Thank you to Goodreads for the annual recap of the many books I’ve had the pleasure to read in 2023. I set out this year’s goal for 50 books and came out with plenty to spare. But even with a variety of titles and age groups and genres under my belt, only a select few really impacted me enough to be set aside as favorites. I’m choosy, I’ll admit, but the books in the below list hit me really hard this past year.
The books:
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón: There’s a reason Ada Limón is my favorite contemporary poet - she truly has a way with her words and creates incredible weavings that match human thought with surroundings. The Hurting Kind is the perfect follow-up to Bright Dead Things; it’s a collection of poems equally lyrical in its words and pensive in it musings and observations. The pictures Limón paints in poems like “Strangers in the Thicket” and “Blowing on the Wheel” take me to familiar places where I am at peace in my solitude with flora and fauna. I will continue to reread and look forward to her next book of poems.
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast: Visits to my friend’s house down the street meant peeks through her mother’s stack of New Yorker issues piled high on their family room coffee table. While those quick flip-throughs familiarized me with the idiosyncrasies behind the magazine’s frequent use of cartoons, I never really connected to them visually or narratively. Roz Chast is a frequent contributer to The New Yorker and Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is her own unique take on the memoir. Through humor and family retellings set up in panels that read like a comic book, Chast delves into the final years she spends with her aging parents in Brooklyn. Funny, heartfelt, bright, and upsetting, I loved Chast’s unique spin on family memoir and felt all the more drawn to her perspective on caring and grief via cartoons.
Welcome to the Circus of Baseball by Ryan McGee: There’s a lot to be said about baseball and America and McGee’s memoir of his summer working at a minor-league team in the South covers a fair chunk of it. It’s 1994 and ESPN reporter Ryan McGee is an intern for the Asheville Tourists in North Carolina. McGee recollects the core memories from his impactful summer with chapters detailing the ridiculous ballpark promotions used to draw local crowds, forging truces with stray stadium cats, and of course the frenzy of Air Jordan’s summer stint in the minor leagues. Even for not-basbeball-fans, I recommend this wonderful memoir to anyone for McGee’s notes on small-town America and what inexpensive and endearing things rural communities look for in search of summer fun.
Remember Us by Jacqueline Woodson: I remember first reading Brown Girl Dreaming in grad school and being struck by how beautiful Woodson’ prose was. Here, she continues on with her poetic tone in this middle grade novel centering on one girl’s recounting of the Bushwick fires in her Brooklyn neighborhood, nicknamed “The Matchbox.” It’s the late 1970s and Sage is about to enter seventh grade. She plays and dreams of basketball with Freddy, a new kid on her block, and they share observations on the changing nature of time and place in their small slice of New York City. A simple and quick read, Woodson’s prose again hits that dreamlike, watchful viewpoint only a wide-eyed, young narrator can provide.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver: With all the noise and awareness behind it, Demon Copperhead was my most-anticipated read for the year and it still managed to blow me away. I avoid hype and clout in works of art be it in film, music, books, etc: I prefer to let the work speak for itself when I engage with it. Demon Copperhead is a rare exception where all the praise is truly warranted. Kingsolver’s retelling of David Copperfield and swapping of the bleak landscape of the poor in Victorian London for modern Appalachia’s poverty-and-addiction-stricken population is ingenious. The epic centers of course on Damon (Demon), a boy born and trapped in misfortune-laden Americana. He navigates a world of foster care, hunger, loss, love, drugs, pain, and hope while paralleling real-life issues that continue to ravage Appalachia. I may be biased since Demon Copperhead is set in southwest Virginia, a region I lived in and came to love for all its beauties and complications. If anything, Demon Copperhead makes me want to read Kingsolver’s work in its entirety to uncover more of her use of language and setting to build characters and conflict. Truly fantastic. My favorite book of the year, and now one of my favorite novels to ever exist.