All 57 Books I Read In 2023

I read a lot of books this year. Here’s what I thought of them!

(If I was smarter I would have done this month by month, but I only made this Substack in September, so you get the whole year at once. Maybe I’ll think of a better way to do this next year?)

Six of the books I had on hand while writing this: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, A People’s History of the United States, Blood Meridian, Dreamland, All the Shah’s Men, and In the Dream House.

1. White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi (2009, fiction)

One theme you will see throughout this list is that I am fascinated by the haunted house; one of my favorite books of all time is House of Leaves, and I’m constantly on the hunt for books that intrigue me on the level that House of Leaves does. White is for Witching is one of the only books that has gotten close. I consistently circle back to it; it is at once obvious in its themes and subtle in its storytelling, which makes it a very interesting piece of work. The prose is beautiful, somewhat abstract, in places gruesome. I wrote more about it in this post, but White is for Witching uses the haunted house very effectively as a symbol of British white supremacy and imperialism. Strange horror. I highly recommend it.

2. The Big Book of Exit Strategies by Jamaal May (2016, poetry)

I bought this book because I happened to go to a reading by May, and was just captivated by his poetry read aloud. His work has such a wonderful rhythm to it. At the Q&A afterwards, he said he draws inspiration from hip-hop when writing, and I can certainly see that even in text form. His poetry is meant to be read aloud. I love this book. In many ways it’s a love letter to his home city, Detroit. One of my favorite poems from this book is one of the first: “Ask Where I’ve Been.”

“I am the too-narrow road winding out of a crooked city built of laughter, abandon, feathers and drums.”

3. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars by Angela Nagle (2017, nonfiction)

A study of the development of the diametrically opposed online cultures of 4chan and Tumblr and how they came to shape opposing spheres of the internet and, ultimately, right- and left-wing American politics through the 2010s. I don’t agree with Nagle on everything (while she’s correct about Tumblr’s purity-focused identity-based culture having some serious problems, I think her concerns are a little dated and missing some nuance), but her analysis of the genesis and psychological appeal of the 4chan-based culture of irreverent nihilism that grew into the online alt-right is really interesting and important to understanding later developments. Kill All Normies was published at a weird and pretty pivotal time, since 2017 was the same year of the Charlottesville white supremacist Unite the Right rally, and also the year the first QAnon post appeared on 4chan. If you were going to write the same book now, six years later, it would already be very different; however, Kill All Normies still has some really useful insights.

4. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (1980, nonfiction)

One of two big history books on this list I would recommend to probably every citizen of the United States (the other being Palo Alto). A very bulky work- I finished it this year, but it did take me more than a year of reading it on and off to actually finish. I think I started in 2021. But it is an important read; essentially, it’s a history of the United States, starting from Columbus’s landing, as a story of repeated, inexhaustible uprising and resistance by people against injustices, from slavery to the Vietnam War. A very human and deeply compassionate exploration of history. Zinn’s work is wonderful and I need to read more of it; I read his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train, last year. He writes in the introduction, “I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future is to be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion, rather than its solid centuries of war,” and that is a sentiment that I find a lot of comfort in.

5. A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers (2021, fiction)

A short and gorgeous distant-future science fiction novella about a monk and a robot who form a friendship, and try to find meaning in a utopian world. Very lovely. I read it all in one go. I love the world painted in this story. The first part of a series that I believe has at least one more installment, which I haven’t read yet. Chambers is one of a few authors who I view as one of the people currently pushing science fiction into a new age to suit current concerns; Martha Wells is another.

6. Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (2021, nonfiction)

An unconventional history book, which divides the four-hundred-year period between when enslaved people were first brought to the United States in 1619 and the present-day of the book’s writing in 2019 into five-year chunks, each by a different author, and dedicates each to a specific aspect of the black experience in America during that time. I read this book in sections, because many of the segments are quite dense little essays that took a bit to digest, but it also contains more prose-styled sections and poetry. A really interesting and educational piece of work but probably one to be read slowly so it can be properly appreciated.

7. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (2019, fiction)

Lesbian necromancers in an evil castle in space! I had a ton of fun with this book. Once I started reading it I couldn’t stop; I probably read the whole thing in two days. The worldbuilding is interesting and the narrative voice is very fun, and once the plot gets going it really doesn’t stop. I enjoyed it so much that I have actually been a little hesitant about reading the subsequent works in the series, because while I’ve heard extremely good things about Harrow the Ninth, I also understand it’s very different stylistically and tonally from Gideon the Ninth, and I liked Gideon the Ninth so much. But I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually.

8. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (1971, fiction*)

Man, what a fascinating piece of work. I will say I do just enjoy Thompson’s writing style, it’s very entertaining and creative just on a surface level, but what’s even more interesting to me is the tension in his work. There’s a tension between the chaos, the exaggerations and inventions and comedy and hyperbole that characterize Thompson’s style, and what seems to me to be a very genuine attempt to communicate his own views and disillusionment and cynicism regarding America and the American national ideology more broadly. I do think much his work is, at its core, a little heartbroken. The most interesting paragraph to me in this entire book, amid all the debauchery and violence, is the jarringly somber segment in the middle where Thompson reflects, honestly, on the disillusionment of the 70s as a sort of hangover from the idealism of the 60s.

“We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”

9. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson (1973, nonfiction*)

I found it a really interesting experience to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and this book back to back, because while they certainly both hold that central tension of Thompson’s work, this book is a lot more grounded in reality, since it is essentially a compilation of Thompson’s campaign trail reporting on the 1972 presidential election (where Nixon won reelection). It definitely drags in places— I personally did not care much for the lengthy section elaborating on the technicalities of the internal delegate politicking of the Democratic National Convention— and I don’t know that I would necessarily recommend it to read for, like, fun, but Thompson’s narrative voice is still very strong and really carries the book.

*all of Hunter S. Thompson’s work was generally characterized by him as nonfiction, but has varying degrees of creative liberty taken with reality lmao

10. Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic (1976, nonfiction)

One of the most ruinously effective anti-war books I’ve ever read, all the more impressive because it’s from an author who had never written before. This book came to my attention because Ron Kovic and the power of his rhetoric were praised by both Thompson and Zinn in their own books (Fear and Loathing ’72 and A People’s History of the United States) when discussing the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and it seemed to me like anyone who both Hunter S. Thompson and Howard Zinn felt was an important voice must be worth reading. It’s a really incredible book, and has been defining for how I think of the Vietnam War. Kovic’s writing reads like a desperate scream from someone who only knows he has something extremely important to say, as he attempts to convey the depths of his experience as clearly and vividly as he possibly can, and I think he succeeds. A relatively fast read and one I highly recommend.

11. Up Front by Bill Mauldin (1945, nonfiction)

A relatively short illustrated memoir/selection of compiled works by Bill Mauldin, a World War II soldier and cartoonist known for his irreverent cartoons in the American soldiers’ newspaper Stars and Stripes. Pretty interesting insight directly into soldiers’ experiences during World War II with a really strong sense of humor. Believe it or not, it was a coincidence that I finally finished this right after Born on the Fourth of July (I needed to finish it so I could return it to the library), and it was definitely a strange tonal switch.

12. When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb (2022, fiction)

An absolute delight. I’d describe it as a sort of YA urban fantasy immigration narrative; it follows a Jewish demon and angel in the early 20th century who immigrate along with the young people of their small eastern European village to America, and wind up embroiled in a labor organizing effort in New York City. So much fantasy is sort of Christian-inspired, so it is always a joy for me personally to read about conceptions of magic drawing on other religions and mythologies, and Lamb uses Jewish angel, demon, and spirit lore in a really fun and engaging way.

13. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996, fiction)

I know Infinite Jest has sort of a mixed reputation, but I really, really enjoyed it. I enjoy books that are like well-constructed puzzles (remember, my favorite book is House of Leaves) and Infinite Jest is certainly that. It doesn’t really do any of the work for you, but because of that, I found piecing everything together to be an extremely rewarding experience. I made a spreadsheet to track the dates and events so I could understand what order things were happening in. I want to write up something longer on my thoughts on the book sometime in the future, but I think it needs to sit and cook in my head for awhile longer first. Eventually I fully intend to reread it for everything I missed the first time around. Certainly it will not be for everyone, and it is not without its flaws (the character of Poor Tony dragged the entire book down for me, and Wallace does somewhat poorly on the whole with women and nonwhite characters), but on the whole I found it to be a marvelously inventive piece of work. It’s also absolutely fascinating to me as a book about a theoretical perfectly addictive piece of entertainment written before the advent of content algorithms; in some areas I think it has remarkable foresight.

14. Survival of the Richest: The Tech Elite’s Ultimate Exit Strategy by Douglas Rushkoff (2022, nonfiction)

A very interesting examination and critique of the reactions of the super-rich to an increasingly destabilizing world. Rushkoff, a well-known social theorist, was inspired to write the book after being invited to a retreat by a group of wealthy men who essentially wanted to know what they should do now to survive and, more importantly, maintain their power and quality of life through any coming upheavals and catastrophes. A very timely book, and for me very insightful especially when it comes to understanding the mindsets and behaviors of Silicon Valley tech billionaires and investors.

15. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2017, nonfiction)

Taylor’s book republishes the Combahee River Collective Statement, a seminal work of black feminist theory, together with lengthy interviews with three members of the Combahee River Collective and authors of the statement. Despite the statement being written decades ago it remains highly relevant: “As Black women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.” In our current age I think it is especially crucial to understand the theory, history, and intersectional perspective of black feminism if we are to continue to work towards true liberation. A relatively short and lovely work.

“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

16. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher (2009, nonfiction)

I really haven’t read that much pure theory at all, but Capitalist Realism is one of the most common beginner recommendations for a very good reason. It’s dense but short (less than a hundred pages, I believe) and for me was extremely refreshing to read, because it felt like it articulated, named, and challenged an idea I had continuously encountered but never felt that I had a good answer to— the idea that, while capitalism may not be good, it is simply the only thing that works, and that contemplating any alternative system is unrealistic and foolish. It is a slower read and I had to take my time with it, but nonetheless it’s a book I think about very often and would recommend highly. Fisher was a very insightful theorist, and the world is poorer for his loss.

18. The Devil and the Jews by Joshua Trachtenberg (1943, nonfiction)

I have something of a fascination with conspiracy theories, which is an interest that necessitates a solid understanding of the tropes of antisemitism. In this book Trachtenberg surveys various antisemitic beliefs and superstitions that formed during the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, discussing their origins, evolution, and often bloody consequences; many of these, such as the blood libel, are still present in conspiracy and antisemitic rhetoric to this day, and it’s important to understand their roots and be able to recognize them. I wrote in much more depth on this topic as relates to the Canterbury Tales (using this book as a major source) here.

18. The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle (2023, nonfiction)

Another book I have thought about a lot since I read it. It is about how the climate crisis is already changing which parts of the United States are habitable to humans; the impacts are only going to accelerate in coming years and decades. Each chapter focuses on a different location (Floridian islands ravaged by hurricanes, Californian towns annihilated by wildfires) and examines it through a series of vignettes of people who have been displaced or are in danger of becoming so due to the increasingly catastrophic impacts of climate change. Not a lighthearted book, but one I was extremely glad I read.

19. Devil House by John Darnielle (2022, fiction)

While I’ve loved John Darnielle’s music for years now, this is the first one of his novels that I’ve read. I thought this book was really interesting; I would describe it as a very unusual crime thriller novel which is commenting throughout on what a true crime narrative even is, what it’s trying to accomplish, and the harm it can do. In a true crime story, who are we meant to empathize with, and what makes us empathize with them, and whose expense does that come at? Can the use of true crime storytelling ever not be exploitative? Maybe not the most tightly-plotted book I’ve ever read, but I still found its ideas very compelling.

20. The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything by Mike Rothschild (2021, nonfiction)

I think this is a really good entry-level resource for understanding QAnon’s origins, its real-world impacts, and generally how we got from Point A to Point B. It was not super useful to me because I had already done a lot of research on this topic and already knew a lot of the information discussed in this book, but I’d still recommend it to other people who want to better understand the QAnon phenomenon.

21. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (2019, non/fiction)

A wonderful book. In the Dream House is a gorgeously written meditation on Machado’s past relationship with an abusive ex-girlfriend (only ever referred to as ‘the woman in the Dream House’) as a young adult, and the psychological scars the relationship left on her. A book that made me cry. Very creatively told, with beautiful and vivid language and strong use of metaphor; extremely effective. I really can’t say enough good things about this book.

22. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris (2023, nonfiction)

The second history book I read this year that I think every American should read (the first being A People’s History of the United States). Palo Alto is a history of Silicon Valley, Stanford University, and Palo Alto which starts from the Spanish colonization of California and continues all the way up through the Internet age. Discusses in great depth California’s history as a nexus of global capital and imperialism, and the international human cost that that has had, from China to South America and back again to Palo Alto, global hub of neoliberalism and one of the wealthiest places on Earth, where high school kids keep killing themselves by walking in front of trains. A hefty read but it earns every page. It is also, despite its subject matter, not a hopeless work; it is just as much about the brave and revolutionary people who have been fighting against the global machine of extraction operating from California as long as it has existed, from Japanese anti-imperialists to Black Panthers to Jewish union organizers. Made me feel like I both had a better understanding of America’s history and some idea of where we might go from here to build a better world.

“To the Muwékma, to whom Palo Alto will be returned. To the planet Earth, its people, and its preservation by any means necessary.”

23. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X with Alex Haley (1965, nonfiction)

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this book, since I’d heard a lot of praise for it before reading it, but I knew few details of Malcolm X’s actual life. Because of that, this book surprised me in a lot of ways. I found it very valuable as a portrait of the life and ideological development of such an important figure of American history. My favorite section of the book was near the end: its depiction of the Hajj. It’s clear, I think, that that is where Malcolm X’s philosophy of justice reached its most complete form, and understanding how soon after that his life was ended was incredibly sobering.

24. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2014, fiction)

A really quick read, but mesmerizing. Another haunted house book, even though the setting is not a house but a vast, supernaturally irradiated stretch of coastland. Handles its psychological and body horror very deftly and introduces a lot of very inventive and genuinely unsettling concepts. The book does leave a lot of questions unanswered by its end- I understand this is partly because it is part one of a trilogy (I have not yet read books two and three, though I want to) but it remains effective as a standalone work despite this.

25. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938, nonfiction)

I’ve read and loved several of Orwell’s more famous books, but Homage to Catalonia might be my favorite. It’s Orwell’s memoir of his experience on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War as a British volunteer for a worker’s militia. I had the good fortunate of getting to visit Barcelona this year, and I read this book while I was there. While the book isn’t and can’t be a complete picture of the entire Spanish Civil War, being confined to one man’s personal experiences, Orwell recounts his time in Catalonia with humor and vivid, wonderful language. A book full of heart and full of rage.

26. Your Emergency Contact has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen (2022, poetry)

A book of poetry that deals with many interlocking themes: race, sexuality, the poet’s relationships with his mother and with his boyfriend, loss and grief, the tension between his feelings on all of these things. To me, it felt like a very thematically cohesive, interlocking work, which always impresses me with poetry. I cried finishing it, and I felt better afterwards.

27. In the Skin of a Jihadist by Anna Erelle (2015, nonfiction, translated from French by Erin Potter)

The first of several books on this list I had to read for classes, but I found this one interesting in its own right, though partly for reasons the author couldn’t have intended. Erelle, a French journalist, writes about her experience investigating an ISIS digital recruitment network seeking to radicalize and manipulate young and emotionally vulnerable European women and get them to travel to Syria for marriage. Since I read it in 2023, with ISIS now essentially defeated, having lost its territory and collapsed into a much more fringe and marginal group than it once was, the fear of ISIS recruit networks is much less of an concern than it was when the book was published. However, the question of the fate of wives and children of former ISIS fighters, some of whom are now stateless people trapped in refugee camps, is still an ongoing humanitarian concern, and in that sense I did feel that Erelle’s book supplied some interesting insights. Some kind of awkward or unideal word choices here or there but I think that’s probably mostly a consequence of the book being a translated work.

28. Moby-Dick: or, The Whale by Herman Melville (1851, fiction)

Bought this book used for three dollars on a whim from a used book store in Colorado, and it took me about four or five months of on and off reading to get through, but I did really enjoy it! Knowing its reputation I was a little worried I’d find it unreadably boring, but that was not the case at all. Sure, it’s very dense and slow, but it was a marvelous ride. I find this book a really fascinating object of study— it is so such an artifact of a certain time, and yet it still felt really fresh and interesting to me. I am, in particular, really interested by the role that Ishmael, as narrator and bystander and archivist all at once, plays in the narrative. I’ve even kicked around the idea of writing some of my own fiction inspired by it. A book from 1851 can’t be without issues, obviously, but I do think I could talk about what I liked about Moby Dick and what I think of it for hours.

29. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky (2010, nonfiction)

This book came to my attention not long after finishing Infinite Jest, and the premise of it— a book of transcripts made by a Rolling Stone reporter who traveled with and interviewed Wallace on the last few stops of his Infinite Jest book tour— intrigued me so much I wanted to give it a look. There is something very mournful about this book, which mostly consists of directly transcribed conversations between Lipsky and Wallace, interspersed with Lipsky’s reflections as he assembled the book, which was published two years after Wallace’s suicide. I don’t know if I’d necessarily recommend this book to everyone (it’s pretty long, and I’d probably say it’s only for people who are already fans of Wallace’s writing), but I found some of the observations very insightful. A quite lovely memorial to the writer, if nothing else. (Also, the second book I read this year made of the compiled work of a Rolling Stone writer on assignment, after Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.)

30. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985, fiction)

Goodness, where to start with Blood Meridian. One of the most gorgeously written books I’ve ever read, purely in terms of its descriptive prose. My entire way through, I was pulling out paragraphs of landscape description and reading them out loud just to marvel at them. It is also, of course, deeply, graphically brutal, which is probably what the book is most famous for. Most of the worst types of violence you can think of are depicted unflinchingly, though not, I would say, unnecessarily. It is a book about American history, in spirit if not necessarily in fact (though often in fact as well). A book I would recommend highly to anyone, if you feel like you can stomach it. I did have to take it in relatively small sections, just because so much happens, and the prose is elaborate enough as to really make you take your time with it.

“It grew colder and the night lay long before him. He kept moving, following in the darkness the naked chines of rock blown bare of snow. The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings. In the predawn light he made his way out upon a promontory and there received first of any creature in that country the warmth of the sun’s ascending.”

31. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (1965, fiction, translated from Italian by William Weaver)

I love Calvino’s writing style very much— it’s so full of vividness and unexpectedness and abstract life. I will say I didn’t quite enjoy Cosmicomics as much as the previous book of his I read (last year), Invisible Cities. I think Cosmicomics probably exposes a few more of his weak points as a writer, in particular some unfortunately limited views on gender, but I still enjoyed getting to see his wonderfully idiosyncratic writing style on full display. I’d probably mostly recommend it to people who already enjoy Calvino or surrealism more broadly.

32. Father Comes Home from the Wars by Suzan-Lori West (2015, theatre)

This is the first of Suzan-Lori West’s plays I’ve read, but I already know I want to look more into her work. She’s an incredibly talented playwright. This particular play is about an enslaved man, Hero, who accompanies his master to fight on the Confederate side of the Civil War in exchange for the promise of his freedom. Just incredibly well-written. West is a master of pacing and writing dialogue. My favorite aspect of this play was the incorporation of classical mythology, which is extremely cleverly done in a way that becomes clear all at once towards the end of the play, and greatly adds to the thematic texture of the work. I only read the play, but I would love to see it performed someday.

33. The Hours by Michael Cunningham (1998, fiction)

The Hours is a re-imagining and exploration of, and love letter to, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a book I unfortunately have not read (I really haven’t read much by Woolf). So while I did enjoy this book (I read it for a class) and I thought its concept and execution were both really inventive and interesting, it definitely felt like it was made somewhat incomplete by my own lack of familiarity with the source material.

34. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (1994, nonfiction)

I didn’t really like this book. I understand it’s one of the more often-recommended books on writing advice out there, but it just didn’t work for me. However, I can acknowledge that this is more an issue with me than with the author. Lamott’s writing style is snappy, funny, and vivid, and there is certainly plenty of good advice in the book. I just found her discussion of writing itself— as a calling that is inevitably unpleasant, torturous, and miserable— to be so drastically different from my own feelings on the topic that I really couldn’t relate to huge sections of the book. I’m sure it will work for other people better than for me, and it is genuinely well-written; I just disagreed with it.

35. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020, fiction)

Another haunted house book! This one was quite fun. I’m always excited to see what authors of color do with the haunted house trope— like White is for Witching, this book is very much about colonialism, specifically taking place in 1950s Mexico. While I really liked the various ways the book explored its themes, I felt like it did fall on the side of possibly over-explaining itself a bit too much when the time came to delve into its backstory. I personally prefer when a horror story, especially one that does such a good job at creating a sense of dread and calling reality into question, leaves some things unresolved and unexplained, some questions unanswered. Mexican Gothic tied everything up cleanly enough that it ultimately left me almost a little unsatisfied.

36. Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño (1996, fiction, translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews)

An incredibly inventive and interesting little book. Nazi Literature in the Americas is a series of fictional biographies of invented writers, most of them Latin American, all of them with some sort of fascist sympathy or tendency. Clearly extremely well-researched— Bolaño fits each of his fictional writers into their historical and literary contexts so well that reading this book and wanting to understand all its references to real events, publications and people wound up getting me quite interested in the history of fascist movements in Latin America, despite the book itself focusing on fictional figures. I would highly recommend this book. It’s not even a particularly long read.

37. Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion by Joshua Trachtenberg (1939, nonfiction)

Unfortunately, this book is rather less accessible than Trachtenberg’s other book I read this year (The Devil and the Jews); it comes at its material from a very academic angle, and despite there being a lot of neat anecdotes in the book I still found it pretty dense and difficult to get through. I am also not Jewish, though, so it may be an easier read for people who can read Hebrew and have a more thorough understanding of standard Jewish religious practice than I do.

38. All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer (2003, nonfiction)

This book had been on my radar for some years, and I’m extremely glad I finally got around to reading it. For Americans, understanding the contexts and consequences of the 1953 US-backed coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran is really critical to understanding our relationship and history with Iran specifically and the Middle East as a whole, and it’s not the sort of thing we really get taught otherwise. Prior to this, most of my understanding of the coup came from Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (also a book I highly recommend, but it’s a memoir, not a comprehensive history). Kinzer manages to compile a complicated series of events into a very readable and easy to digest explanation, and I would recommend it highly, especially to any American looking to deepen their understanding of recent Middle Eastern history.

39. Yellowface by R. F. Kuang (2023, fiction)

Yellowface is somewhat a departure for Kuang— she’s most famous for her fantasy, while Yellowface is a literary satire that verges on psychological horror. I think some people may be put off this book in particular because it intentionally uses a wildly unlikable and unreliable narrator, and that’s definitely the aspect of the book most likely to not be for everyone. However, I thought it was very skillfully done! It’s a pretty fast and compelling read, and extremely cutting regarding racism in the publishing industry. I also shared a paper I wrote about this book here.

40. Writing with Pleasure by Helen Sword (2023, nonfiction)

Another book that I had trouble with just because I struggle with more densely academic writing. This book is also specifically somewhat difficult because it’s both somewhat repetitive and aimed mostly at academic or professional writers, and I felt that I personally did not glean much useful advice from it; it possibly could have been better structured to serve better as a writing advice book.

41. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems by Mahmoud Darwish (2002, poetry, translated from Arabic by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche)

I started seeking out Palestinian poetry and writing to read when the Israeli bombardment of Gaza began in October. Darwish is one of Palestine’s most beloved and influential writers, and his poetry is simply gorgeous, even translated out of its original language. I wrote about it at much greater length here. This book compiles and translates his poems from many different collections over the course of his long career, providing a really lovely cross-section of his work. He has become perhaps my favorite poet over the last few months.

“I gaze upon the procession of ancient prophets climbing barefoot to Jerusalem and I ask: will there be a new prophet for this new time?”

42. Noor by Nnedi Okorafor (2021, fiction)

Afrofuturism! I love afrofuturism! Noor is a pretty quick read, to the point that its pacing felt almost a little bit rushed (I felt like this book could have been a hundred pages longer, easily, with the same sequence of events and just a little more time given to dwell on them) but it was still very fun and packed with interesting ideas. It’s very grounded in its Nigerian setting, and has a wonderfully detailed cultural and geographical texture.

43. The Magician by Colm Tóibín (2021, fiction)

Like The Hours, I would say this book is probably going to be best if you’re already familiar with the inspiration behind it, though it also stands well on its own. The Magician is a nonfiction novel-style biography of the German writer Thomas Mann. I found it quite compelling, especially in its later chapters, and the author clearly did a staggering amount of research to be able to put something like this together. It does move very slowly in its first half— events accelerate around the leadup to and outbreak of World War II— and the pacing is a little odd throughout, which honestly is probably an inevitable consequence of writing a comprehensive portrait of a person’s life. People’s lives just aren’t paced like books. I’d consider these relatively minor issues. I still found the book really informative, and it taught me a lot about a figure I was previously largely unfamiliar with.

44. Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir by Amy Tan (2017, nonfiction)

Another book I read for class. While probably not one I would have picked up on my own (I’m not a huge reader of memoirs, and I’m not very familiar with Tan’s work), I did enjoy it! Tan is obviously an incredibly skilled writer, and extremely capable at leading a reader through a story, even one as complex and twisting as this book, which is a recounting of her experiences plumbing her own childhood and looking back on it with adult eyes.

45. Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones (2015, nonfiction)

Not a fast read, but a super interesting one. Dreamland follows two main plot threads, one about the development of prescription opioid painkillers and the other about innovations in heroin trafficking from Mexico, and how these two forces worked in tandem to create the massive devastation of the opioid crisis in the US, in particular in towns and communities that had not previously seen major drug use problems. A very thoroughly researched book with a lot of firsthand human voices, from nurses to drug traffickers to addicts to epidemiologists. I didn’t completely agree with all the author’s final conclusions, but his reporting is stellar and Dreamland is a really valuable piece of work.

46. Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Mike Merryman-Lotze (2022, nonfiction)

Light in Gaza is a compilation of English-language essays and poetry from Gazan writers- I got it for free from Haymarket, and I’m really glad I did. It’s a collection of work both stark and lovely. Some of the chapters are more autobiographical and literary while others take a more technical slant, discussing topics like architectural and technological development in Gaza. While I personally preferred the chapters that leaned more towards memoir, I really appreciated the book as a whole; the range of topics and voices let the collection cover a lot of ground, touching on a lot of different aspects of life in Gaza, which I found very valuable as someone whose everyday life is so very different from the circumstances of these writers.

One of the writers included in this book, Refaat Alareer, was killed along with his brother, his sister, and her children in an Israeli airstrike not long after I read his lovely words.

“Don’t ever be surprised / to see a rose shoulder up / among the ruins of the house: This is how we survived.”

47. Loudermilk, or: The Real Poet, or: The Origin of the World by Lucy Ives (2019, fiction)

This book was really interesting! I’m still thinking about it! And I did enjoy it, it’s a relatively fast read with a really innovative writing style and it kept me entertained and interested the whole way through. But at the same time I still feel like I have no idea what the author was saying to me; it’s that sort of book. Loudermilk is a satirical work about an extremely confident, charismatic, and fundamentally untalented jock, the titular Troy Loudermilk, who cons his way into a prestigious writing MFA program by having his cripplingly socially anxious best and only friend write poems for him. It’s like if Fight Club was about creative writing grad students. And again, I did enjoy it! But it’s not a book that lends itself to easy interpretation- I think maybe it gets a little tied up in its own absurdity and satire, which makes it hard to glean the author’s level of sincerity when it comes to any particular topic.

48. Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy Theory that Reshaped the World by Will Sommer (2023, nonfiction)

See above, The Storm is Upon Us; I felt very similarly about this book. Really good and well-researched intro to the topic of QAnon, laid out in a fairly easy to understand way. Sommer, like Rothschild, is a reporter who was covering QAnon for a pretty long time before it got any mainstream attention (in the book, he recounts getting ejected from a QAnon conference after buying a ticket under his real name), and he’s clearly very familiar with the topic and how to write about it.

49. Loving Day by Mat Johnson (2015, fiction)

A genre blend— half comedy, half slice-of-life, half drama, some social commentary mixed in. I really enjoyed the characters and character writing in this book! The cast felt very bright and alive, particularly the characters of Tal and Spider. However, the plot and pacing did not work quite as well for me; there were a lot of conflicts set up and by the end I wasn’t really sure how many had been resolved, which I don’t think was the author’s intention.

50. Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 by Mahmoud Darwish (1987, poetry, translated from Arabic by Ibrahim Muhawi)

One of the best books I read this year. I don’t really know if anything I could say about this book would adequately convey how I feel about it, but I’ll try. Memory for Forgetfulness is a long work of prose poetry that is Darwish’s memoir of his time living in Beirut during the 1982 Israeli siege and bombardment of the city. The spine of the story follows Darwish through one day of life in the besieged city: waking up, fearing the bombs, dreaming of making coffee, going to see friends, skirting rubble, fearing the bombs, meeting a lover, and so on. In between, he pulls in his thoughts on Palestine, nationalism, love, death, the broader Arab world, and a hundred other things. Vivid and remarkable. It will sit with me for a long time. Highly, highly recommend.

51. Doctor Who: Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman (1998, fiction)

A really fun and fast read! I started reading some old Doctor Who books from the period when the show was off the air (specifically the Eighth Doctor Adventures) on a dear friend’s recommendation, and I can safely say at least some of them are good! Including this one. It’s a very fun adventure story set in San Francisco with a great supporting cast, and I also found it a great introduction to the book series as a whole.

52. Doctor Who: The Turing Test by Paul Leonard (2000, fiction)

I would describe this book as ‘bafflingly good,’ given that it is an obscure Doctor Who novel- I honestly found this to be a genuinely interesting work of sci-fi historical fiction. It doesn’t have much to do with broader Doctor Who canon at all, being told from the revolving perspectives of three real historical figures (Alan Turing, Graham Green, and Joseph Heller) and recounting a series of events during WWII that culminate in a climax set during the firebombing of Dresden. I came into this book not necessarily expecting much, but it doesn’t flinch from addressing some quite complex questions of war and morality, and manages to do so with a lot of grace, I thought. Occasionally the plot gets hard to follow, but I found this pretty forgivable given the book’s other strengths.

53. Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell (1938, fiction)

Keeping up with the somewhat shlocky science fiction run here, this is the novella that The Thing is based on; I read it specifically so I could better analyze the movie for this post after rewatching it. The novella itself is like, fine, and has some effective moments of horror, but I think it has considerably less thematic potency than the movie, and it also gives the Thing a ‘true form’ which I’m sure was scary in 1938 but when described now just makes me think of a Muppet, so you can just watch the movie without missing anything and probably have a better experience.

54. The Struggle for Catalonia: Rebel Politics in Spain by Raphael Minder (2017, nonfiction)

A book I would recommend highly for any English speaker who wants to understand the current state of the Catalan push for independence from Spain. While the ever-evolving nature of the political situation means this book is already a little out of date six years after publication (most notably, it was published shortly before the attempted Catalan independence referendum of October 1, 2017, which caused a Spanish constitutional crisis and forced the then-leader of Catalonia to flee the country), it examines every angle of the situation with hundreds of interviews with Catalans of all walks of life, giving voice to all the complexities and arguments for and against the Catalan separatist movement. A really interesting piece of work, especially as I read it following a stay in Catalonia.

55. Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz (2013, fiction, translated from Estonian by Group Ibex)

Robert Kurvitz is the lead writer of the video game Disco Elysium, and Sacred and Terrible Air is set in the same world twenty years later. I’m not even sure how to start talking about this book. I think it’s a fantastic piece of work, even though I know I didn’t understand everything it was trying to say on a first reading, and I definitely intend on rereading it in the near future with a closer eye to try and piece everything together. It’s a really interesting book. Between the two works, Kurvitz has crafted a world which I find extremely compelling and think about often. I would definitely recommend Disco Elysium as the far more accessible entry point to the universe, since Sacred and Terrible Air can be very dense and challenging to parse out at points (and is also unfortunately only available in unofficial translation, as well as being out of print), but as a fan of the game who was interested in seeing more of its world, I really enjoyed Sacred and Terrible Air, and it left me with a lot to think about.

56. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926, fiction)

This is actually the first of Hemingway’s novels that I’ve read, though I had read some of his short fiction. I quite liked this book! It starts off very beat-by-beat- this happened, then this happened, then this- but as it gets into the more exciting material the pace picks up and it becomes clear what the story is really about. Hemingway is very good at capturing a mood and atmosphere and using it to say something without many words at all, and his depiction of Pamplona during the bullfights is incredibly vivid and strong.

57. Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World by Subcomandante Marcos (2022, non/fiction, translated from Spanish and with commentaries by the Colectivo Relámpago/Lightning Collective)

Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World is a book that defies easy classification. It’s a series of short allegorical folktales written by Subcomandante Galeano/Marcos, spokesman of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation). Each story conveys some lesson or experience gleaned from the Zapatistas’ ongoing liberation struggle against the Mexican state. Each story is accompanied by a commentary chapter by the collective of translators who put the book together, elaborating on the EZLN’s history, circumstances, and accomplishments in order to contextualize the work. A short and fast read that nonetheless manages to provide a clear-eyed and multifaceted look into the world and dreams of the Zapatista movement.

“After the flame comes the smoke; after the smoke follows the word.”