I find it disappointing that most year-end book lists focus on what was published rather than simply read in a given year. Considering we have access to some 4,500 years of literature, it's hard to believe the best books people read were all published in this one.
In that spirit, I give you my top ten reads of 2023. Some of these books I've documented in my weekly #whatireadovershabbat posts, some I haven't. Every one of them stuck with me, changed my outlook, bowled me over, or made me want to read them all over again.
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924), trans. John E. Woods
The scale of Mann's novel is matched only by its intimacy. I read The Magic Mountain over many weeks, unable to put it down as its tale of hypochondriac, star-crossed sanatorium patients unfolded. The war of wits, intellects, and personalities which it presents never bogs down, even as characters argue and debate for pages on end. Nor does anyone ever "win" an argument (at least not obviously). Mann is ironic and equivocal, giving credence to many perspectives.
I read three other books by Mann this year, namely Buddenbrooks, Doctor Faustus, and The Story of a Novel. Each charmed and (mostly) riveted me. But The Magic Mountain was the first I read and its impression has been the most enduring. I have high hopes now for Joseph and His Brothers.
E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908)
I hadn't read a Forster novel since Howards End back in high school. Though I don't remember much of the plot, I do remember loving the book. I would tell people that to read Howards End was to get a sense of "the spirit of England."
A Room with a View was a similarly buoyant experience. The comedy and pathos of this tale of English tourists is unmatched. More than a satire of "going abroad," it's a paean to nature and the romantic spirit. The final lines, drawing together the deep time of the earth and the human scale of love, are simply wonderful—and wholly earned. But satire it is as well, and deadly funny. A "light" novel that stands the test of time.
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866), trans. Michael Katz
Who knew you could be so gripped by a 160-year-old psychological thriller? Well, setting aside the age-stamp, obviously the countless readers who have turned this bizarre, lumpy novel into a world classic.
Really Crime and Punishment has everything: indelible characters, mysterious motivations, gripping philosophical debate, and quite a few twists. Even the, I gather, much-criticized ending kept my attention. For those unfamiliar or who've forgotten, this ending includes some apocalyptic visions, which sounded strikingly to me like a description of the Covid pandemic and our increasingly topsy-turvy world.
Until this year, I had only read Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky. Inspired by Crime and Punishment, I also got around to The Brothers Karamazov (in Michael Katz's new translation). While I enjoyed the former more, I suspect in the long run the latter will lodge itself more securely in my memory. The Brothers K contains unparalleled debates over faith, guilt, and iniquity, but it's kind of a slog. That's a sin you could never hold against Crime and Punishment.
Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch (2009)
For unpretentious bizarreness, it's hard to beat Australian writer Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch. I say "unpretentious" to distinguish his feat from those who aim to shock just to shock, or indulge in surrealist antics. The strangeness of Barley Patch is of a completely different order.
Barley Patch is a novel about a novelist (who seems a lot like Murnane) who has given up writing fiction. It is composed mostly of reminiscences of readings past, a stream of memories of books, and the images they've evoked for him, which his attempt to explain his renunciation elicits for him. In the course of this extended self-accounting, Murnane gives readers a look into the infinite worlds that lie, in his wonderful phrase, on "the far side of fiction"—the reams upon reams of characters and situations, landscapes and encounters which will never be brought into print, but which somehow really exist within the infinity of fictional worlds.
This is metafiction with a vengeance, and an ode to the reader's endlessly peopled solitude.
Homer's Iliad (c. 800–680 BCE), trans. E. V. Rieu
I struggled for years to read the Iliad. I would pick up a new translation (there’s always a new translation) and get a few pages deep before losing interest and forgetting about it. The only difference I can discern this time is that for once I picked up a prose translation.
E. V. Rieu was the originator of the Penguin Classics series, which began with his erudite yet accessible prose version of the Odyssey. The translation sold a million copies and launched one of the most popular and recognized publishing series. His Iliad appeared a few years later in the same series.
Rieu’s Iliad flows smoothly, rendering battlefield carnage, divine scheming, and emotional devastation with equal aplomb. A great deal has been made about the horrific transformation of battle ushered in by modern warfare, but Homer’s poem makes plain that war was always a horror of horrors. And yet the poem holds itself majestically aloof, too, panning from gods to warriors to innocents as if all existed on the same narrative and emotional plane. A mighty story, as powerful as they say.
Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Richard Philcox
There is nothing quite like Fanon's psychology, his complex and irreverent phenomenology of racism and its pathologies. Black Skin, White Masks is at once deadly serious and deadly funny. Here the Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher diagnoses the ills whose remedy he will later prescribe in liberatory violence. The latter has, of course, been distorted and exaggerated by lazy readers both pro and con.
All you need to see that Fanon didn't prescribe Kalashnikovs in place of therapy and Prozac is to have read this book. Kalashnikovs, no matter at whom they are pointed and fired, can't alter a language that deforms the soul; for that, one must adopt a weapon whose barrel points both within and without. Black Skin, White Masks outlines the internal target that such a weapon must aim at, even if the causes for deformation lie outside you as well.
Richard Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger) (1945; exp. 1991)
Fanon may be unsparing in his psychological acuity, but Richard Wright is unsparing, full stop. Black Boy is an unflinching look at himself, his family, our society, and the world. The book is in some sense an apologia pro vita sua, and also a no-holds-barred indictment of American racism. But if by "justification of one's beliefs and conduct" you imagine a detached, congratulatory appraisal of what you've gotten up to in your life, this isn't what Wright offers at all.
If he eventually gets around to the larger structural forces that placed him and his family in the impoverished situation in which he was raised, Wright doesn't, on the way, leave anyone uncriticized. He depicts harrowing child abuse, as well as his own patterns of cruelty, indifference, and vanity. And if he finally absolves his absentee father for the awful legacy he left behind, he does so because he deems him too ignorant to have done better—and because otherwise Wright can't put him behind him.
Indeed, the fierce individualism that will later lead Wright to reject Communism, and which make him today an icon of Black conservatism, is already evident. The point repeatedly emphasized in this autobiography is that everyone must be held accountable, even for actions committed under the duress of profound inequality. Ethics, one realizes, is of the utmost importance to Wright. Black Boy is an ethical testament to the power of the will in will-destroying times.
William Golding's Pincher Martin (1956)
This one is really a stand-in for all four books I read by William Golding this year: Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), and Free Fall (1959). The moment I put down Lord of the Flies, I knew I had to keep on reading. There was some mystery in this book that I couldn't shake. A mystery not of human evil, but the manner of that evil, its ways and means, its depths and sources. And so, rather than reread Lord of the Flies, I wanted to see how else Golding had expressed his intuition of depravity, and the forces in us that contend with depravity.
Each subsequent book added something to my grasp of the mystery. The Inheritors pointed to the species-origin of our cruelty, Free Fall to the confluence of art and sin, greatness and baseness. But Pincher Martin, which dives deep, deep into our ratiocination, our rationalization of iniquity, the attempt mentally to escape what lies inside—Pincher Martin had me gasping for air.
I plan to resume my sequential journey through Golding's oeuvre. I'm compelled to discover where his pilgrimage through our inner darkness leads.
Roberto Calasso's The Celestial Hunter (2016), trans. Richard Dixon
It was a great loss when Calasso died in 2021. I've been reading him since 2014, when Ardor (2010) and The Ruin of Kasch (1983) overturned my whole way of understanding history, society, the sacred, and modernity. Not only was Calasso a consummate scholar and a magisterial writer, he was a thinker of and past our age—or maybe a holdover from a past one. But he would probably best like to be known as a storyteller. And what a storyteller he was.
The Celestial Hunter tells the story of hunting from the Paleolithic to the Information Age. Briefly told, Calasso suggests that the shift that our ancestors underwent hundreds of thousands of years ago—from being mostly fruit-eating omnivores, hunted by larger animals, to hunters who ate those very same animals—that this shift continues to reverberate down to the present. The experience of capture, killing, and sacrifice erupt today in art, in code, in urbanity, to name a few.
But while I'm drawn to Calasso's ideas, the meat of book, if you will, are the myths he retells. From the Greek gods to Russian shamans, cave paintings to modern philosophy, Calasso re-narrates their principal stories to stunning effect. Indeed, he revels in stories that end abruptly, leaving their secret untold, and in stories that get repeated, their doubling a refusal of narrative closure. It seems that for Calasso, no real story ever truly ends. Which is how I know his own work, recursive and unending, aspires to the condition of myth. And perhaps succeeds.
Darryl Pinckney's Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan (2022)
Darryl Pinckney's memoir of his relationship with writer Elizabeth Hardwick aspires to the condition of gossip, and it certainly succeeds. To be sure, gossip, in my vocabulary at least, is a term of rare distinction—its most wonderful realization, In Search of Lost Time. Gossip is the lush production of social life through a medium of distortion, but a distortion that is very much one's experience of reality itself.
However you look at it, Come Back in September is a delightfully literary memoir, full of stories of great and neglected writers, scenesters and humble craftsmen, and overflowing with recommendations for reading (just as Hardwick was). You can't believe how lucky you are to be hearing all these intimate and quotidian stories. A whole world is evoked. Though one would do Pinckney an injustice to forget that it is a world he has evoked, arranged, however subtly, as he sees fit. Perhaps a final word to a mentor, at last as a peer.
Runners-up
I would be remiss if I didn't name some honorable mentions. Other books which might have ranked on this list if I wrote it on another day include: Gillian Rose's philosophical memoir Love's Work (1995), my fourth time reading it; Eric Sundquist's indispensable literary history of Black-Jewish relations, Strangers in the Land (2005); Susie Linfield's The Lions' Den (2019), the most trenchant study of the Left's Israel-obsession I know; Tom Dent's unjustly neglected travelogue, Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement (1997); the new Michael Katz translation of The Brothers Karamazov (1880), obviously; and Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers (1930–32), a book even weirder than Barley Patch, but far more self-indulgently so.
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