My aim this year was to read 100 books, while my 2023 total of print, audio, and ebooks comes to 42, my goal may have been too ambitious—but there’s always 2024. Here’s this year’s breakdown: 19 novels, 7 memoirs, 4 short story collections, 4 poetry collections, 3 essay collections, 3 novellas, and 2 chapbooks. Some highlights:
Orhan Pamuk’s memoir of Istanbul is a deep dive into a place over time—the city where Pamuk was born, and still lives, and knows intimately. The memoir looks at the city’s history, geography, and collective psychology in chapters on Istanbul’s artists, poets, and writers (along with terrific photos), alongside the intersection of person and place that has driven Pamuk’s fiction and nonfiction. It’s also a memoir of becoming a writer, one raised in privilege, and yet there doesn’t seem a corner of the city in which Parmk doesn’t see something of himself. • If you’re looking for a sharp, fresh read—don’t miss Open Throat, by Henry Hoke—a novella that will leave you seeing the LA hills, and mountain lions, in a new way; and Sidik Fonfana’s terrific collection, Stories from the Tenants Downstairs. • Another story collection not to be missed, Andrew Porter’s The Disappeared, which looks at youth with thoughtful nostalgia, and in settings that are meticulously realized. Keith Pilapil Leismester’s novella, Mississippi River Museum mines place with elegiac tone and beautifully calibrated detail. For the sheer beauty and power of language and image, there’s none better than Hala Alyan’s poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year and Zaina Hashem Beck’s O. • My lighter reads this year included Alan Bennett’s classic novella, The Uncommon Reader, a fantasy of Queen Elizabeth and a bookmobile, and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, a fairy tale of LA seventies rock and roll. • Among the outstanding audiobooks I listened to this year was Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, read incandescently by Meryl Streep, and Elizabeth McCracken narrates her novel/memoir, The Hero of This Book—I can’t imagine the book without her wonderfully wry tone. Ditto for Harry Windsor’s Spare, whose narration was both elevated in tone (given his British elocution), yet beautifully down to earth. • In books on writing craft, Edith DeSalvo’s The Art of Slow Writing was a revelation—not everyone it seems writes a book in a year; and Colm Toibin’s essay collection, A Guest at the Feast, makes one feel precisely that way. I grew up in Los Angeles—east of the 101—and loved Matthew Specktor’s essays on LA, Always Crashing in the Same Car, on his youth there, and the writers, filmmakers, and highly particular mix of weather, geography, and culture. • John MaGahern’s memoir, All Will Be Well, like the Irish writer’s fiction, is filled with moving detail of character and place; as was Genanne Walsh’s chapbook memoir, Eggs in Purgatory, which looks at caring for an ill parent in prose that illuminates the empathy and complexity of the father-daughter bond; and Stanley Tucci’s memoir, Taste, on a life of food and cooking is not only entertaining and instructional, but ultimately arrives at a much deeper place. I’d love to know what your standout reads were for 2023!
