2023 Books
| Title | Author | Date Finished | Rating | Publisher | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Killing Gravity | Corey White | 12/29/23 | 4 | Macmillan | A fun, exciting space noir that doesn’t do anything to unusual but packs a great punch |
| The Mysteries | Bill Watterson and John Kascht | 12/26/23 | 3 | Simon & Schuster | |
| Manifest Destiny Vol. 1: Flora and Fauna | Chris Dingess, Matthew Roberts, et al. | 12/26/23 | 4 | Image Comics | Fun, weird counter-history of the opening of the American west. I’d like to see more Native folks. |
| Universal Harvester | John Darnielle | 12/22/23 | 4 | Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux | Read My Notes |
| The Book of Accidents | Chuck Wending | 12/18/23 | 4 | Del Rey | A sprawling but heartfelt and dark story about family and trauma and the worlds we make (and break) with our choices. Wendig’s books are energetic but not always to my taste, tone-wise. But this hit a good balance of heart, ideas, and style. |
| Prince Caspian | C.S. Lewis | 12/15/23 | 3 | HarperTrophy | |
| Everybody: A Book About Freedom | Olivia Laing | 12/5/23 | 5 | WW Norton & Company | Read My Notes |
| A Horse and His Boy | C.S. Lewis | 12/8/23 | 4 | HarperTrophy | I am always on board for a story with a grumpy talking animal. |
| Fragments of Horror | Junji Ito | 11/28/23 | 5 | Viz Media | |
| The Infinite Blacktop | Sara Gran | 11/10/23 | 4 | Atria books | A fitting end to a series about the ultimate unknowability of mysteries. Some things are resolved, some things remain ambiguous. Some things stay open, others close. A great series all around. |
| Boneland | Jeffrey Thomas | 11/06/23 | 3 | Forma Street Press | Read My Notes |
| The Motion Demon | Stefan Grabinski | 10/22/23 | 3 | NoHo Press | A strange collection by this polish weird fiction master, focused almost entirely on trains. Grabinski portrayed trains as harbingers of supernatural and psychological dislocation, and the best stories in this collection (for my money, “The Siding” and “The Motion Demon”) foreground the uneasy mood and psychic danger of the railroading world. |
| Her Body and Other Parties | Carmen Maria Machado | 10/12/23 | 5 | Gray Wolf Press | Read My Notes |
| Beneath | Kristi DeMeester | 10/3/23 | 2 | Word Horde | A brutal and visceral book whose thin and uneven characters don’t really pay off all the violence and torment they experience. There were some interesting and unusual feminist ideas that could’ve been developed about the monstrousness of predatory men, but the book ultimately settled for a generic survival horror plot. |
| The Books of Earthsea | Ursula K. Le Guin and Charles Vess | 9/18/23 | 5 | Simon & Schuster | Read My Notes |
| A Colony in a Nation | Chris Hayes | 08/16/23 | 4 | Recorded Books, Inc. | A rich and rhetorically righteous book about criminal justice and punishment in America, written as it was bursting at the seems with its own contradictions. I appreciated the rhetorical device of juxtaposing the American Revolutionary complaints about English law enforcement on American everyday life with current criticisms of punitive racilized overpolicing and punishment. I found the ending kind of unsatisfying, especially compared with more practical and prescriptive books like Alex Vitale’s “The End of Policing” and Mariame Kaba’s “We Do this ‘till we Free us”. |
| Mr. Monster | Dan Wells | 08/07/23 | 3 | Tantor Media (audiobook) | The second in the John Cleaver series, this is a violent, sadistic book about a teenage sociopath who hunts supernatural monsters, giving him an outlet for his tendencies. Well written, but I’m shocked that this is YA. |
| We Have always lived in the Castle | Shirley Jackson | 7/29/23 | 5 | Blackstone Audio, Inc. | I listened to this on Audiobook, narrated by Bernadette Dunne. It was amazing; strange and cryptic and absolutely engaging, full of family murder and menacing townspeople and sympathetic magic and the power of mundane things. |
| Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story | Nick Tosches | 7/3/23 | 4 | Penguin Books, 2009 | A gorgeously written and haunting book about a genuinely awful person who was gradually swallowed by darkness within and without. My favorite detail remains that, in a fit of religious fervor, Lewis refused to record a song he had written but now thought to be sinful and Sam Phillips spent hours arguing biblical theology with him before he relented. That song was “Great Balls of Fire” . |
| Skandar and the Unicorn Thief | A.F. Steadman | 7/11/23 | 2 | Simon & Schuster, 2022 | A post-Harry Potter kids fantasy pastiche with weak characters and a confusing mythology that is thirsting a bit too hard to be licensed as a middle-brow netflix series |
| The Second Shooter | Nick Mamatas | 6/21/23 | 4 | Simon & Schuster 2022 | Read My Notes |
| A Wrinkle in Time | Madeleine L’Engle | 5/23/23 | 4 | Yearling Books, 1973 | Read it with my 10 YO. Much weirder and darker than a book for children has any right to be, filled with bizarre aliens, vanishing parents, and a manichean struggle between light and darkness. |
| Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills | David Stradling | University of Washington Press, 2007 | Read My Notes | ||
| The EC Archives: Weird Science Vol. 1 | William M. Gaines and various artists | 5/15/23 | 4 | Dark Horse Books, 2022 | Another rich and shining collection of amazing comics. The stories are rich and shocking, and the art is brilliant, nervy and beautifully stylized. My modern comic sensibilities find the EC line to be over-wordy, but the final product is so wonderful that I can easily re-adjust expectations. It’s particularly fascinating to read how many of these stories focus on the end of the world. It brings to light just how pervasive the threat of nuclear annihilation structured everyone’s thinking in the 1950s. |
| Resonant Vol. 1 | David Andry, Alejandro Aragon | 2023/05/11 | 3 | Vault Comics, 2020 | A rich, messy apocalypse story about a world battered by violence that is mystical, social, and interpersonal. It’s set in a future where mysterious “waves” make people briefly and viciously violent, and the only way to control it is through intense mind-calming or literally tying yourself up. The world has descended into a chaos of cults, gangs, and small groups trying to survive in between them. Vibrant, jagged art and propulsive storytelling. |
| Ramona the Pest | Beverly Clearly | 2023/04/21 | 4 | Scholastic, 1999 | This series is so fun to read w/ my 9 yo. The characters are funny and feel lived in in ways that kids and adults can identify |
| The Philosopher’s Stone | Colin Wilson | 2023/04/18 | 3 | Valancourt Books, 2019 | A rather end-loaded entry in the genre of Lovecraftian Horror, but in the broader context of a meditation on art, philosophy, and neuroscience. It takes a long time to wind up, and as a consequence, felt a little dull. |
| The Marrow Thieves | Cherie Dimaline | 2023/04/12 | 5 | Dancing Cat Books, 2017 | “A haunting and hopeful book about the ongoing violence of colonialism and the ways that kinship (lineal and ““fictive”") structures resistance to it. " |
| Redwall (Redwall, #1) | Brian Jacques | 2023/04/12 | 4 | Red Fox, 2006 | An exciting and rich fantasy adventure that engrossed my 9 year old and I. |
| The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity | David Graeber, David Wengrow | 2023/04/01 | 5 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021 | Read My Notes |
| Piranesi | Susanna Clarke | 2023/03/17 | 5 | Bloomsbury, 2020 | Read My Notes |
| A Collapse of Horses | Brian Evenson | 2023/03/07 | 5 | Coffee House Press, 2016 | Read my notes |
| Ralph S. Mouse (Ralph S. Mouse, #3) | Beverly Cleary, Tracy Dockray | 2023/03/07 | 5 | HarperTrophy, 2006 | These books are fun and funny. I read with my 9 yo and he loved both the interplay between the human and mouse characters, as well as the sub-text of being nervous about school. |
| A Walk Through Hell, Volume 2 | Garth Ennis, Goran Sudžuka, Ive Svorcina | 2023/01/30 | 3 | Aftershock Comics, 2019 | |
| The City in the Middle of the Night | Charlie Jane Anders | 2023/01/30 | 4 | Tor Books, 2019 | Read My Notes |
| The Daylight Gate | Jeanette Winterson | 2023/01/16 | 3 | Hammer, 2012 | Read My Notes |
| Die, Vol. 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker | Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans | 2023/01/10 | 5 | Image Comics, 2019 | |
| Crooked | Austin Grossman | 2023/01/09 | 3 | Mulholland Books, 2015 | Read My Notes |
| The Christmas Pig | J.K. Rowling, Jim Field | 2023/01/08 | 4 | Scholastic Inc., 2021 | |
| Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 | M. John Harrison, Jennifer Hodgson | 2023/01/06 | 5 | 2020 | Read My Notes |
Previous years’ lists:
Currently Reading, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2000s, 1990s
