According to Goodreads I read 54 whole books this year! Here were my favorites, in the order I read them:
- Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives - 2023 was very much the year of Bolaño, as he rapidly climbed to the top of my list of favorite authors. I read six of his books this year, and The Savage Detectives was my favorite. Roberto Bolaño's epic follows two men, one of whom is the author's own literary alter ego, on a strange discursive odyssey of exile through the figurative and sometimes literal wreckage of Latin American poetry and youthful ambition. It's also an alternately loving and biting fictionalized satire of the author's own youth in Mexico City and the literary movement which he formed. What could come off as self-indulgent and pretentious is instead a wildly entertaining tragicomic road novel that, crucially, keeps its two heroes on the sidelines, telling their stories exclusively through the eyes of the characters they meet along the way and building a rich tapestry that feels of a piece with Bolaño's own (brilliant) short fiction. I wrote about The Savage Detectives a little bit more here
- Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red - It's been long enough since I've read this that it's difficult for me to write about it, but this book became an instant favorite. A verse novel inspired by the myth of Herakles and Geryon, it's the great autistic queer coming of age novel. It's beautifully written and I can't recommend it highly enough
- Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19 - If you're autistic and love books, this is a novel to fire you up and kick off a million different hyperfixations, a rich stylistic experiment that pulls from coming-of-age novels, existential literature, and essays. Written in a bold modernist style with shades of Woolf and Lispector, it explores a woman's life through books, featuring numerous mini-essays on real-life books and authors and what they mean to the protagonist at different points in her life. I posted about this one a bit more here
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan - Absolutely brilliant and probably my favorite UKL. A dark and claustrophobic novel built around a single location, it follows Tenar, a young girl serving as the high priestess of the Nameless Ones, as she rebels against the religious role forced upon her. Tenar is a wonderful and compelling protagonist, and the narrow setting allows for a far great depth and specificity in world-building than A Wizard of Earthsea.
- Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels - While this is technically four books, in essence they comprise a single 1700-page mega novel following the lives and friendship between two Italian women from an impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood across seven decades. It's about womanhood and misogyny and class and violence and the struggle to escape one's origins, but it's also about the changing political and social face of Italy through the second half of the 20th century. Few books can match these in terms of sheer ambition and Elena Ferrante pulls it off beautifully. In sum total, they're definitely one of the great literary achievements of the 21st century to date
And here were a number of others that I really loved:
- Ann Quin, Berg
- Casey Plett, A Safe Girl to Love
- Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmarte
- K. Patrick, Mrs. S
- Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
- Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother
- Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built
- Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth and Amulet and Antwerp