Weird year. I’ve read 39 books so far this year, nearly 10K pages, but it feels like I read fewer/less than that, maybe because most of the most memorable reading experiences, especially from summer on, all looked and felt the same, in that I read them on my iPad, the screen black, the text white and enlarged to a reasonable size, the font the same, never influenced by peculiarities and particularities related to the text-conveyance device. For my entire life text had come packaged in paperback (some with French flaps) or hardcover form, the crispness and quality of which widely varied. When reading longer books particularly, when I think of reading The Recognitions in my twenties or War and Peace in the two different new editions/translations I’ve read, I picture the physical book, pulpiness, girth (excuse me), covers bent or bumped once I reached the end, multiple pages dogeared. I’d always walked and read with bound physical objects in my hands, the pages coffee-stained, whipped by wind, their texture affected by mist in the air. But 2023 was the year I converted to someone totally comfortable reading on an iPad.
There’s something democratic about the way the iPad screen levels the superficial aspects of reading so the emphasis is totally on the prose. If the format is always the same, the only thing that changes is the text’s texture, its inherent nature, character and swerve. The way the blind’s other senses are supposedly accentuated, something similar may happen in terms of sensitivity to differentiation in language when reading on an electronic device with a uniform format.
Also I now have a literal virtual library of 19th-century British fiction downloaded nearly for free, at most a dollar or two for the complete novels of the Brontes, Eliot, Trollope, Dickens, Hardy, Austen, a few others. For some reason I stayed away from 19th-century England, maybe because I wasn’t all that into Sense and Sensibility in high school? Now, on the other side of the previously off-putting marriage question that so often comes up in these books, I may be more willing to engage with it? Or maybe it’s just that the few I’ve read so far in the modern era, starting with Middlemarch this summer, have been without a doubt deserving of their long-standing reputation as flat-out classics (Wuthering Heights, not so much). It’s humbling in a way to have considered myself a reader and a writer while ignorant of these books. I’m only about a hundred pages into Great Expectations as I write this, with Bleak House on deck, Villette, Gaskell’s North and South (also Cranford) ready to go, my reading list exploded, all of them concealed in an app, ready for revelation on an elegant iPad screen.
Below, the top three are really tied for the “best” book I read in 2023, but I’ll give it to Dracula because I really didn’t expect to appreciate it nearly to the degree I did.
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Blows expectations out of the Danube. Started reading this because it’s 19th-century English-language fiction and The Wolves of Eternity didn’t provide the supernatural caloric content I was looking for as we entered spooky season this year. I read this and Wuthering Heights simultaneously, a chapter of one and then a chapter of the other, for a few days but then committed to Dracula, which seemed to me super-superior.
The first chapters when Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania and the world becomes weirder, all the descriptions of how the natives dress, with their wide belts etc, the paprika on the food, the villagers warding off evil, gifting Harker with a crucifix, the first appearance of the wolves, the disorientation as Harker rode in the carriage, the feeling of going in circles, the weird blue flames and some odd optic deviance, all that was about as good an entryway into a novel as I’ve ever read. The first few chapters were tremendously teleportive, atmospheric, wonderful fun, knowing what Harker was getting into, too.
And then the Count was wonderfully depicted, charming, creepy, suspiciously unwilling to eat, with that grip of twenty men, the house apparently unoccupied by anyone else, the count freaking out when Harker nicks himself shaving, not appearing in the mirror, crawling down the side of the castle, the crazy scene with the mother of the stolen baby wailing in the courtyard before she’s devoured by wolves, the trio of sexy succubus-style vampires pushed off their prey by the Count. All so good. And then when it shifts to London, with multiple perspectives introduced, mostly first-person accounts, letters, diaries, memos, that crazy news report about the arrival of the Demeter from the Black Sea, the huge black dog that jumped to shore, the account of the crew, all so so so good.
The writing style, compared to Eliot and Emily Bronte, seemed so clear, the sentences flowing without continual intercession of clauses set off by commas. The style feels comparatively modern and seems almost to read itself, to flow across and down the pages, attaining total immersive transparency at its most active/best moments. And then the images are so strong, the winged beast biting the neck of the young woman at the edge of a cliff or something backed by moonlight, the Count slicing open his chest so Mina can feed on his blood like a sicko mother feeding its child milk, the scene in the graveyard confronting Lucy Westerna in full-on vampire form, when they stuff her decapitated head with garlic, the final scene at sunset in craggy mountains while it’s snowing, all so picturesque and evocative with the language flowing beautifully while disappearing to reveal the off-the-hook, totally fulfilling finale. And that’s just the surface level appreciation.
The novel is an interpretative goldmine, abounding with theme and conflict and characterization and potential readings from every analytical angle. Race, class, gender, sexuality, otherness, good vs evil, light vs darkness, the old ways vs modernity, Christianity vs paganism, selfishness vs selflessness/sacrifice, Victorian buttoned-up goodie-goodie society versus drink the blood from an open wound on my chest perversity. And then there’s science vs the supernatural of course, there’s the multiple perspectives, the inclusion of various media including very early phonograph recordings, taking the faster modern train across land to Transylvania than the old-fashioned ship on water route the Count takes when he flees London. Could really just go on and on forever with all this, even before discussing how Stoker started writing this soon after his friend Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy, how the whole thing’s a metaphor for homosexuality in the Victorian era, society-wide fear of being converted to a covert taboo cult that exclusively takes place after dark.
Van Helsing often philosophizes and interprets but the novel for the most part is consistently dramatized and always pushing forward, or when static it’s increasing suspense. Some parts toward the end seemed to delay the finale almost to excess but that anticipation that was being built was necessary to make the finale that much more satisfying.
All in all, wish I had read this many years ago — my mother claims that she read it to me when I was little or that she tried to read it to me when I was six or seven and really into vampires but I was too scared to let her go on. I remember getting vampire books from the library and placing them at the bottom of the stack because I was worried that the pictures in them would come to life and get me if they weren’t weighed down by other books.
Generally, vampires have such great attraction, are such complicated villains, immortal yet essentially dead, so powerful yet so vulnerable to crucifixes, the host, and garlic for some reason. Why garlic? (Possibly it relates to porphyria?!) Otherwise, reading this in the week before Halloween, with yards decorated with skeletons and fake cobwebs etc, a full moon lighting the nights like there’d been a dusting of snow, I often thought of the book during the day when I couldn’t stop myself from taking a few more pieces of Halloween candy from the stash reserved for the 31st. Uncontrollable urges for sugar, for forbidden unhealthy food and drinks, wanting to overindulge and sleep the sleep of the fully sated, or my child’s OCD related to an upcoming SplatFest in the game Splatoon 3, any of those modern mediated/engineered desires the novel made more apparent.
Anyway, throughout I just enjoyed this way more than I expected and look forward to reading it again in print (first time through I read on my iPad, which does allow for reading at night in bed in darkness, which doesn’t hurt when reading something like this).
Middlemarch by George Eliot
In college, a respected English Lit professor (Pat Day) mentioned at one point that we like when it’s about 65 degrees, not too cold, not too hot, and he associated this preference with Middlemarch, the literary embodiment of 65 degrees, which I didn’t read in college because I didn’t take 19th-century fiction somehow, despite having majored in English Lit. About eight years after graduation, 20+ years ago, I first tried and failed Middlemarch — got a decent paperback at Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore in Boston but didn’t make it beyond the preface. Text was too small, hardly any margins. Never read that copy and donated it at one point. A few years ago got a lovely “clothbound classics” edition, read the first few pages, but didn’t have it in me to continue at the time. Decided to try again this summer and felt like the text was just a little too small for me, so I downloaded a 99-cent Kindle “Dover Thrift” edition and read it on my iPad, with the text enlarged to a comfortable size. The page numbering made no sense (368 pages, but each “page” required three or four swipes to achieve a new number). I liked tapping archaic words I didn’t quite know (“durance“) and seeing the definition pop-up immediately, and I highlighted in yellow hundreds of comely, graceful phrases, the first being “vague labyrinthine extension,” referring to Casaubon’s consciousness but also seeming to have some metafictional content too.
Early on, it interested me that Casaubon’s project is called “The Key to All Mythologies,” the subtitle to Franzen’s recent Crossroads, so it felt like reading Middlemarch would unlock an understanding of Franzen’s project in a way I looked forward to — and it turns out that for a grand-sounding, apparently grand-standing subtitle, it’s actually self-deprecatory and humbled, knowing that Casaubon’s project is incomplete, beyond his capabilities, and sort of DOA or at least outdated because he doesn’t know German, the language in which all recent related research has been written in. So there’s that intertextuality that kept me interested at first, as well as the image of Casaubon as a sort of leaden John Kerry-looking academic who attained dimensionality early on and helped bring the book to life.
Also of course Dorothea and Rosamond, a pair of dissimilar lovely ladies that echoed in advance similar dissimilar pairs in War and Peace, Natasha and Helene. Also of course Tertius Lydgate and Will Ladislaw. And to a lesser extent Fred Vincy and Mary Garth. And all their parents and intermediaries, particularly Bulstrode, whose name suggested to me “balustrade,” an ornamental railing that to a degree connects or extends and supports the novel’s primary columns.
Loved generally the phrasal fabric of the novel, the language that elevates what otherwise often seemed if reduced to its plot points like a romance, “unfortunate” marriages, thwarted longing and love, difficulties with financial issues, petty local politics, long-concealed impurities of the past coming to light in the present. Loved also the chaotic intrusion of Raffles, who sort of reminded me of Barney from The Simpsons albeit in period dress.
Beyond interest in its form and phrasing, I suppose I was interested in the presentation of the casual, nearly universal bigotry of the era, how the townspeople were aghast that Ladislaw’s relative had been a Polish musician — not even purely English! And someone, maybe Lydgate, had a Jewish ancestory, I think?! Sir James Chettam, Celia’s husband, objects to Ladislaw on the grounds of not having good blood. “Peerage” is another word I learned in this — as history, it suggests how far we’ve come but also the sort of classification and stratification that’s always been a core feature of human idiocy. Such stratification does serve as an effective restraint in novels, the obstacles of propriety that the characters cannot overcome without sacrifice after hundreds of pages of handwringing until climatic scenes underscored by a serious weather event as though the atmosphere itself objects to their actions.
Generally, though, after a point maybe two hundred pages in, once the primary players cohered, reading Middlemarch was all I really wanted to do, settling down on the porch after work in the afternoon or later in bed or on the weekends spending as much time as possible on my iPad.
Downloaded the complete George Eliot, the complete Brontes (and purchased a lovely “clothbound classics” box set), plus North and South, and will now start filling the sizeable gap in my 19th-century reading knowledge.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Comely, upstanding prose. Its clarity next to godliness, exemplary moral integrity. Oh, there will be spoilers ahead, so many spoilers, if you’re considering reading this and know nothing about it, same way I knew nothing about it, somehow — avoid all reviews and anything about Charlotte Bronte or else key plot points will be spoiled. I learned that Jane and Mr. Rochester would become an item the day before he so wonderfully appeared and fell from his horse. Before I read the related pages, I learned that this is the book responsible for “the madwoman in the attic” I had read an excerpt of in college. But otherwise I shaded my eyes from reviews like these that have no choice really but to reveal some serious plot points. And unlike when reading 20th century lit, modernist or postmodern, the revelation of what happens really would make a difference to a reading experience.
The storytelling is so wonderfully compelling, patient, conventional, especially the meting out of the mystery of the lunatic Creole Bertha in the attic, but also bits like when Mr. Rochester impersonates a traveling soothsaying gypsy or the revelation of the deal post-intervention at the altar. A lot happens in this, and if taken out of context, if removed from the world of the novel and its sensibility, not considered as a construction of these comely and upstanding phrases, most of it is pretty far-fetched, fictional, wishfullfillmental if not quite feelgoodish, and most certainly superproblematic from a contemporary perspective: the 39 to 19 age difference between Mr. Rochester and Jane, Mr. Rochester’s illegitimate child he cares for as guardian only and otherwise delegates to governesses, the madwoman in the attic from the West Indies of course, and St. John’s great white crusade to bring the Hindus to Christ (not to mention proposing to his cousin who he considers a sister).
All this was problematic from Jane’s perspective, too, and from Charlotte’s perspective was surely presented as an exaggerated moral obstacle course for Jane to run and come out the winner thanks to unwavering committed virtue, including her early-feminist sense of independence and self-assurance in her equality with men (more so: men are not granted superiority by nature; they must prove themselves her equal).
But really I just found the novel enjoyable, comfortable, appreciating the clarifying attention to secondary/tertiary characters (eg, Blanche Ingram or Mr. Mason or the wealthy Mr. Oliver and his beautiful daughter Rosamund, even Pilot the dog — unlike in, say, her sister Emily’s novel, wherein really only Heathcliff seemed indisputably defined and even the primary Catherine was diluted with a secondary Cathy), the consistent stability of its narrative orientation, a lofting comforter of a story I suspected would turn out well in the end, functioning almost like a comedy with the main character beginning low and ending high, albeit scarred and wizened by the experience.
Jane, as a narrator, with her famous occasional direct address to the reader (“reader, I married him” I knew as a famous line in a novel but never knew it came from this one or who “him” was), is beyond reliable — she’s a representative of moral responsibility, identifying the old verities and virtues as they arise in drama. Her argumentation is always so righteous and always on the side of right, in a way I rooted for — the underdog who rises up.
The whole novel reminded me of Louis CK’s bit about Good Will Hunting, sort of, how Matt Damon wrote and directed it and starred in it and made his character a handsome super-genius who gets to make out with Minny Driver. In this, Charlotte Bronte seems to run her narrator through a similar sort of wish-fulfillment gauntlet, the orphan with an innate moral sense, judge of all around her, weighing per an understanding of Scripture and always acting according to her calculations, receiving for good behavior a massive inheritance from a distant relation also related to the family who saved her toward the beginning of the third section. Even the naughty narrative obstacle of the first wife is cleaned up neatly by the fire and Bertha leaping to her death from the roof. Voila!
Looking forward to read Wide Sargasso Sea at one point — and some of the essays in the back of a critical edition I acquired at a library book sale this fall (“Oh, Jane Eyre,” sighed the woman at the check-out table who took my dollar bill, and now I know why she may have said it like that). Would’ve loved to have read this in college with a great professor but maybe I wasn’t ready for it at that time in my life? I read on an iPad, white text on black screen, often in the dim light of a Christmas tree that we put up way too early this year, strung with red lights, moving the little red bookmark string to chart my progress on the comely, upstanding Penguin Classics hardcover I laid out on a table but didn’t actually read.
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot
Such a great, simple, straightforward, moralistic, enjoyable fable of a story — the first two chapters, a few through the middle, and the last few are as good as reading gets, or, well, at least for 19th Century fiction are flowing and riveting, easy enough to follow, with such a sympathetic central character.
Loved the urgency of his initial unfair ostracization, resettling far from his home area and establishing himself through committed labor, weaving with “the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect.”Related to a degree to the solace he found in this, in the repetition of days and melting of hours at his loom (“Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life”), as well as the accumulation of guineas he reveled in every night, Scrooge McDuckishly.
Loved also when he tried to engage his new community, earnestly trying to help someone in need by preparing an herbal concoction he’d learned from his mother, only for the community to become suspicious, as though he knows some sort of witchcraft. The temporal setting, generally, seems balanced between the old vaguely pagan folkways and the rising powers of manufacturing modernity, especially early on in the novel before Silas commits to weaving and then raising his foundling.
Secondary and tertiary characters other than the florid-faced self-indulgent dissolute piece-of-shit Dunsey aren’t as clearly drawn or didn’t come to life for me the way Mr. Marner did, and the the phrases aren’t as consistently rich as in Middlemarch, but I very much enjoyed reading this and should have read it thirty or more years ago.
I did love this bit about beer drinkers: “the beer-drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended with embarrassing sadness.”
And this: “In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.”
I could imagine reading again, knowing how Godfrey Cass, Nancy Lammeter, and Dolly Winthrop emerge from the community character slurry, for example. Lots of local color, rustic stratification, life of the poor and the somewhat higher ups, old pagan folkloric herbology giving way to good Christian living, karma, Providence, the story complicated through its middle sections by interludes consisting of old-timey dialect-ridden dialogue that, for me, dropped things down a bit, although I see how these scenes round out the community perspective on the central players and situation.
Comparisons to A Christmas Carol are valid, although this doesn’t seem as taut and simple. Silas also seems like a much more complicated/rounded character than Scrooge — both are misers, superficially, but there doesn’t seem to be much ill-will in Silas. His hoarding emerges from not being able to trust others, based on how he’d been treated in the past, whereas Scrooge, from what I remember, is just a domineering boss/bastard. That is, I don’t remember much humanizing backstory. Can’t remember if the ghost of Xmas past showed something that made Scrooge into a “Scrooge”? Probably did. Need to re-read . . .
OK. Re-read the Ghost of Christmas Past section and the “humanizing backstory” bit really feels kinda lame, a lonely boy, not feeling part of things, Fezziweg dancing, a love interest ending things since Scrooge seems too interested in “Gain,” and then seeing her family with another man frolicking at Christmastime, mentioning Scrooge as a cold lonely taskmaster etc. Feels insufficient and rushed compared to the opening chapters of Silas Marner.
Anyway, a wonderful short novel that intermittently achieves flat-out transportative instructive greatness.
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
Loved 85% of this. About as good as a travelogue through the US in 1960 could be. Famous author (received Nobel two years after these travels) of some of the greatest American novels of the mid-20th century on the road in a decked-out truck named for Don Quixote’s horse, loaded with fishing gear and hunting rifles (as alibi when asked what he’s up to) and some booze and books and bedding, accompanied by a blue French-speaking poodle.
Right from the beginning, it takes off as he saves his boat as a hurricane hits the Long Island Sound. Totally active, engaging, flowing, propelled writing. And then he’s off, complaining of traffic and cities always-encroaching outward until he finds what he’s searching for, a glimpse of endangered, usually rural, regionally peculiar (in the sense of a representative of the particular) scenic America, first to the north, Vermont, to Maine, then across to New York state to Michigan to Chicago for an undescribed respite with the wife (incredible stretch forensically reconstructing the previous occupant’s activities in a hotel room), up to Wisconsin and then west to the Badlands. As he moves west it really takes off when encountering bears at or near Yellowstone (Charley goes nuts), and then rapturous description of California sequoias, melancholic recognition of changes around his hometown of Salinas, which we know from East of Eden, and down to Monterrey, which we know from Cannery Row, and then across the Mojave, where he decides not to kill a coyote and then believes he’s responsible for its life (great moment). Some time with rich rancher friends in Texas all wearing worn denim and then to New Orleans to observe protestors against desegregation, the so-called “Cheerleaders,” middle-aged women screaming obscenities at a little black girl escorted by police into a formerly all-white school. More than twenty times someone in the South makes a joke about misperceiving Charley as a [racial epithet redacted] — these scenes and the related analysis are so affecting and ethically presented, insightful, empathetic all around yet angered, and self-questioning, the sort of thing that might sit like a cherry atop a lifetime of work deserving the Nobel. He had thought all Americans of all races in all regions shared something more common in their American-ness with one another than culturally disparate citizens of other countries, but by the end he’s not so sure, sensing divisions still so apparent seventy-three years later.
Loved 85% of it but there’s maybe 15% worth of dialogue with randos encountered on the road, little visits and chats, also some bits about for example trailer parks/mobile homes wherein the significance seemed to me less apparent and my interest waned and my reading pace accelerated accordingly.
But generally I’m comfortable calling myself a huge Steinbeck fan — formally, in terms of the posture of his prose and clarity and choices of his perception, he seems right down the middle, totally accessible, yet somewhat skewed or surprising at times, as expected of an artist of his caliber. Probably the writer against whom other writers can be gauged as more or less conventional or experimental. Content-wise, he’s a natural champion of the underdog, the underclass, as long as they have a functioning moral compass and some dignity and something particular about them and try to be good.
Ultimately, the sort of book I feel like my conservative, midwestern, nevertheless New Yorker-reading father-in-law may have read and loved, or would love if I gave my copy to him — we’ll see when the in-laws visit in a few weeks. Wish I’d read this long ago.
Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth
Mostly thoroughly enjoyed settling down with this, especially the scenes with Caesara O’Shea, a sort of Irish version of Brigitte Bardot or maybe Ava Gardner, who the author apparently once knew? A famous movie star who takes a fancy to Nathan and asks him to show her where all the writers hang out. To which Nathan responds The New York Public Library? (The loudest LOL in a book with plentiful silent amusement/smiles and maybe three audible laughs.) Alvin Pepler, with his photographic memory and former game show glory, who relieves himself on Nathan’s handkerchief, foreshadowing Sabbath on a grave a few books later, is an entertaining character. And the whole conceit of persecution anxiety/assassination fears works well, considering the era it describes post-RFK/MLK.
The last stretch corresponded with a breakout section to Miami for Nathan’s father’s death and funeral, which seemed grafted on or appeared as though events in Roth’s contemporary late-‘70s life compelled this turn in his fictional account of his life a dozen years earlier when Portnoy/Carnovsky took off. I see how the ending with his brother and the armed-guard limo ride through transformed Newark syncs and closes the book down but for what’s essentially a comedy it has the progression of tragedy (starts high, ends low). As in the end of The Facts, written around the same period, there’s a relentless quality to the self-analytical questioning, the hocking, this time from Nathan’s brother, although it doesn’t really feel like anyone other than the author animating the character to critique the alter-ego.
But overall seems to demonstrate exactly why Roth has the reputation he has — highly regarded for humor, energetic language, characterization, and cultural insight, albeit with reservations maybe thanks to a sort of automatic excessive relentless lack of restraint that makes it what it is but also detracts from it at the same time?
Generally enjoying, however, my recent immersion in the lesser — or at least, for me, the previously unread — Roth.
Patrimony by Philip Roth
About as good as this could be — not a place I really wanted to spend time, or so I thought early on, but by the end I didn’t really want it to end, or at least I was in no hurry for the elder Roth to move on. Not quite excruciating but in that ballpark, or maybe too filled with life and dark humor, although not at the expense by the end of the emotional heft. Roth’s relentlessness I critiqued in The Facts is his true patrimony. He hocks because he cares.
Happening by Annie Ernaux
“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations, and my thoughts to become writing, in other words something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”
That’s the last line of this, a variation on a purpose statement like at the end of Portrait of the Artist (“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”) or the beginning of Paradise Lost (“assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to men”).
Formally, it’s unadorned but not degraded, “working class” like the author’s roots, but with parenthetical paragraphs, meta-interjections conveying the “intellectual” artist consciousness/awareness of the tendencies and needs of the text she’s creating. The story proceeds linearly, exemplary rising drama centered around the trials of a student finding an abortionist and having an abortion in early ’60s, in and around Paris. Also incorporates and analyzes old journal entries. It’s categorized as “essay” by Fitzcarraldo Editions but reads more like a novella, like fiction, meta-fiction, memoir, autofiction, ultimately like literature, like individual experience conveyed in text to the variegated readership of the world.
Thematically, it’s required topical reading on the subject of abortion, a document of what it was like before women had the right to control their fate and secure safe and effective treatment for unwanted pregnancies. Easy to see why she won the Nobel Prize when she did (2022), with abortion rights in the U.S. after fifty years revoked in some states (banned in Texas in most cases on August 25, 2022, for example) and generally threatened. The author is not conflicted about her pregnancy, even when she and a friend essentially remove the alien-like fetus from her body, despite it almost seeming like dream imagery, surrealist imagery (she’s working on a paper about the role of women in surrealism), they go through the motions by instinct and necessity.
Will read as many of Ernaux’s short books as I can over the next few years — the delay between ordering from the UK and receiving the package in the mail makes them almost seem free, like gifts — whatever could this be that’s come all the way from London?
Ordered this at the exact moment the wife on the couch pressed play on the trailer of a cinematic adaptation on one of the fancy streaming services. We watched it after I finished reading and I’d recommend it for sure.
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Otherwise, I’ve recently posted about a few other novels that surely also make the cut for best books I read in 2023:
See also Love, Tramp, and The Year by Tomas Espedal, previously posted here.
See also I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal, The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher, All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer, and Bang Bang Crash by Nic Brown, all previously posted here.
See also The Magus by John Fowles, previously posted here.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).