2023 has seen me continue to fail to write anything that isn’t an essay / dissertation / sermon, and thus to continue to work out what on earth I’m doing or want to do with this site (my age of blogging is maybe over / having a web-front is still helpful / who knows). HOWEVER, at some point in the summer I did promise some pals a ‘books what I have liked this year’ post, and so… here goes.

Ongoing disclaimer that these are not books published this year, just books I’ve loved this year (some of which happen to be 2023 publications, some of which really really are not) in no particular order, and also that my reading mojo continued to struggle through my academic life into this summer, and I’ve been fighting to reclaim it.

Titanium Noir , by Nick Harkaway. I am, of course, a Harkaway fan of old (and I also re-read The Gone-Away World this year, which—for the record— is still a wildly ambitious piece of chaotic mayhem and continues to slap). However, after the behemoth that was Gnomon, which I liked and appreciated for its ideas and ambition rather than utterly loving, this felt like a shift. Slimmer, tighter, still packed with intriguing ideas about the state and future of the world, and fully embracing the noir genre, it very definitely packed a punch. A+ would recommend (and enjoy the nod to Sidney Greenstreet).

All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy has long been a novelist I’ve meant to read more (I read The Road an eon ago, and have owned Blood Meridian for nearly a decade without actually reading it). His death this summer sent me into Foyles to emerge with All the Pretty Horses, which completely blew me away and I’ve now added the rest of the Border Trilogy to the pile. I’m not a particularly visual reader, so I tend to notice it when a novelist really makes me see places, and McCarthy really did that for me here. The way he depicts the land somehow makes a story that is troubling and occasionally brutal into something heartbreakingly beautiful.

Land of Milk and Honey, by C. Pam Zhang. Flat out the best of the, ‘The Capitalist Apocalypse is Extremely F--ing Nigh’ novels I read this year (there were three of them), this worked wonders by focusing on one specific thing that is endangered in the climate crisis: food. And particularly food as a pleasure that engages the senses, not just nutrition: taste, smell, flavour, texture . . . all of these come out to play in this novel. The focus is on the narrator, the in-house chef in a tiny billionaire prepper commune in the mountains in northern Italy, while the story of ‘what on earth is going on here’ quietly, steadily, unfolds below it. It’s wonderful, and strangely optimistic.

The Late Americans, by Brandon Taylor. Taylor is one of my favourite contemporary writers, managing to capture me with his novels, short stories, and essays, which is really rare. TBH I think I like his criticism the best, and I think the way he writes about the craft of writing and storytelling more broadly, and about culture and thought really help open up his novels for me. This one follows an interlinked cast of characters in the mid-west (a combination of artists, students and blue-collar workers) and their pains and desires, in the contemporary world—whose challenges and dynamics are never explicitly described but are very much present. It feels very real, both in its murkiness and in its hopefulness, and I continue to love Taylor’s observational eye.

Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead. This is the sequel to Harlem Shuffle, and Whitehead just continues to smash out a fabulous crime novel with social commentary in the best possible way. I love the way the events unfold over years rather than at speed, with things paying off over time. But mostly I like the writing. There’s one chapter whose opening is as delicate and sharp and funny in its description as a PG Wodehouse novel, except it’s about blood and broken glass. I am delighted that he is working on the third in what is now a trilogy.

Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice. I came across this because its sequel was listed in an ‘upcoming novels to pay attention to’ and it sounded like my jam, so I thought I’d read the original. It turned out that it was very much my jam: an atmospheric, eerie little novel about how people might behave in the event of an unknown event that cuts off their community from the rest of the world in the middle of winter—and then with the arrival of an outsider—but with the particularity of being set in an indigenous community on a reservation in Canada, and the outsider is a white man. Also, I now need someone to import the sequel from Canada for me, because as far as I can tell the publication rights aren’t sold in the UK, so if y’all could get on that, that would be fab.

Cat’s Eye, by Margaret Atwood. I first read this in my late teens, in my first foray into Atwood. 20-odd years later all I could remember was that it was incredibly good, and incredibly true about pre-teen and teenage girls, and that I couldn’t really understand why it unnerved me so much that I couldn’t face going back to it, even as I re-read most of her other novels. Re-reading it again this year, I sort of understand why, but only in that I now know that I don’t remember much of the detail of my being picked-on over the years at school, and that the dynamics of Cordelia, Grace, and Elaine’s ‘friendship’ continue to make my stomach hum uncomfortably. This time around I understood the adult Elaine and the way the novel as a whole works better than I did the first time, and I have a lurking suspicion that this might actually be Atwood’s finest.

Perfect Spy, by John le Carré. This is another I first read well before I was equipped to understand what it was really about (sometime in my early twenties I think). Then I thought it was fine but long, and I had no idea why everyone seemed to reckon it was Le Carré’s greatest novel, when things like Smiley’s People and The Constant Gardener existed. This year I finally went back to it (I’d being meaning to for a couple of years), and whew, it turns out that it really is that good in its understanding of how people work—or rather, of all the ways they don’t.

The Dark is Rising (series), by Susan Cooper. I feel like I should have had these as a child and am baffled that I didn’t (given that I read and re-read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Moon of Gomrath about 97 times between the ages of 10 and 15). Anyway, I finally started on them in January of 2023, and finished them this week, sprawled on the sofa for a re-read of The Dark is Rising followed by The Grey King and Silver on the Tree between Christmas Day and the 28th. They’re deceptively simple in many ways: a quest a novel, a limited amount of doubt about the outcome (as an adult reader, at least), and yet their depth of soul and atmosphere lingers, and they really get that cold, queasy feel of both evil and the ‘neutrality’ that allows evil—and for that, I think The Grey King may be my favourite.

Tehanu, by Ursula le Guin. One of the ‘other’ series’ that I should have been reading as a kid but somehow missed (see also Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl and Chrestomanci series’, which I got into in my thirties). I finally finished the main quartet this year, with Tehanu. I loved Tenar in Tombs of Atuan so it was a joy to revisit her, but also to have a novel whose story is so deeply bound up in the choices that women have to make about how to live, knowing how they’re most likely to be perceived and understood, and what that means for them.

And one to give a miss . . .

Yellowface, by Rebecca F. Kuang. I picked this up because this was everywhere and because, despite its weaknesses I did actually really enjoy reading Babel. This I did not. I think it was trying to do something interesting, but I don’t think it quite had the courage of its convictions to go full-bore for a tragic ending, and ended up flattering itself that it was both deeper and more of a thriller than it was. Thumbs down (though if you’re desperate to read it, you can have my copy for the postage)