Hi guys! As the end of the year is approaching… what have been your top 3 books for 2023? I want to hear about your favorites/most memorable reads across all genres that you finished this year.
Mine are as follows…:
1. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll: It was so good I stayed in bed on a Saturday night eating ice cream with my phone on DND to finish the last 100 pages in one sitting lmao.
2. The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: first book that made me cry in a while.
3. Still Life by Louis Penny: these books are such a vibe and I love how they are so immersive. It’s like a mini adventure-vacation to Quebec every time I read any of the novels from this series, but this one was the first one that got me totally hooked!
Notable mention: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman.
Posting before we enter December so that this racks up a loooong list of recommendations to check out for 2024.
by catfishmermaid
3 Comments
If it’s books that were printed within the year, I think the only one I read was Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu and it was fantastic, I have no idea how to describe it other than prose and unwavering.
As for two others, Book of the Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa was devastating yet mesmerizing, and I guess Collection of Sand by Italo Calvino, I read a bunch of his other books for the first time this year and it’s hard to say what was my favorite but this one reminded me a lot of Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, just mementos about anything and everything he sets his eyes on.
I’m almost positive some are slipping my mind. But two that I read this year that I really enjoyed are:
— *The Garden of Seven Twilights* by Miquel de Palol. A story about a group of people who wait out a bomb scare by retreating to a wealthy guy’s isolated chateau in Spain. While they’re there, they contend with their interpersonal stuff, but also tell each other stories to pass the time. And it gradually becomes clear that the material and characters in the story show that there’s more going on with the guests (in the present) than they’re letting on. It was so engrossing and so well-written. Like an onion I wanted to get to the bottom of. Highly recommended.
— *Dead Babies* by Martin Amis. When Amis passed this year, I decided to give some of his novels I hadn’t tried a go. I only read one or two of his books before and wasn’t super into them. But this was a whole different story. Part dark British farce. Part comedy of manners between a group of bohemian students on a wild weekend. And things get pretty wild and hilarious. Several of the moments in the novel live rent-free in my head now. Also highly recommended.
It’s so hard to only pick 3, but I think I’d say:
– Life Ceremony, a short story collection by Sayaka Murata. Everything she writes is strange and disturbing and beautiful, hard to describe. I read it in a forest sitting in a tree branch with a nice butt-sized bend in it, too, making it doubly memorable.
– The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. His prose is just incredible and I’m a sucker for Faustian tales.
– Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman. I wish this book would become insanely popular and start a bunch of literary trends lol. Never has an author written something that made me and the way I think feel so seen. Surreal, increasingly sci-fi, often funny, and always disturbing take on humans’ relationship to resources and ecological systems in the 21st century.