My year in reading, 2023 edition

All the books I read this past year

It’s always fun to look back at the past year and review the books I’ve read. This was a great year for books! I hope you enjoy reading my list and that you get some ideas for things you want to read in 2024.

Usually my yearly reading is heavily weighted on the side of nonfiction, but this year it’s much more even: I think it comes out at 15 fiction, 20 nonfiction. (I really did read some fantastic novels!) I’ll list the books alphabetically by author in each of those two categories, and add a few poetry books at the end.

FICTION:

Haven - Emma Donoghue.
This was my favourite novel of 2023. It’s about three 7th-century Irish monks who travel to a desolate island to set up a monastery, and the challenges — physical, spiritual, and relational — they face. It got me thinking a lot about community (“Is there a word for a fellowship of unequals?” one character muses), calling, and faith. And it’s so beautifully written. (I had a review of Haven published in The Christian Courier; you can read that here if you want to know more).

The Swallows of Lunetto - Joseph Fasano.
This novel is about a young man in late-WWII Italy who returns to his home village after being absent for eight years, carrying secrets about atrocities he has committed. The young woman he meets and falls in love with also has her own family’s painful past to deal with. It’s very poetic and quite moving.

The Humans - Matt Haig.
This is a brilliant, entertaining book. Its basic concept might seem far-fetched: an alien is sent to earth in the body of a scientist who has just been killed, to prevent the man’s research findings from being made public. His fish-out-of-water exploits at the beginning are pretty hilarious, as he stumbles around clumsily experiencing cold, hunger, and law enforcement for the first time — but the book develops into much more as the alien finds himself caring about the humans he encounters and making choices that conflict dangerously with his assigned tasks. I loved it.

Plainsong / Eventide / Benediction - Kent Haruf.
These three novels, which should be read in the order listed, are simple and understated, but very beautiful and touching. They are about ordinary people in a Colorado town whose lives and stories intertwine throughout the three books. I came to love these characters and admire the way they dealt with adversity. If you like writers like Wendell Berry and Leif Enger, you’ll probably like these novels. I’d highly recommend them.

Foster / Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan.
Keegan, an Irish writer, writes short, deceptively simple novels that are real gems. Although I’ve listed these two books together, they are not related narratives: Foster is about a young girl who goes to stay with a childless couple while her own mother is coping with another new baby, while Small Things Like These (which won numerous awards) is about an ordinary man who glimpses the reality behind the religious facade of his small village and is forced to make a life-altering decision. Both books are wonderful.

Homecoming - Kate Morton.
I have read most of Morton’s previous novels and enjoyed them; Homecoming is her latest and one of her best. Most of her books involve a present-day woman unraveling a past mystery, and this one was no exception. A London writer named Jess discovers that her dying grandmother was present at the time of a tragic fatal incident at an Australian estate in 1959. Morton weaves together the 2018 and 1959 narrative timelines and a book Jess discovers about the tragedy, so we get multiple voices and perspectives as the strands of the mystery come together. I found myself turning the pages faster and faster as I read, trying to figure things out. If you like big fat novels with lots of twists, you’ll like this.

Our Missing Hearts - Celeste Ng.
I’ve enjoyed a couple of Ng’s previous books (Everything I Never Told You and Litle Fires Everywhere), but this one didn’t really do it for me. It’s about a young boy in a future dystopian America whose mother was taken away from her family because of her political writings. The book raised some important themes about racism and authoritarian regimes, but it wasn’t compelling: too much explaining and telling, not enough showing and action.

Tom Lake - Ann Patchett.
This is Patchett’s newest, and it’s lovely. A woman named Lara reminisces with her husband and three adult daughters about her time at a summer theatre many years before, particularly her romance with a temperamental young man named Duke. This is a novel that manages to use the Covid-19 pandemic as a plot device without it completely dominating the book; the fact that Lara’s daughters are home on their family’s fruit farm because of Covid allows the perfect opportunity for the family’s conversations and reflections. Patchett is such a good writer, carefully unspooling just the right information at the right time for the reader’s benefit.

We Are the Light - Matthew Quick.
I really liked this novel, which is structured as a series of letters written by a widower named Lucas to his former therapist in the aftermath of a mass shooting in their town. Lucas is an engaging character, and the town sees him as a leader and hero — but as we watch him trying to use a piece of performance art to bring his community together, we start to realize just how broken he is and how tough the journey to healing can be. Very moving book.

The Little Wartime Library - Kate Thompson.
This is a nice, relatively light novel about a young woman running a library in a collapsed train tunnel in London in WWII. It has interesting historical elements, appealing characters, and romance, and it illustrates the power of books to bring people together and help them cope in difficult times.

Women Talking - Miriam Toews.
This novel, based on real-life events, focuses on an unnamed religious commune where women and girls — some as young as three — have been drugged and sexually assaulted by men in the community. While the perpetrators are in jail and the rest of the men have gone to the city to post bail for them, a group of women of various ages meet to talk about how they should respond — leave, fight, or do nothing — and a young man who was once part of the community and has now returned is appointed to record their discussion. Their emotionally charged conversation, held over several days, addresses themes of faith, obedience, forgiveness, and revenge, and eventually leads the women to a united decision about how to respond to what has been done to them. The book is very powerful, as is the 2022 movie version of it.

French Braid - Anne Tyler.
I’ve been an Anne Tyler fan ever since Saint Maybe, the first book of hers I ever read and my favourite of the 25+ she’s written in her 60-year career. I’ve enjoyed many of her novels, but in the last 15 years I’ve been more “meh” about her. Tyler writes great scenes with quirky characters and amusing dialogue — but she seems less and less able to pull these together into a compelling plot. French Braid follows the Garrett family from the 1950s to the present day, and it’s touching at times, but some of the subplots feel unfinished, and the significance of particular scenes and conversations isn’t always clear. It’s an okay book, but for me the whole was not greater than the sum of the parts.

NONFICTION:

Elisabeth Elliot: A Life - Lucy S.R. Austen.
A detailed, thoroughly researched, and well-written biography of Elisabeth Elliot, the prolific Christian writer and speaker who is probably most famous for being the widow of Jim Elliot, a missionary who was killed, along with four other men, by members of the Waorani tribe in Ecuador in 1956. A mythology has grown up around the missionaries’ deaths and Elisabeth and Jim’s courtship; Austen shows how these events were much more complicated than we may have been led to think. The chapters on Elliot’s time in Ecuador after Jim’s death and on her later years with her second and third husbands are very revealing, as we see how Elliott became quite open-minded about faith and gender issues but then more narrowly conservative as she yielded to the influence of powerful men in her life. Overall, an excellent book and a must-read for anyone even slightly familiar with Elliot’s story.

The Day That Went Missing: A Family’s Story - Richard Beard.
One of the most interesting memoirs I’ve ever read (and a cautionary tale about the stereotypical British stiff-upper-lip mentality). In 1978, when Beard was 11, he and his parents and three brothers were on a seaside holiday in Cornwall, England when his 9-year-old brother drowned. How his parents dealt with this tragedy is almost unbelievable: they went home for the funeral (which the surviving children did not attend), immediately returned with the surviving boys to the same seaside spot to finish their interrupted vacation, and then never spoke of the incident for 40 years. In later years, Beard starts to recognize how his own emotions have become frozen and inaccessible, and he begins researching what happened by talking to his parents and siblings, revisiting the scene of the tragedy, and analyzing the events that preceded and followed it. Very gripping.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands - Kate Beaton.
This is a graphic memoir (i.e. told in art, “comic book” style) about Beaton’s move from small-town Nova Scotia to work in the Alberta oil fields to make money to pay off her student loans. Sexual harassment, loneliness, marital strain, and alcoholism — and the code of silence that makes it so difficult to speak out about these things in such an isolated and male-dominated setting — are all addressed here. A very eye-opening book.

Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family - Joy Castro, ed.
This is a book of essays by writers who wrote about family members in their published works, discussing how those choices impacted their relationships with those they’d written about.

The Woman They Wanted: Shattering The Illusion of the Good Christian Wife - Shannon Harris.
In this memoir, Harris, former wife of Josh Harris of I Kissed Dating Goodbye fame, talks about her marriage to a famous Southern Baptist youth pastor, the pressure on her as a wife and mother in the evangelical fishbowl, and her struggle to break free of religious control and discover who she truly was as a person and a woman. This was an interesting book that shows how even someone who wasn’t brought up in the evangelical church environment can still fall under its sway and control.

Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age - Katherine May.
I read May’s book Wintering last year and loved it; this one is very good too. May reflects on the overwhelming experience of the pandemic, the rush to reopen and get back to normal, and the practices and experiences of wonder — under the categories of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water — that can serve as antidotes to that overwhelm.
(An aside: I noticed someone left a mistaken Google review of this book online, apparently thinking they were reviewing a hotel: “The view is spectacular but can not compensate for the limited service.” It strikes me that May’s book would assert the opposite: a spectacular view can be adequate compensation for the limitations of life!)

Fractured - Susan Mockler.
This is an engrossing memoir by a woman who survived a nighttime collision between the car she was a passenger in and a moose. She was left with a spinal injury, and the book details her recovery from the crash, her determination to regain function and independence, and her journey to acceptance of her identity as a disabled person.

All My Knotted-Up Life - Beth Moore.
A beautiful memoir by the well-known writer and Bible teacher. Moore writes vulnerably about her upbringing, which included being sexually abused by her father; the path that led her to her teaching ministry and her leadership of Living Proof Ministries; her decision, after the election of Donald Trump, to be more vocal about the sexism and misogyny women endure in the church; her family life, including her husband’s terrible health crisis; and above all her enduring faith in and love for Jesus. It’s a funny and moving book in which Moore’s unique voice clearly shines through on each page.

You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult - Lane Moore.
I enjoyed this book about adult friendships. Moore challenges some of the pop culture stereotypes about friendship and gives her warm, witty perspective on figuring out what you’re looking for in a friend, how to reach out to potential friends, how to handle friendships at work, how to navigate conflict and breakups, etc.

In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World - Padraig O Tuama.
This beautiful book is a bit hard to categorize: part memoir, part spiritual direction. O Tuama explores the concepts of shelter and welcome in relation to spirituality, identity, sexuality, relationships, and many other areas of life. Each chapter title is “Hello to…” something — Hello to Here, Hello to What We Cannot Know, Hello to the Body, Hello to the Shadow — showing how we need to make space for so many things, even frightening or disturbing ones, in our lives in order to grow and thrive.

Dangerous Territory - Amy Peterson.
In this memoir, Peterson tells how as an eager young evangelical Christian she travelled to an unnamed Asian country to do missionary work, but became disillusioned about whether her work made things worse or better for the friends she made there. It’s beautiful how she talks about moving from the idea of doing great things for God to just resting in being loved by God.

Run Towards the Danger - Sarah Polley.
I really enjoyed this excellent memoir-in-essays by actor/director Polley. She writes about her personal experiences of trauma: her career as an often-exploited and endangered child actor, her decision not to testify against accused sexual abuser Jian Ghomeshi, her struggle with a severe concussion, her problematic relationship with her father, and more.

On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World - Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg.
Ruttenberg bases her dicussion of repentance and repair on the teachings of Maimonides, a medieval Jewish scholar who set out five steps for dealing with the ways we have hurt others: name and own what we’ve done; take steps to change; make restitution and accept consequences; apologize; and make different choices. She applies these stages to communal and individual wrongdoing and also addresses attitudes that sometimes get in the way of true repentance, like the notion that good intentions are all that matter and the failure to recognize power differentials. A very important book.

How to Be a Bad Friend: The Hidden Life of Failed Relationships - Katherine Sleadd.
In this unique and vulnerable book, Sleadd draws on her own painful experiences of friend conflicts and breakups to argue that the terms we often associate with being a “bad friend” (toxic, difficult, dramatic, etc.) may actually be necessary, useful parts of our selves and our relationships. She encourages readers not to focus too much on being “good” friends and not to turn friend conflicts and breakups into lessons that may prevent us from making space for future friendships.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful - Maggie Smith.
Smith, best known for her viral poem “Good Bones” (from which her memoir title is taken), writes about her “overnight” success with the poem, her realization of her husband’s affair, and their eventual divorce. It’s a wonderful memoir: honest, gracious, and beautifully written. (I wrote a longer review of it for The Christian Courier; you can read that here.)

Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning - Sarah Stankorb.
In this very interesting book, journalist Stankorb details how a group of women, using the power and reach of the internet, were able to expose abuse (and attempts to cover up abuse) by men in the Southern Baptist denomination.

A Goodness I Cannot Explain: A Medical-Spiritual Memoir - Catherine Stewart.
This memoir was written by a Presbyterian minister who was diagnosed with a brain tumor and faced with two treatment options, surgery or radiation, that would have very different risks and effects. The book chronicles the process she went through in making her decision, drawing on Scripture, relationships, research, and her own inner sense of being held and known by God. I agree with the friend who lent me this book that it probably could have been shorter — yet it is a valuable book in terms of understanding one person’s journey and the sometimes unexpected factors involved in making a difficult and complex decision.

The Gift of Restlessness: A Spirituality for Unsettled Seasons - Casey Tygrett.
This book was wonderful. It explores how feelings of restlessness and unsettled-ness, as uncomfortable as they may be, can motivate us to ask deeper questions about belonging, security, purpose, and more. I loved Tygrett’s honest voice and his gentle encouragement to stay in the restlessness and discover what we can learn there, rather than trying to escape and avoid it.

Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation - Jon Ward.
This memoir dovetails well with Stankorb’s book Disobedient Women, above. Ward details his childhood and young adult life in the evangelical church, how he walked away from that world, and how his work as a journalist forced him to question many of the assumptions he’d grown up with. A very interesting look at how American evangelicalism has been intertwined with politics and nationalism and how one man responded to that.

The Story of a Poem: A Memoir - Matthew Zapruder.
I really enjoyed this book in which poet and poetry teacher Zapruder explores the writing process, his struggle to write about his son’s autism, his relationship with his father, and more.

POETRY:

I tend to read a lot of individual poems online, many of them found through Joseph Fasano’s Daily Poetry Threads on Twitter (X). This year I also read several lovely books of poetry:
The Hurting Kind - Ada Limon
Second Space - Czeslaw Milosz
Wild is the Wind - Carl Phillips
Wound is the Origin of Wonder - Maya C. Popa

Thanks for making it through to the end of this long list (that’s assuming you did, and didn’t just scroll down to pretend you’d read it like some kind of monster). I’d love to hear if you’ve read any of these books, or if you read something else in 2023 that was particularly good. Please let me know in the comments — and happy reading in 2024!