay, enough of a prelude. Below—drumroll—are my top ten books of 2023. I’ve got quote highlights first and more thoughts afterward.

Fiction

1. Everything Sad is Untrue | Daniel Nayeri

   if I had to pick one favorite of the year, this would be it • Scheherazade’s one thousand and one tales meets middle school drama: Iranian folklore and poop • middle grade not-really-a-novel-more-like-an-embellished-true-story • refugee son of a woman exiled for converting to Christianity • I laughed, I cried

2. Silence | Shūsaku Endō

   I watched the movie when it first came out & have been wanting to read this ever since • highly recommend reading Makoto Fujimura’s Silence and Beauty after it • • idealistic priest faces persecution and a foreign culture and runs aground on the silence of God • I keep coming back to this story and I know I will continue to

3. A Canticle for Leibowitz | Walter M. Miller Jr.

   a post-apocalyptic sci-fi where a small sect of monks preserves fragments of writing from before the nuclear holocaust? yes PLEASE • the beginning surprised me with how un-sci-fi it felt and the ending shook me because [spoilers] • are we doomed to repeat our mistakes? is knowledge inherently good or bad, and what about the humans who use it? • great wry humor and characters

4. The Left Hand of Darkness | Ursula K. Le Guin

   another classic sci-fi • I just love UKLG so much, her writing stuns me every time • I wasn’t ready for this book before now but this was the right year for it, esp. paired with The Genesis of Gender (see below) • I love these characters • the premise is: what if there was a world where most of the time people were sexless, androgynous and could be either sex during mating periods? how would that change society? how would you, as a sexed human, interact with them?

5. Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy

   I finally read it!! • it didn’t hit me the same way Dostoyevsky’s books have but man did I care about these characters • every character is just so complex which sounds dumb and cheesy to say but it’s true because in one moment I could hardcore judge them and in the next I’d feel incredible sympathy for them and see myself in them and it’s genius • I really want to read War and Peace now

Non-fiction

1. How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told | Harrison Scott Key

   this really is an insane story and it’s phenomenal • best non-fiction book of the year if I had to pick • so his wife cheats on him and, well, I’ll let him tell the whole saga • she also wrote a chapter in here which was perfect • I laughed out loud so many times while reading this and also was moved to worship, which I didn’t expect from a comedian’s retelling of his wrecked marriage

2. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | Annie Dillard

   theology + nature writing = everything I want in a book • I bought this used and found a dead spider in the pages which was very fitting • her prose FLOORS me. reading it was one of those humbling experiences that reminds me there are true geniuses in the world and I’m lucky just to read them • I want to stalk muskrats

3. Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People | Esther Lightcap Meek

   the perfect post-college read because it explained the frustration I felt about not being able to articulate what I’d learned • what does it mean to know something? how can we have confidence in what we know? • she’s a master teacher, guiding us through these big questions with helpful illustrations, humor, and genuine care • what if knowledge is so much more than what we can put words to??

4. The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory | Abigail Favale

   she takes a thorny, hot-button, deeply personal and often painful, philosophically complex issue and writes about it with clarity and kindness, weaving in rigorous history and philosophy with personal reflections • she navigates tensions like these with such grace: gender cannot be divorced from the body but it also cannot be reduced to the body • I really want to read more theology of the body after this

5. Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel | Rebecca Goldstein

   now this was fun • you can tell she’s a novelist as well a philosopher • so a hundred years ago a logician named Gödel proved that mathematical systems can’t be both consistent (no contradictions) and complete (proving its own foundational truths) • what’s so crazy is he made this philosophically rich statement with mathematics—he proved, with numbers and logical rules, a statement that is both philosophical and mathematical • I didn’t understand all of it but I loved what I did get!

Poetry

The Four Quartets | T. S. Eliot

I dearly want to take a course on this someday and I probably only understood about 10% but some of the lines bowled me over • I read it in infrequent spurts, often in Prospect Park • lots about roses and time and endings and beginnings • East Coker has my favorite section • I couldn’t figure out why it was called “quartets” because each has five sections, not four, and then someone informed me he was referencing the musical composition lol • “only through time time is conquered” • “fare forward”

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Also, a housekeeping note: I’m taking January off from online spaces, including here. I have some other writing projects I want to work on and I need a breather from social media. I think it'll be a great way to start the year, but I'm looking forward to reconnecting with you all in February.

Here’s to 2024—may it be full of books that make us laugh and cry, comfort and convict us, remind us of truth and blow our minds.

~ Aberdeen