[List] Top 10 Reads of 2023

jan 20 2024

I read 77 books in 2023 and had a great time reading them. Let me gush about them here! I tried to only include first time reads, but one or two of these are rereads. I also included some honorable mentions because again, I loved a lot of the books I read this year! These are not in any particular order, just vaguely in order of earliest to latest read. Let's get right into it!

Honorable Mentions:

Lavinia (Ursula K. Le Guin)

I'm typically very uninterested in/unimpressed by Greek myth retellings, which is why I was surprised that I loved this book so much! It's a loose retelling of the Aeneid and specifically the story of Lavinia, and I felt like it did so much interesting stuff not only with gender but also with the concepts of national identity, heritage, religion, writers and creativity, etc.

Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert)

I decided to continue with the Dune series this summer while I had a lot of free time at my job, and I didn't come anywhere close to finishing the series, but I liked what I read! These books were some of my first forays into scifi beyond Le Guin, and I enjoy them. They're not for everybody, but they just scratch some itch in my brain. Dune Messiah makes the anti-imperial and anti-white savior (anti Paul, really) themes that are subtext in the first novel and makes them flat out textual, just for anybody who missed them or was even slightly concerned about what Herbert was trying to do here. I also love Alia and at the end of this book we get a glimpse of one of my favorite character dynamics— toxic codependent twins!

Witch King (Martha Wells)

I read the first Murderbot novella and liked it well enough, but just never really felt compelled to continue on with the series. When I read it, I had only started to dip my toes into scifi and it just wasn't the kind of scifi I found engaging. But I found Wells' writing style and ideas to be really fascinating, and when I heard she was writing a fantasy novel I knew I wanted to check it out! I actually really enjoyed this novel and found both timelines to be engaging and interesting— I loved the ideas and character dynamics that Wells presented. The only thing about this book is that it just leaves you wanting more from these characters and this world, and yet it was marketed as a standalone. Fantasy definitely needs more standalones, but this is one of those times that I would have been fine with a trilogy or more.

Dungeon Meshi (Kyoko Rui)

I started reading this manga maybe one or two years ago and caught up to the chapters that were out at the time. When new chapters started coming out, I held off on reading them because I wanted to build up a nice big pile, but then I kinda just forgot about the series and ended up losing my place. The series concluded recently, which made me restart the series from the beginning and finally finish it! I really really enjoyed this, I'm not a big manga or anime person but I just find Rui's art style to be so charming and beautiful, and her writing is also top notch. I felt like she really stuck the landing for the series, it was such a satisfying ending that felt like a culmination of everything that came before despite the series running for so long. And though the series heads into some darker territory in the last ten chapters or so, it felt well written and appropriate for the story, not just shoehorned in for shock value.

Witch Hat Atelier (Kamome Shirahama)

This is another one of the few manga I actively read and keep up with, and along with Dungeon Meshi it's the only manga I have a physical copy of! This is another one where what drew me to it was the absolutely gorgeous art style, as well as the depth of the narrative around children and teaching and gatekeeping of knowledge. I really enjoy the character dynamics in this one as well. I'm not caught up (I'm only on volume six), but I hope to catch up with this one in the new year!

Top 10:

The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)

This is one of Le Guin's most well known works, along with The Left Hand of Darkness, and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of science fiction. The Dispossessed is about Shevek, a brilliant mathematician from an anarcho-communist planet of Anarres. His society was carefully constructed from scratch by refugees fleeing the nearby hyper-capitalistic planet Urras, so much so that their language was designed by a computer to not have possessive pronouns. They are very communal, and Shevek, who is a very introverted, smart, and sensitive man, feels isolated in comparison. No matter how hard he tries, he can never really feel like part of the group or a true member of society. As he keeps working on his mathematical theory, he begins to rub up against corruption and bureaucracy— two things that Anarres isn't supposed to have. He eventually goes over the heads of his bosses with the help of some mathematicians on Urras, which is viewed as a huge betrayal of his planet's values. His book gets published and he travels to Urras to receive an award, which is viewed as another huge betrayal. What he sees and does while on Urras changes him, and he returns to Anarres unsure if he will be welcome home.

I was a little bit worried before reading that this would be anti-communist propaganda, but I should have never doubted Le Guin. She expertly crafts this anarchist society and spends a lot of time criticizing capitalism and oppression while also having genuine good-faith criticisms about Anarres' government and what it would take to continue having an anarchist government over time. I definitely want to reread this one soon, because I read it very early in the year and I'm fuzzy on some of the details. Oh, fun fact, Le Guin's parents were friends with Oppenheimer (yes, the Oppenheimer) and Shevek was loosely based on him!

Maurice (E.M Forster)

I watched the movie version of Maurice earlier this year and absolutely loved it, so of course I had to read the book! I was hesitant because I don't read a lot of classics, especially British classics, but I read A Room With a View and actually liked Forster's writing style a lot, so I decided to give this one a try. I really really enjoyed this book and everything it had to say about homosexuality and class.

Maurice begins with the titular Maurice attending college and becoming very close with a classmate, Clive. This friendship gradually crosses from purely platonic to romantic, and Maurice falls head over heels for Clive. Clive is heavily inspired by the ancient Greeks and their mode of romantic friendships, pure love between men, and refuses to let the relationship turn physical. After a trip to Greece and a serious illness on his return, Clive decides it's time for him to basically grow up and be straight, leaving Maurice heartbroken and devastated. Their relationship becomes distant and strained as Clive enters into a successful (if strained) heterosexual marriage, but Maurice struggles to move on. Eventually, during a stay at Clive's estate, Maurice strikes up a relationship with groundskeeper Alec Scudder, but can their relationship overcome intolerance and seemingly insurmountable class differences?

I knew this was a novel about gay romance, but I was super surprised at how prevalent the discussion of class is, and how much I enjoyed it. Forster also has a lot of interesting imagery around opposites, especially in terms of nature/city, light/shadow, rain/sun, etc., which are all used very effectively. The history around this novel is also fascinating— it was written in 1914, but not published until after Forster died, in 1971. Forster feared public and legal attitudes around homosexuality, and was determined to keep the novel's happy ending but feared legal persecution in the UK. I'm glad that the story kept its ending and that it was eventually published and even adapted into a faithful and wonderful movie!

Ninefox Gambit (Yoon Ha Lee)

Ninefox Gambit is set in an incredibly distant future and focuses on the Hexarchate, an empire which uses calendrical effects (magic math) to make horrible weapons and do evil things. The book revolves around Kel Cheris, a member of the rank and file mind-linked Kel soldier faction, who is about to be fired from being a soldier because of her unorthodox strategies. In an effort to save her job, she participates in a competition to come up with a strategy to reclaim a fallen fortress in the most resource efficient way possible. Cheris' solution? Pull the undead general Shuos Jedao out of the magic grave he's being kept in and have him do it. Her reward? Getting Jedao stuck into her brain and being sent to reclaim the fortress herself. The problem? Jedao was certifiably insane even before getting put in torturous solitary confinement for hundreds of years. Cheris has been warned not to listen to Jedao, but having someone stuck in your head and being able to see how deeply the Hexarchate has failed not just Jedao, but all of its citizens, has Cheris wondering if the fortress really deserves to be saved at all.

I read this entire series (including the short story collection) over the summer and it's one of the ones that has stuck with me the longest. I love the characters and their dynamics and their world. Lee does so much interesting stuff with identity and memory in these books, especially in the third novel! The third book could have easily felt superfluous but it doesn't at all, perfectly showing the audience what happens after you beat the evil empire and how hard it is to stop yourself from falling into their same traps. If you read A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine) and wished Mahit's imago-machine wasn't broken for 80% of the book, this one is for you!

Yellowface (R.F Kuang)

Kuang is a master of YA Fantasy, but proves herself just as capable with this adult contemporary debut. Yellowface is a story about writing, publishing, racism, and capitalism. It revolves around June, a mediocre white author whose debut flopped. June loves writing and thinks she's a good author, but being "good" isn't enough. You have to be amazing, and you also have to be marketable. One of June's distant school friends, Athena Liu, is both amazing and marketable, and June struggles with jealousy and admiration for Athena, who is a darling literary success. Then, when Athena and June are hanging out, Athena tragically chokes and dies— leaving behind her newly completed uber secret manuscript about Chinese laborers during WWI. June swipes the manuscript and heavily edits it, selling it as her own. The publishers turn June into the next hot thing, marketing her as the ethnically ambiguous "Juniper Song," and her book sells like crazy. It looks like she's going to get away with it, but can June really keep something as big as this secret forever?

I loved the commentary this book has around racism, tokenization, and the publishing industry in this novel, and being in June's head is such a crazy experience. She's obviously a horrible person, but she's so sure of herself and her own victimization that you can easily forget and begin to feel bad for her... until she does or says or thinks something so egregiously wrong that you remember she's actually a shit human being. A truly manipulative and unreliable narrator— watching her struggle to justify her actions and recontextualize her behavior to make herself look better is insanely compelling to watch. Kuang's push and pull, back and forth, with June is excellently done and makes this a compulsively readable book!

The World and All That It Holds (Aleksandar Hemon)

I randomly picked this up off the shelf at my library and ended up enjoying it so much! It's a historical fiction novel about a poet-turned-conscripted-soldier during WWI. We follow him throughout his life as he falls in love with a fellow soldier, and the two try to build a life together, eventually starting a family. They keep getting chased out of wherever they try to settle. It's an incredibly human tale about being a refugee, and how once you get pushed out of your home, you can never really return or find a home again. The events of the plot were often shocking and sad, but it all feels thematically resonant and the wry narration keeps it from getting too hard to continue. I'm typically not a historical fiction fan but I devoured this book and everything it had to offer!

Ring of Swords (Eleanor Arnason)

This was such a surprising read! Arnason is an incredibly underrated author and I really wish more people knew about her. She's been compared to Le Guin, who is one of my favorite authors. I definitely see the comparisons, but also think that Arnason brings something unique to the table! Like Le Guin, Arnason uses scifi to talk about the human condition and explore contemporary social issues, but Arnason leans more explicitly into homosexuality and her work typically centers around female protagonists (which took Le Guin some time to start doing). Ring of Swords focuses around human alien biologist Anna Perez and human prisoner of war turned alien ambassador Nicholas Sanders as they try to stop the humans and the hwarhath (a matriarchal humanoid furry alien species who practice intense gender segregation and are predominantly homosexual) from going to war. It's basically a book about people sitting around and talking and trying not to go to war, and it rocks.

The book has such interesting themes of clashing colonizing cultures, what it means to be a person, and how cultural values can take on new light when reflected back through another culture. There's a really funny scene in this book where the human military are sitting around trying to figure out what kind of gay porn to send the aliens as part of a cultural exchange. Anna Perez is an incredibly smart and compassionate protagonist and Nicky, the secondary protagonist, is sarcastic and charming despite all he's been through. We learn more about Nicky's backstory and romance with general Ettin Gwarha via interludes framed as excerpts from Nicky's journal, which Gwarha has access to and comments on occasionally. This is just such an amazing and gripping novel, and I highly recommend all of Arnason's work. "The Potter of Bones" is a short story set in the hwarhath past, which I also highly recommend.

Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer)

I have friends who love both the book and the movie, and in my Fantasy Lit class we talked enough about VanderMeer's worldbuilding tips that I finally decided to give this book a go after finding it in a used bookstore for $7. I really enjoyed this— it's a quick, short read, but it does so much. We follow an unnamed (and unreliable) narrator on an expedition to the mysterious Area X, which is an area (inferred to be in Florida) which has been affected by alien pollution. The narrator has a particular vested interest in the expedition, since her husband was on one of the previous expeditions. He eventually returned, but had been vastly changed. This book was so atmospheric and creepy and fun, and I do want to continue with the Southern Reach trilogy!

The Vampire Lestat (Anne Rice)

The Vampire Chronicles are always hard to rank objectively for me because the highs are so high but the lows are so low. I think The Vampire Lestat will always be my favorite of the original trilogy just because of how the highs end up outweighing the lows. Interview with the Vampire portrays Lestat as a callous, selfish, unthinking monster who doesn't give a shit about Louis or Claudia (or anyone at all, really) and is just evil for the sake of being evil— Louis is the wounded protagonist and Lestat is the villain. The Vampire Lestat was a huge reorientation of the series, setting up Lestat firmly as the protagonist and giving him a chance to explain his side of the story and why he is the way he is, and Rice would stick with this characterization for the rest of the series. For the most part, I think this is done pretty well, with Lestat staying the same theatrical and sometimes shortsighted vampire with a thirst for knowledge that he is in the first book, just with more depth, although Rice's woobification of her own character crosses the line into pure ridiculous retcon at certain points (Rice wants us to believe that Lestat never killed a single innocent person, which I'm not buying).

This novel brings in so many great characters and dynamics into the series, with Lestat's mom Gabrielle being the world's first transmasc deadbeat vampire father, and Lestat's violinist ex-boyfriend Nicky forming the worst vampire coven of all time. Armand is also such a good character in this novel— he's great in Interview with the Vampire too, but here he really gets his time to shine with a backstory and more complex motives. Seeing the creation of the Theatre des Vampires and Armand's transformation from graveyard dwelling cultist to alternating between love and hate for Lestat to building up the coven and becoming fulfilled with his work is great. This novel fills in a lot of the gaps in IWTV and presents some alternate interpretations of events from that novel, which are interesting and add a lot of complexity to the story. There's also the present day timeline of Lestat becoming a one hit wonder vampire rockstar which is silly and fun in the best way possible. The Loustat reunion in San Francisco is also really great to me!

Now moving onto the lows— I find everything to do with Marius to be exceedingly tedious. Part of this is the fact that Marius is just not a very interesting character to me: Rice writes him as so perfect and beautiful and cool, clearly wanting him to be liked, while also riddling his personality and backstory with red flags. Marius literally bought Armand as a slave and yet never even brings his name up while he's explaining his backstory to Lestat, not even giving an excuse as to why he left Armand and let him believe he was dead or explaining his and Armand's relationship at all other than, "don't make a vampire that young, it was a mistake." YEAH MARIUS IT SURE WAS AND SO WAS BUYING HIM AS A CHILD SLAVE!!!!

Part of this tedium is also due to the fact that Marius serves primarily in this novel to deliver vampire lore dumps, particularly around Those Who Must Be Kept, and I just find all that stuff to be dull. I know some people might be interested in Anne Rice's vampire backstory lore, but I just don't particularly care for it, especially knowing that she's just going to retcon this again in Queen of the Damned. It feels like a waste of time and the way it's delivered- a flashback within a memory within a flashback- doesn't hold my attention either. I feel like Akasha is just such an iconic and fun villain that people forget or overlook the fact that her backstory and the way it's delivered makes zero sense.

Anyways, like I said, overall I do really like this novel and think it's the cleanest of the first three original novels. Interview with the Vampire is incredibly iconic, but something about Louis is a little hard to connect to and the interview format hobbles Rice a little because she can only include what she can feasibly have Louis narrate. Queen of the Damned has one of the best chapters in all three novels alone (we love you Devil's Minion) and has an iconic villain and character team ups, but like The Vampire Lestat it struggles with boring vampire lore dumps. This is also the book where Anne Rice basically became popular enough to fire her editor, which shows. Queen of the Damned is way too long and has a bunch of random character POVs that don't add to the overall story and end up going nowhere. The Vampire Lestat hits a sweet spot for me and I can't wait to see how the TV show adapts it!

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)

Picture this: you're me, and you just finished this book. You loved it and thought it was super atmospheric and creepy. It's late, so you go to bed. But you can't fall asleep. You just keep falling into this light doze and having these incredibly vivid nightmares and waking yourself up. You keep overheating and throwing off all the blankets, and then getting cold and bundling up. Rinse and repeat. Eventually you can't take it anymore, and even though it's still dark out it's got to be late enough to get up at this point. You check your phone. It's 5:00 in the morning. You give up and decide that We Have Always Lived in the Castle has cursed you. Damn you, Shirley Jackson!

Anyways, I went to urgent care after that and found out I had the flu. So that explains that. Sorry Shirley!

I read The Haunting of Hill House too, and liked that book as well, but something about We Have Always Lived in the Castle is just next level to me. The book is about Mary Katherine (called Merricat) and Constance Blackwood, who along with their sickly Uncle Julian are the only three living Blackwoods after a poisoned sugar bowl killed the rest of their family. Uncle Julian only had a little bit of sugar and survived, and Merricat had been sent to her room without supper, but Constance simply didn't take sugar that day, making her the prime murder suspect. She was eventually acquitted, but the village people believe she's guilty and Constance has developed severe agoraphobia. Merricat takes it upon herself to go to the village and buy groceries, as well as coming up with various rituals in order to keep the house safe. Despite being outsiders, the girls and their uncle are happy, until their cousin Charles shows up and begins courting Constance in an attempt to steal their inheritance.

Merricat is such a fun and complex character, and the commentary on being an outsider and finding companionship and a life for yourself outside of the bounds of society is really interesting. Jackson has a wonderful writing style that just keeps you hooked— she steps strongly into the voice of her narrator and makes them very unique and memorable.

A Desolation Called Peace (Arkady Martine)

I finally read this duology! It's been recommended to me forever, but I wasn't that into scifi until recently (starting to think I was just reading the wrong scifi, because a lot of books on this list are scifi...). This series follows Mahit, a member of a minority ethnic group on the outskirts of a powerful empire. Mahit has always had a certain fascination with the empire, loving their language and literature, and was selected as ambassador for her people when the previous ambassador mysteriously stopped reporting back. In the first book, Mahit attempts to solve the murder of her predecessor with the help of an "imago machine," a cultural staple that basically copies and implants an ancestor line into someone's head. Neurological "tampering" is a big no-no in the empire, so her people keep this practice a secret. Mahit struggles with integrating her imago machine, as well as being seduced by the empire and its citizens, while struggling to keep her people out of its hungry grip.

The second book is about the empire fighting a hugely powerful alien enemy, and Mahit and her girlfriend/oppressor/it's complicated/fellow bureaucrat Three Seagrass getting swept up in first contact and negotiations. I loved the slow pace and murder mystery of the first novel, but this novel felt much larger, more action packed, and higher stakes. Eight Antidote and Nine Hibiscus are great POV characters and there are also some non POV side characters introduced in this novel that I love. The ending does feel like it wraps things up a bit too cleanly and quickly, but the journey is great and that matters more to me.

And that's the list! I highly recommend all these books (and if they're part of a series, the rest of the series as well). I really hope some more people read Eleanor Arnason, because she's super underrated and I wish more people knew her. Wishing you all a great year of reading in 2024!