The Best Books We've Read in 2023
Just like last year, we asked our contributors, book clubbers, and readers to share the best books they read this year.
We have 14 lists for you, consisting of many books and even some more than one reader loved. These are our favorite books we read this year, but I’d love to hear about yours in the comments! And if you’re looking for more best of lists, you can find our list of 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 right here.
Esmée
Host of Bored to Death book club
Our Share of Night - Mariana Enriquez
This honestly was my year of chonky books and I carried Our Share of Night with me for over a month. It’s the book I read on my birthday, the book I brought on a trip to France and a book I didn’t want to end. I was so impressed with Enriquez’s writing and ability to weave together history and horror and social commentary without it ever feeling blunt. The horror was aspirational and I especially loved how she managed to leave so much to my own imagination. I need more of her work and I need to reread this one.
The Past is Red - Catherynne M. Valente
A non-chonky one, but I’m a big fan of Catherynne M. Valente’s writing, and this tiny book packs a punch! There is such confidence in her sentences, such love for her characters and it definitely made me cry. There is something so painfully and wonderfully human about everything Valente writes that makes me feel so damn much.
Plankton - J.J. Voskuil
I read both the second and third installment of Het Bureau and they are all equally good. I picked no. 3 for no particular reason, but I just love reading about Dutch history, the history of the field I work in and about Maarten Koning trying to find his way through the world. I still can’t tell why these books speak to me as much as they do, but I will fully continue the series in 2024.
The Fragile Threads of Power - V.E. Schwab
I already said this on Instagram, but reading The Fragile Threads of Power felt like coming home. The Darker Shade of Magic series were my first foray into V.E. Schwab’s writing and they always held a special place in my heart. I loved how the old characters returned, but kind of liked the new characters more, and can’t wait to see where else she’ll take us in the next two books.
When I’m Gone, Look for me in the East - Quan Barry
Quan Barry is slowly becoming one of my new favorite authors. Her previous book was about teenage witches and now this one was about Buddhist monks. Such a wild range of subjects and writing style and yet, there is something quintessential Quan Barry about them. A hint of magic, lots of human conflict and an awe for the world that is inspiring.
I will try to do a best 10 books of 2023 on my instagram, because there are so many more books I’d love to share!
Mieke
Find Mieke on Instagram
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
Check&Mate - Ali Hazelwood
Yellowface - R.F. Kuang
The Poppy War - R.F. Kuang
Fourth Wing - Rebecca Yarros
Sam
Book clubber, find Sam on instagram
My top 5 for 2023 is (in random order)
Out of Love - Hazel Hayes
A love story, written from the end to the beginning. I felt this one so deeply and I think Hayes explored the relationship beautifully.
Kindred - Octavia E. Butler
A woman falls through time back to the 1800s, and finds herself trapped on a plantation. Thrilling and exciting read, with the sci-fi elements woven in brilliantly.
Tender Is The Flesh - Agustina Bazterrica
An absolute bonkers society in which animals are made extinct because of a virus harmful to people, and people have started breeding and slaughtering other people. Needless to say that this is a must read.
American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Patrick Bateman is the most psycho character I’ve ever encountered and Bret Easton Ellis’ writing made me love it. Classic.
Mouth - Puloma Ghosh
A debut author who has penned a short story collection with sci-fi, fantasy and magical realism, steeped in Indian lore and religion. I absolutely loved it and if you’re into any weird book we read for book club, make sure to get your hands on this when it comes out in June 2024!
Sara
Find Sara on Instagram
Legends & Lattes - Travis Baldree
This time it’s Real - Ann Liang
Chain of Gold - Cassandra Clare
If you Could See the Sun - Ann Liang
Love on the Brain - Ali Hazelwood
Lily
book clubber, find Lily on instagram
It’s never easy to chose just five, so I decided to choose those ones that really stuck with me and are not from the bookclub. A bit on a grim side I’m afraid but remarkably good books nevertheless.
Happening - Annie Ernaux
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child.
This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.
In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.
Hope Against Hope - Nadezda Mandelshtam
A harrowing yet uplifting account of Stalin's persecution of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1930s, and of one man - Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), whose poetry, in spite of the unfolding tragedy of his life, preserved its unique creative gaiety. Nadezhda's memoir covers their last four years together. She begins in Moscow in May 1934 with the knock on the door at one o'clock in the morning, and her husband's arrest by the secret police for composing a satire of Stalin. For all its grim subject matter, it is a story of courage in adversity, and even humour finds a place.
Kiss of the Spider Woman - Manuel Puig
Kiss of the Spider Woman is a graceful, intensely compelling novel about love and victimization. In an Argentine prison, two men share a cell: Molina, a gay window dresser who is self-centered, self-denigrating, yet charming as well; and Valentin, an articulate, fiercely dogmatic revolutionary haunted by memories of a woman he left for the cause. Both are gradually transformed by their guarded but growing friendship and by Molina’s obsession with the fantasy and romance of the movies.
The Orphanage - Sergiy Zhadan
From the Ukrainian literary star Serhiy Zhadan comes a devastating story of the struggles of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives, now in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances along the way, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a deeply personal account of violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.
The Hunger Angel - Herta Muller
It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.
In her novel, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp day and night, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life.
Steve
Find Steve on instagram
We Are Light - Gerda Blees (World Editions, 2023)
Niki - Christos Chomenides (Other Press, 2023)
The Secret Hours - Mick Herron (Baskerville, 2023)
Good Will Come From The Sea - Christos Ikonomou (Archipelago, 2019)
The Pine Islands - Marion Poschmann (Serpent’s Tail, 2017)
Linet
book clubber. Find Linet on Goodreads
My top five of 2023:
Vagina Obscura - Rachel E. Gross
Matrescence - Lucy Jones
Know my Name - Chanel Miller
Vel - Mieke Versyp & Sabien Clement
Rifqa - Mohammed El-Kurd
Not in a particular order. If I had to pick my favourite non-fiction, it would be Matrescence (don't be mistaken, not only for mothers or women - I'm neither pregnant nor have a baby); my favourite poetry would be Rifqa; and my favourite graphic novel would be Vel.
Laura
find Laura on instagram
Sorrow and Bliss - Meg Mason
Yellowface - R.F. Kuang
Natural Beauty - Ling Ling Huang
Miniapolis - Rob van Essen
What Moves the Dead - T. Kingfisher
Roy
Book clubber, find Roy on Goodreads
Lijmen/Het Been - Willem Elsschot
A comedy about the moral degradation of capitalism. Frans Laarmans gets an offer to become very wealthy, all he has to do is rip people off by overselling subscriptions to a fancy sounding but absolutely worthless magazine. Apparently Elsschot worked in advertising all his life to pay the bills, but claimed to absolutely hate commerce. I didn’t learn that until after reading the book, but it makes a lot of sense. When Lijmen ended I thought there would nothing to add with a short story sequel, but Het been really did provide a final note that enriched the whole work. A masterpiece.
Het Bureau 3: Plankton - J.J. Voskuil
Time marches on in Het Bureau, and its effects are mostly bad. The inevitable aging of father figures and the responsibility of work begin to wear out protagonist Maarten Koning. What is there to say except: I get it.
The Vulnerables - Sigrid Nunez
Honestly a book about the pandemic didn’t appeal to me much, but another book from Nunez did. There’s just something magical about her writing. She writes a kind of book that shouldn’t work, but she pulls it off because it’s just such a joy to hang out with her.
Rusty Brown - Chris Ware
Another graphic novel that catalogues lives of quiet loneliness and desperation from the pen of Chris Ware. I first read Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth nearly twenty years ago and Ware’s style still speaks to me.
Confrontaties - Simone Atangana Bekono
I was working my way through a list of mostly unremarkable Y.A. books for school and liked Confrontaties when I read it, but wasn’t grabbed by it. It wasn’t until going back to it to make some notes on it that the book really got to me. All my classmates didn’t like it because the main character was so angry, unpleasant and unlikeable. That honestly made me like it even more!
Amandine
Book clubber, find Amandine on instagram
Nudes - Elle Nash
Life for Sale - Yukio Mishima
Things We Lost in the Fire - Mariana Enriquez
The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K Le Guin
The Years - Annie Ernaux
Jochem
Book clubber, find Jochem on Goodreads
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Waar ik jaren geleden bij de eerste poging in slaap viel na pagina twee en het boek enkele jaren later bij een tweede poging na vier pagina's in een onnavolgbare woordenbrij transformeerde, kwam het dit keer wel binnen, en hoe! Subliem geschreven roman van gedachten, gevoelens, herinneringen en beelden.
Myth of Normal - Gabor Maté
Een boek dat mijn wereldbeeld een beetje gekanteld heeft. Het heeft mij veel geleerd over hoe trauma onszelf en onze maatschappij in zijn grip houdt, maar bovenal heeft het me een dieper inzicht in mijzelf gegeven.
The Other Wind - Ursula le Guin
Prachtige afsluiting van de Earthsea reeks waarin alles samen komt. Deel 4 en 5 waren niet helemaal op niveau van de vroegere trilogie, maar deze stijgt daar zelfs bovenuit in zijn herevaluatie en omdraaiing van de conclusies van de eerdere boeken. Feministischer en menselijker.
Memoirs of a Revolutionist - Pyotr Kropotkin
Wat een lieve vent is het toch, en wat een onwaarschijnlijk leven vol avontuur heeft hij geleefd.
De Opwindvogelkronieken - Haruki Murakami
Meer dan een maand heb ik het gruwelijke en bizarre universum van dit enorme boek geleefd. Het was niet altijd even meeslepend, maar de hoogtepunten waren geweldig en de vibe gaat me nog lang bijblijven.
Suzanne
Find Suzanne on instagram
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed - Mariana Enriquez
Motherhood - Sheila Heti
Dagen van Glas - Eva Meijer
Still Life - Sarah Winman
Boy Parts - Eliza Clark
Francisca
Find Francisca on instagram
The Blighted Stars - Megan O'Keefe
Axiom's End - Lindsay Ellis
To be Taught, if Fortunate - Becky Chambers
A Prayer for the Crown - Shy
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
Carina
Find Carina on instagram
Babel - R.F. Kuang
Memorial - Bryan Washington
Gender Queer - Maia Kobabe
Thieves - Lucy Bryon
Our Wives Under The Sea - Julia Armfield
If you’ve made it this far, thanks so much for reading and a big thanks to everyone who shared their favorite books of 2023. If your favorite isn’t mentioned, be sure to leave it as a comment and I will check it out. Happy holidays and until the new year!
It’s always so cool to see everyone’s lists!