Books from 2023

Sorry this is late...

A list of what books I read this year with a few words about each. More to come this week about some changes and new things for the newsletter so stay tuned.

I aimed to read 50 books this year and it just didn’t happen for a variety of common reasons. Next year, same goal and will hopefully hit it.

Talk soon and thanks for the support.

—Matt

1. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
   
   A bizarre little book. Sebald’s mode of storytelling didn’t always work for me but I found the ending particularly rapturous and worth the journey.
   

2. End Zone by Don DeLillo
   
   A nice early novel. Not his best, not his worst. Interesting juxtaposition between football and the nuclear bomb which signaled a bit of later career interests.
   

3. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
   
   A kind-hearted and in all honesty simple read.
   

4. Is Mother Dead? by Vigdis Hjorth
   
   Should’ve been a novella. Extremely tedious after 100 pages.
   

5. Dr. No by Percival Everett
   
   Funny jokes, good puns. A nice intro to his style.
   

6. All Systems Red by Martha Wells
   
   A silly sci-fi novella I read for a book club about an autistic robot, which was often hard to follow but at least it was short.
   

7. The Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen
   
   Legitimately one of the best books I’ve ever read. I have almost nothing to say about that doesn’t spill into a sort of waterfall of praise.
   

8. The Waste Land & Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
   
   It’s Eliot. It was fun. I’m not a scholar.
   

9. War & War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
   
   Krasznahorkai’s third novel and first in English is the one that James Woods in The New Yorker called “terrifying.” It’s in fact one of his funniest, most surprising and engaging novels of his I’ve read. I continually find his prose challenging and engaging, his viewpoint impish, and his narratives pleasurable for their phenomenological drive.
   

10. Zero K by Don DeLillo
    
    Might be my favorite DeLillo I’ve read. Structurally sinister without being tricky, intellectually rigorous, and syntactically nuanced. Brilliant work.
    

11. The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
    
    Found this far too sentimental and cloying to enjoy.
    

12. Duplex by Kathryn Davis
    
    Another book club dud. Has that “gothic” and “witchy” quality that’s en vogue but is actually a shield for having uninventive technique and ideas. Its outer layer involving magic creates a veneer of creativity quickly dashed by the laziness of prose and narrative arc.
    

13. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
    
    A friend jokes that only gringos love this book…well I loved it so more evidence in that camp.
    

14. Jernigan by David Gates
    
    Nice novel from the 1990s.
    

15. Chasing Homer by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
    
    Good afternoon novella with QR codes for drum beats to listen to during the reading and wonderful art pieces throughout.
    

16. Betwixt & Between by Jenny Boully
    
    Interesting and short memoir/essay collection that was a nice train read back from Vermont.
    

17. A Girl is A Half Formed Thing by Eimar McBride
    
    neo-Modernist and highly interesting book of great technical quality.
    

18. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
    
    Perhaps out of favor for several reasons (including the female characters), but this is the type of book that wins Pulitzers: sort of middle-brow page-turner about someone growing up.
    

19. The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

    
    Kept wanting Margarita to show up. The satire, for what it is, seems limited because of my own distance from the Stalinist Soviet Union, but it was fun how many postmodern techniques were deployed in this work from the 1920s.
     

20. All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
    
    I don’t think McCarthy is my thing. RIP though.
    

21. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
    
    A near perfect novel.

22. The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
    
    Short, anxious, and heady book. The prose was very interested in recreating a business-mood but I found the execution uneven.
    

23. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
    
    A near perfect novel. I don’t think the “magical” ending works, but its other features make for a wonderful experience.
    

24. Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
    
    Short novella. I found lots of it to be particularly striking and other sections to rely on short-hand, like Bellow was too bored with his own idea to explicate emotions or details.
    

25. A Heart So White by Javier Marias
    
    Part stage-play. Part detective novel. Part romance. Part family drama.
    
    In less than 300 pages, Marias packs in so much and it is the novel I’ve recommended people read the most this year. Brilliant, astonishing work.

26. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
    
    Kind of a crazy experience to read. Wonderful.
    

27. Born This Way Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement by Joanna Wuest
    
    Wrote about it here.
    

28. So Much Blue by Percival Everett
    
    Wrote about it here.
    

29. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
    
    A reading experience that made me sick. Finished the novel in 2 sittings. Brilliant.
    

30. Remainder by Tom McCarthy
    
    Wrote about it here.
    

31. Mao II by Don DeLillo
    
    American classic.
    

32. The Trial by Franz Kafka
    
    Funny.
    

33. Wounded by Percival Everett
    
    Essay on this coming next month.
    

34. Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen
    
    A page turner but falls a little flat at the end. Feels rushed.
    

35. Hot Milk by Deborah Levy
    
    Essay on this coming later this month.
    

36. On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry
    
    A nice little tome that I don’t think rescues “beauty” as an artistic goal so much as wishes for a different ethical environment than the present.
    

37. The Uncanny (Penguin Collection) by Sigmund Freud
    
    A good short collection of Freud’s work on the “uncanny.”

38. SALMON by Sebastian Castillo
    
    In the interest of full disclosure, Sebastian is a friend. I still think this was one of the most fun reading experiences I’ve had this year.
    

39. The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber
    
    A perfectly acceptable craft book. Mileage may vary.
    

40. The Visiting Privilege: Stories by Joy Williams
    
    Short, minimal stories that come from across her career. There’s a lot of them and some are okay, but many are brilliant.
    

41. Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
    
    An interesting experimental novel that doesn’t always hit its mark. Some of that may be because the Irish political references missed me but often the prose was riveting.
    

42. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
    
    It’s Henry James.
    

43. The Plains by Gerald Murnane
    
    This didn’t work for me. I haven’t been able to explain why but I was glad when I closed the book.
    

44. Alice Knott by Blake Butler
    
    Very engaging and often wonderfully funny book.
    

45. Molly by Blake Butler
    
    An example of compelling memoir without ever deigning to exploit their subject. Often it felt like an academic study of Butler’s late wife, her personality, her work, her mind and their marriage.
    

46. Inland by Tea Obreht
    
    Structurally, I found this novel very challenging to make it through but ultimately the work to get there was rewarding.
    

47. Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
    
    I found the first 100 pages fun and the last 100 intensely tedious.

48. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
    
    A play to end my year.