Best Books of 2023

This year I have returned to form and picked 5 novels, not 3.  What's a bit curious is that all of them are comic novels in one way or another, though Troubles and Grey Bees are both a bit bittersweet, focusing on life during occupation.  Most of these were read quite early in the year, with the exception of Grey Bees, so there was a lull when I wasn't loving much of what I was reading.

Best Books Read in 2023

J. G. Farrell - Troubles
Andrey Kurkov - Grey Bees
Kingsley Amis - Girl, 20
W. Somerset Maugham - Cakes & Ale
Evelyn Waugh - Decline and Fall

Honorable Mention:

Frederick Reuss - Henry of Atlantic City
J. G. Farrell - The Siege of Krishnapur
Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl (A SF novel set in a largely post-carbon society.)
Alaa Al-Aswany - The Yacoubian Building  
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Theodor Fontane - Effi Briest (Germany's version of Madame Bovary...)
Naguib Mahfouz - The Search
Georges Perec - Life, A User's Manual (Puzzles within puzzles...)

Jhumpa Lahiri - Whereabouts

Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs (A solid novel with a bleak ending.)

Pandemic in the Metropolis: Transportation Impacts and Recovery ed. by Loukaitou-Sideris, Bayen, and Jayakrishnan  (This is actually a non-fiction book I reviewed for a journal.  Not as entertaining as the 10 fiction books but more directly relevant...)


The best re-read was a bit of a toss-up between Flaubert's Madame Bovary and McInerey's Bright Lights, Big City.  I think I'll go with Bright Lights, Big City.

There were several moderate to severe literary disappointments this year.  I finally read Fante's The Bandini Quartet and didn't like it much at all.  I read a couple of Hemingway novels and didn't like those, though that was hardly a surprise.  (I was expecting to enjoy Fante...)  I was moderately interested in Angela Carter's Wise Children, but the last chapter was so icky that I crossed it off my list of novels I could ever recommend.  I had expected that Conrad's Under Western Eyes would make the list, but it didn't for reasons I go into here.  But I guess you just never know about books, even those you are primed to like, until you actually dig in between the covers.

I do expect to get around to a few key Russian novels in 2024 and will probably reread Invisible Man.  I have relatively high (but hopefully not too high) expectations for McCarthy's The Group, which I'll be starting soon.  I suspect after I wrap that up I might read or even reread some Joan Didion (and possibly some of the Sontag essays I haven't gotten to yet).  And I'm all but certain I'll get to The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams.  So a lot of potentially great reading in the new year.