Authors share their favorite reads of 2023 and most anticipated books of 2024 (Part 4 of 4)
What books do Jennifer Haigh, Joanna Rakoff, Rachel Beanland, Dawn Tripp, Zibby Owens, and eight other writers recommend?
When I decided to reach out to a couple dozen writers to see if they’d like to contribute a list of their favorite books from last year, along with the books they were looking forward to reading this year, I figured I’d get 10-12 responses, enough for one post. I should have known better; after all, writers are passionate readers. And just about everyone loves to make lists of their favorites and share them. So, having heard from 50 authors, I’ve had to make this a four-part series. I know you will find common ground with some writers and discover new books to add to your TBR list.
Part 4 features Jennifer Haigh, Joanna Rakoff, Zibby Owens, Rachel Beanland, Dawn Tripp, Elizabeth Benedict, Michelle Brafman, Christine Coulson, Anne Korkeakivi, Tara Lynn Masih, Terese Svoboda, Hannah Sward, and Ona Gritz.
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Rachel Beanland is the author of The House is on Fire (2023) and Florence Adler Swims Forever (2020).
2023 Favorites:
People Love Dead Jews: Essays by Dara Horn
Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
Chesapeake Requiem by Earl Swift
The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel
Looking forward to reading in 2024:
The Book of Love by Kelly Link
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
Liars by Sarah Mancuso
Elizabeth Benedict is the author of the recent memoir Rewriting Illness: A View of My Own (Mandel Vilar, 2023), the National Book Award finalist Slow Dancing, the bestseller Almost, and The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers. She writes about sexual politics and culture for Salmagundi and helps students apply to college through Don’t Sweat the Essay, Inc.
Best books I read in 2023 by women:
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2023): The third in Sigrid Nunez’s dazzling trilogy, beginning with The Friend, this one is set early in the pandemic, when the narrator and so many others were “the vulnerables.” The intense, immense pleasures of this novel involve being inside the head of its brilliant, funny, and vulnerable narrator as she navigates this new landscape.
The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon, 2021): This diabolically clever novel is the story of a down-on-his-luck creative writer professor who steals a plot from a former student and ends up in a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. A mystery-thriller about storytelling, story-stealing, and identity theft. I couldn’t put it down.
The Years by Annie Ernaux (Seven Stories Press, 2017): Annie Ernaux’s kaleidoscopic journey through the years 1941 to 2006 is told from collective points of view, in details that are intimate, local, and global. The writing is dense, dazzling, sometimes difficult; it forced me to consider the array of details that define an individual life, the life of a community and a generation–how much we remember and how much we forget.
Ms. Demeanor by Elinor Lipman (Harper Perennial, 2022): No one but Elinor Lipman could write a rom-com love story with pandemic undertones that’s as wise, witty and sophisticated as Ms. Demeanor. It begins with a pair of officemates having sex on a NYC rooftop. Because of a crazy neighbor who watches, the woman is arrested and ends up in house confinement for six months. Much gourmet cooking and intra-apartment-building romance ensue.
Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen (Picador, 2022): A brilliant collage of a novel inspired by the real-life mother of 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler. In 1615, his illiterate mother was charged with witchcraft, and 500 years later, Rivka Galchen weaves a coruscating, tenderhearted novel from the tragedy.
Looking most forward to in 2024:
Leaving by Roxanna Robinson (Norton, February 13): She had me at “college lovers reunite after a lifetime apart.” Whether she’s writing about Joan Didion’s sentences and sunglasses, Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings, or a disoriented Iraq war veteran, Roxana Robinson is a writer of wide-ranging intellect, precision prose, and abundant compassion. I’d follow her anywhere.
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (Norton, May 14): I’ve been waiting to read this novel since I heard Claire Messud read from it last summer. The title suggests some of its concerns: a peripatetic family caught up in events larger than their intimate struggles. Knowing that some of the stories are inspired by the author’s history makes it even more compelling.
Like Love: Essays and Conversations by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf, April 2): Ever since I read her meditation Bluets, I’ve been an acolyte. Like Love, says the publisher, is a collection of “profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols.” Count me in.
Good Material by Dolly Alderton (Knopf, January 30): Fourteen days from today, I’ll be curled up with this London writer’s latest, about a bad breakup, told from the anguished man’s point of view. Having read her memoir, Everything I Know About Love, I know there’s no one better writing about growing up, relationships, romance, all of what obsesses us when we take a break from the world’s troubles.
Days of Wonder by Caroline Leavitt (Algonquin, April 23): Mothers, daughters, forced separations, the search for justice, the need to reinvent ourselves, and plot twists that turn lives upside down animate Caroline’s latest page-turner. How does she do it in book after book? I’ll be turning off my phone when it arrives.
Michelle Brafman is the author of Washing the Dead (Prospect Park Books, 2015), Bertrand Court (Prospect Park Books, 2016), and most recently, Swimming with Ghosts (Keylight Books, 2023).
I read a ton of terrific books in 2023, so this was a really hard list to make. I selected five (but there were more) that I loved and also provided me with some much needed clarity and emotional and spiritual sustenance.
The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World by Rabbi Sharon Brous: I’m cheating a bit because I read this in 2024. I tabbed every other page of this beauty which I highly recommend to anyone trying to create a little light during these dark times.
Hestia Strikes a Match by Christine Grillo: Another book about finding connection in a world that’s been turned upside down and sideways. Plus, it’s smart and funny as hell.
Absolution by Alice McDermott: I can’t say it better than Kirkus — “an exquisitely conceived and executed novel that explores her signature topic, moral obligation, against the backdrop of the fraught time preceding the Vietnam War.”
World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music by Jeff Tweedy: I loved reading Jeff Tweedy’s gorgeously crafted, soulful, and generous series of love letters to the songs that shaped him as a musician and human being.
First Comes Love by Marion Winik: Marion Winik can break my heart and make me howl with laughter inside of a single page. Last year, I gobbled up her entire canon, and each and every book challenged my notions of love and grace.
American Ending by Mary Kay Zuravleff: Cheating again. I actually read this moving novel in 2022, but it falls under the category of books that have provided me with sustenance. And what a reminder of the healing and redemptive powers of telling family stories!
Books I’m looking forward to reading in 2024:
Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison
Short War by Lily Meyer
The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson
Such a Lovely Family by Aggie Blum Thompson
Christine Coulson is the author of Metropolitan Stories: A Novel (Other Press, 2019) and One Woman Show (Avid Reader Press, Oct. 2023). (photo credit: Taylor Jewell)
Favorite Books of 2023:
Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman (2023): Inspired by old photographs of women literally holding things—baskets, melons, babies—Kalman extends the act of holding to include our stories, our losses, our devotion, and just holding on in an overwhelming world.
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan (2022): Scanlan drops us into the culture of stable hands and horse racing, but the subject is almost irrelevant in her hands; you are carried by the sheer force and economy of the writing as it gallops, thunders, and ultimately lays bare a world we never thought we cared about.
Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter (2023): In this modern fable, Leichter simply erases the line between what we know and what we can only imagine, with space itself serving as the main character.
Sisters by Lily Tuck (2017): A tight, sharp family portrait rendered with propulsive, blunt lines. The sisters are not sisters, but the current and former wife of the same man.
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton (2016):As audacious as its subject, Dutton’s writing is quick and daring, so fleet in its prose that you are actually seduced by the text—and the extraordinary 17th-century Englishwoman who inspired it.
Looking forward to these in 2024:
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
The Girls by John Bowen
Bring No Clothes by Charlie Porter
Ona Gritz is the author of the middle grade novel August or Forever (2023), Present Imperfect: Essays (2021), the memoir On the Whole: A Story of Mothering and Disability (2014), the poetry collection Geode (2014), and the picture book Tangerines and Tea, My Grandparents and Me (2005). Ona’s new memoir, Everywhere I Look, will be published on April 16 by Apprentice House Press of Loyola University. Her first young adult novel, The Space You Left Behind, written in verse, is forthcoming from West 44 Books in June 2024.
Favorite Books of 2023:
I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai
We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman
Love in the Archives by Eileen Vorbach Collins
Starter Dog by Rona Maynard
Drawing Breath by Gayle Brandeis
Looking forward to reading in 2024:
First Love by Lilly Dancyger
Days of Wonder by Caroline Leavitt
I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Kiyo Ito
House Parties by Lynn Levin
A Friend Sails in on a Poem by Molly Peacock
Jennifer Haigh is the author of several books, including Baker Towers (2005), Faith (2011), News from Heaven: The Bakerton Stories (2013), Heat & Light (2016), and most recently, Mercy Street (2022). (photo credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
Favorite books read in 2023 (some of these are a couple of years old): Absolution by Alice McDermott, Severance by Ling Ma, The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen, Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, and Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee.
Most anticipated: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, The Great Divide by Cristina Henriquez, Leaving by Roxana Robinson, and Feeding Ghosts, a graphic novel by Tessa Hulls — an incredible visual artist who happens to have a killer story to tell.
Anne Korkeakivi is the author of An Unexpected Guest (Little, Brown, 2012) and Shining Sea (Little, Brown, 2016).
I read too many excellent books of different sorts in 2023 to want to pick only five favorites. But Pearl by Siân Hughes, Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, The History of Man by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, and The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li were all novels that surprised me for one reason or another and which I couldn’t stop thinking (or talking) about afterwards.
In 2024, I’m looking forward to re-reading Chelsea T. Hicks’ wonderful debut short story collection, A Calm and Normal Heart, which I listened to as an audiobook first in 2023.
Also high on my list are:
Aednan: An Epic by Linnea Axelsson (translated from the original Swedish by Saskia Vogel)
Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe
Omega Farm by Martha McPhee
The Slip: The New York City Street that Changed American Art Forever by Prudence Peiffer
And yes, I know that’s five plus five plus one, but can there ever be too many books?
Tara Lynn Masih is the author of the YA Holocaust novel My Real Name Is Hanna (2018, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award); two story collections, Where the Dog Star Never Glows (Press 53, 2010) and How We Disappear (Press 53, 2022); and the editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (2009).
My taste is eclectic. I loved many more than five books in 2023, but the following left the deepest impression:
Traces by Patricia L. Hudson
Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny
Flatlands by Sue Hubbard
Trip Through Your Wires by Sarah Layden
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
And I look forward to the following in 2024:
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton
The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
The Wildest Sun Asha Lemmie
Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel Shahnaz Habib
Zibby Owens is the creator and host of the daily podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books. She is also the founder and CEO of Zibby Media, which includes publishing house Zibby Books, online magazine Zibby Mag, Zibby’s Book Club, retreats, classes, and events. She owns Zibby’s Bookshop, an independent bookstore in Santa Monica, California. Zibby is the author of Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature and the children’s book Princess Charming, as well as editor of two anthologies, Moms Don’t Have Time to Have Kids: A Timeless Anthology and Moms Don’t Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology. Her new novel, Blank, will be published on March 1.
Five favorites from 2023:
My What If Year by Alisha Fernandez Miranda: A memoir about a CEO and mom who took a year “off” to try four internships.
The Last Love Note by Emma Grey: A rom-com with a heart about a mom and widow who discovers love again.
The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays by Kelly McMasters: A young mom and bookseller endures a tumultuous relationship in a remote location with her artist husband until she can’t take it anymore.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith: Poet Maggie Smith writes about her divorce, motherhood, and reclaiming her sense of self.
Everything All at Once by Steph Catudal: Steph cares for her elite athlete husband who hovers on the brink of death in this uplifting ode to love and marriage.
Most anticipated this year:
Grief is For People by Sloane Crosley: A literary, gut-wrenching look at what it’s like to get robbed both of possessions and of a dear friend from NYT bestseller Sloane Crosley.
Here After by Amy Lin: A poetic talisman about Amy’s loss of her husband at a young age in the style of Maggie Smith’s This Place Could Be Beautiful.
After Annie by Anna Quindlen: A mother’s loss rocks a family as told through the eyes of her children, husband, and best friend by a legend in literature.
Did I Tell You? by Genevieve Kingston: Mental illness rocks her world and impairs the relationship between her mother and her in Genevieve’s story.
First Love by Lily Dancyger: Reflections on the power of young friendships and the feelings of loss that can come from drifting away or more in this debut collection of essays.
Joanna Rakoff is the author of the memoir My Salinger Year (2014) and the novel A Fortunate Age (2009). (photo credit: Mark Ostow)
A few favorite 2023 books:
The Leaving Season, Kelly McMasters: One of my favorite memoirs of all time; the story of a marriage and divorce, which is also an investigation of leaving and loss; unbearably wise and elegant.
My Last Innocent Year, Daisy Florin: Among the great novels of the past decade; a coming-of-age tale set at a posh New England college, Florin’s Whartonian debut dissects class in a rare and glorious way.
We All Want Impossible Things, Catherine Newman: I think about this novel pretty much every day. Two middle-aged friends; one dying of cancer in hospice, the other tending to her and thinking through her own life. Hilarious, heartbreaking, beautiful, a book that changes you forever.
Small World, Laura Zigman: No one balances humor and pathos like Laura Zigman and this novel is, truly, her best yet. Two middle-aged sisters of very different temperaments move in together following their divorces, in Cambridge (my city!), forcing them to sift through their tumultuous childhood, centered on the care of their terminally ill younger sister. And yet: Hilarious!
A few 2024 books, due out in the coming months, that I’ve read and loved:
The Tree Doctor, Marie Mutsuki Mockett: Unputdownable, unforgettable tale of a woman stranded in her childhood home–thousands of miles from her husband and kids–during lockdown.
I’ll Just Be Five More Minutes, Emily Farris: Brilliant, hilarious essays reminiscent of Samantha Irby and David Sedaris.
The Sicilian Inheritance, Jo Piazza: Cancel all your plans before starting this magnificent thriller, in which a defeated Philadelphia celebrity butcher (yes, you read that right) journeys to Sicily to unravel a family mystery.
Docile, Hyeseung Song: Truly remarkable memoir of growing up Korean and poor in Texas and failing to conform to ideas–both her parents’ and the world’s–of what an Asian girl should be. Indelible, intelligent, moving.
And a few 2024 books I’m excited to read:
A Well-Trained Wife, Tia Levings: A memoir chronicling Levings’ life in a fundamentalist Christian sect. From the host of the fantastic Working Writer podcast.
The Cliffs, J. Courtney Sullivan: I’ve loved every one of J. Courtney Sullivan’s novels and can’t wait for this new one!
Last House, Jessica Shattuck: Perfect Life, Jessica Shattuck’s wonderful comedy of manners, pops into my head nearly every day, and I’m super-excited for her new one!
Terese Svoboda is the author of the novels Pirate Talk or Mermalade (2010), Bohemian Girl (2011), Dog on Fire (2023), and Roxy and Coco (out Feb. 1 from West Virginia University Press); the short story collections Trailer Girl and Other Stories (2001), Great American Desert (2019), and The Long Swim (out March 1 from University of Massachusetts Press); Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan (2008), which won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize; a biography of radical poet Lola Ridge (2016); and several volumes of poetry.
2023 Favorites:
Bursting with characters frightening and funny, raging and sometimes ugly, Innards is a debut tour-de-force by Caine Prize-winner Magogodi oaMphela Makhene who, in 14 stories, takes apart apartheid Soweto in its own voice.
Another debut, Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakely Cartwright, is about a lesbian who seduces her daughter’s best friend. Boundaries are broken but so elegantly.
Gina Apostol’s La Tercera is both extremely smart and very ambitious, tackling the last 300 years of Philippine history, its traitors and heroes, reactionaries and revolutionaries, through the lens of a Filipina novelist living in NYC, not to mention the subjects of anti-imperialism, Borges, French theory, and postmodern fiction.
What do Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali have in common? Fat Time by Jeffrrey Renard Allen, stories that will take your hat off, a collection of speculative history and compassionate depictions of Black urban life.
I love Marie Ndiaye’s work. Vengeance is Mine (translated by Jordan Stump) is no police procedural, but murders have been committed. Its jagged, twisted narrative mimics the lawyer’s internal unraveling in brilliant, haunted language.
Looking forward to reading in 2024:
Life Span, Molly Giles’ memoir – not short stories, her usual endeavor – expertly weaves her life and loves in and out of the Golden Gate Bridge. Funny, sharp, and so honest, it’s a terrific sorting of romance and family.
Helen Benedict’s The Good Deed. Acutely sensitive to immigrant peril, for years Benedict has alternated between fiction and nonfiction in her efforts to relay their tortured paths out of violence. In this novel, five women’s lives are skillfully braided together to depict the plight of refugees on the island of Samos.
Lynn Schmeidler’s debut fiction, Half Lives, is an endlessly inventive collection of 16 stories that are equally amazing in form and content. Rules are broken over and over, and sometimes even physics does not apply, especially in “The Time Museum.”
Charles Jensen’s The Splice of Life: A Memoir in 13 Film Genres cleverly immerses us in the life of a queer writer, film aficionado, and Jeopardy! contestant extraordinaire via the analysis of a movie per chapter.
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling was a Christmas present this year, so it counts as 2024 instead of 2023. Earling has only published one previous novel, Perma Red, but that was a dazzler. Bitterroot Salish, she gives language to the brutalities that the interpreter and guide must have endured.
Everybody can usually figure out sex, but nobody hands you a book about how to stay married like Love, Crash, Rebuild: Alternatives to Distance, Destruction and Divorce by Dr. Mark Borg, Jr. with his wife, Haruna Miyamoto, another therapist. Borg also wrote Don’t Be a Dick! He’s not fooling around.
Hannah Sward is the author of Strip: A Memoir (Tortoise Books, 2022). (photo credit: Jad Nickola Najjar)
2023 favorites:
Come Home Canyon by Jill Schary Robinson: A phenomenal author and my beloved mentor who published this book last year at the age of 86.
Tales of an Inland Empire Girl by Juanita E. Mantz: Written from a child’s perspective with such depth and innocence; a beautiful writer and the most generous, supportive author
Light Skin Gone to Waste by Toni Ann Johnson and Once Removed by Colette Sartor: Both winners of The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction
Have Mercy on Us by Lisa Cupolo: Every story is a gem! She is an exquisite author and so incredibly generous and supportive of other writers.
And I can’t leave out Please Be Advised by Christine Sneed: A dynamite collection of stories in memos that I found so refreshing!
As for 2024, I’m still catching up on stacks of books from last year and the year before, but at least two are Days of Wonder by Caroline Leavitt and I Quit Everything by Freda Love Smith. And with AWP coming up next month in Kansas City, this stack of must-read books and the ones to catch up on will no doubt grow into two more stacks! God help me.
Dawn Tripp is the author of Moon Tide (2003), The Season of Open Water (2005), Game of Secrets (2011), and Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe (2016), all published by Random House. Her new novel, Jackie, will be published on June 18.
I have just started a new novel, and when I am working into a new creative project, I often re-read books that have shaped my life and mind as a fiction writer – including Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and others. I also read experimental fiction, novellas, poetry, or creative non-fiction that defies easy categorization. For the last few months that’s the space I have been in.
I read several longer works published this year that are altering the way I approach the page: Rachel Cantor’s brilliant, wildly inventive Half Life of a Stolen Sister and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. Over the years, I’ve read many incarnations of Homer’s epic poem of rage, revenge, and war. Wilson’s Iliad was, for me, transcendent.
Recently, I’ve been reading shorter works, both fiction and nonfiction.
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy by Anne Carson is an uncanny distillation of fiction, myth, drama, that challenges our understandings of desire, identity, and time.
Aurelia Aurélia by Kathryn Davis: Davis is, for me, one of the most exhilarating contemporary writers for how she is always exploring liminal spaces of creativity and mind, and this singular memoir of grief is no exception.
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli: I love how this slim book reminds us that all the forms of time we construct our lives around are an illusion.
I recently read W.S. Merwin’s The Shadow of Sirius cover-to-cover: When I am feeling out of sync with my own creative process, I use poetry or music to find my way back in. “Youth,” “Rain Light,” and “To Paula in Late Spring” are three poems from this collection I adore.
Foster by Claire Keegan: I read it in one sitting in November; the next day, I started on page 1 and read it through again, just to get to those gorgeous heartbreaking moments at the end.
Some writers can do this. I am in awe every time I encounter it. As a reader, you know what’s coming and it still strikes through you — with all the leveling beauty a deeply felt moment in life can bring.
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