Look what a week stuck at home in an ice storm will do… Another newsletter!
A month later than planned, here are my thoughts on books I read in the past year that moved me. I’m omitting some favorites because I already wrote about them: Earth Room by Rachel Mannheimer, Who Will Pay Reparations on my Soul and The Fugitivities by Jesse McCarthy, The Menopause Companion by Sasha Davies and Girlhood by Melissa Febos, National Dish by Anya von Bremzen, and The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl.
So without further ado… Please, quibble with me! Recommend your own favorites.
Everyday we get more light, yet it’s still really dark out. Time to read.
My Favorite Books I Read in 2023
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, originally published in 1963, rereleased by New Directions, 2022
Post-apocalyptic survivalist fiction, but make it about care
I’ve never read The Road—RIP Cormac McCarthy—but I nonetheless think of it as the quintessential post-apocalyptic survivalist novel. I have a sense that it’s nightmarishly violent and, in turn, presumes violence will be the defining characteristic of life after societal collapse. Because of the prevalence of this assumption, it’s easy to accept it as a statement of truth. Survival will require arming yourself, possibly joining a militia, and building a bunker. Why? Because in the face of collapse, people will ravage each other.
It turns out that I’ve been waiting for someone to contradict this vision, and that person is Marlen Haushofer, writing in the 1960s. The Wall is a survivalist book, for sure, but with none of the machismo bullshit. To say I loved it is a staggering understatement. My friend Claire Evans gave it to me (read her phenomenal substack, Wild Information) and I promptly gave copies to all my friends. It’s as much about survival as it is about gender and gender expectations, animal husbandry, and what makes living worthwhile. It made me think a lot about what it means to assume violence is the path to safety (errr, see my last newsletter!), and what the inverse would mean: What if we saw care as central to survival instead. Enjoy, friends!
Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght, Picador, 2021
Nonfiction nature writing in remote Russia, with hilarious character portraits and some adventurous driving
I thought this book was going to be about the fish owls of Primorye and the efforts to save them. And it is! But you know what else it’s about? Feral men! I’ve rarely read about men who combine such contradictory features: extreme competence, extraordinary skills for survival and self-sufficiency, and also, deranged drunkenness and absolutely no ability to function in any form of society whatsoever. This is, in many ways, another survivalist book; in this case, it’s nonfiction. Slaght chronicles his work with Russian scientists to traverse a highly remote region of Russia and tag and gather information about the fish owl, which, as it sounds, feeds on fish. By necessity, their work takes place in winter. As the ice melts, they are frequently in harrowing situations.
I learned a huge amount about the fish owls, who became very dear to me. I also learned about the ecology of this terrain, the history of the region, and the hard work of avian science. In that sense, this book hit a home run. But it was the people he encounters and works alongside that made me love it. Case in point: Slaght learns that their host in a remote dwelling has been saving deer penises, drying them, and soaking them in alcohol, which he drinks to increase his virility. Yet this same man refuses to let a woman live in his home because, he claims, the one time he tried, she used too much water. This, in a landscape with no dearth of water. All this virility, with nowhere to go in the Russian winter, as the call-and-response of a pair of fish owls at dusk fills the air.
Return from the Stars by Stanislaw Lem, originally published in 1961, rereleased by MIT Books in 2020
Classic sci-fi—visionary, misogynistic, affecting, and unforgettable
I loved the 1972 Tarkovsky film Solaris, based on one of Lem’s novels, so it seemed odd I’d never cracked open any books by this giant of literary sci-fi. Just as I was about to head to our local sci-fi bookstore, a friend handed me Return from the Stars. (Note: The cover design for this whole series of Lem books is so good!)
The first several dozen pages were nonsense to me. But when I finally adjusted, I couldn’t get enough. The basic premise is that an astronaut went on a mission, and while he was gone, time was moving much faster on Earth. The result is that the world he returns to has radically changed, while he has not. On this new Earth, there is no violence, no rape, no heroism. (That these things are all tied together is one of the central conceits of this book.)
I told myself I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. It’s, well, problematic. There is in fact a rape scene (warning!). But it really was a book that has stayed with me, in part because there are moments of writing so transcendent I felt lifted into the air. There is a scene when the main character ends up in a room of decommissioned robots that was more powerful for me than anything I’ve read except The Wall! It spoke to the Holocaust, the invisibility of migrant labor, the devaluation of essential workers, and all human acts of dehumanization.
Other Favorites This Year
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, originally published in 2008, Riverhead, 2019
Virtuosic strangeness, shards of stories, a thousand trips broken into pieces and never completed
My profound love for Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead inspired me to read this award-winning tome. It’s a thick one, which is always a little intimidating, but it reads smoothly, even though it felt like a novel made out of the estranged pieces of many novels. I love to read Tokarczuk because her voice carries strongly and she has disturbing fascinations that she doesn’t shy away from. In this book, there are many variations on the theme of how human body parts are preserved—another act of fracturing and reconfiguring. In theory, this is a book about travel, but in reality, I think it’s more about what it means to always be lost.
Dr. No by Percival Everett, Graywolf Press, 2022
James Bond meets his match: wordplay…
If you haven’t read this excerpted speech by Everett, published in the Yale Review, about writing an abstract novel, please, start there! I read two of Everett’s novels this year—Dr. No and The Trees—and I could barely believe that either of them exists. I mean that as a high compliment. They’re both highly formulaic and absolutely unhinged. I’ll stick with Dr. No, which is in every way a direct spoof of a James Bond story. There’s an inordinate amount of wordplay with the word nothing, but somehow (HOW?) it works! He throws in infuriating details (a character named Bill Clinton, for no apparent reason); the story moves too fast; the whole thing feels disorienting, like walking through that classic hallway of doors. And yet (HOW?), it’s pure delight. I would love to talk to someone else who’s read this book about nothing so… you know… hit me up!
Pee Poems by Lao Yang, Circumference Books, 2022
Deeply political and scatological poetry, translated from Chinese
Yang’s poems toggle between statements that break your heart and ones that make you grin stupidly. Pee Poems is the perfect title because Yang makes lots of references to human excrement, urine, and the body. And yet, if you asked me what these poems are about, at their core, I’d say the value of artistic freedom and the profound loss that’s experienced individually and collectively whenever it’s extinguished.
Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara, Random House, 1972
Short stories, direct lessons, super lively
I was thinking as I read this short story collection that I could feel Toni Morrison in the background, and what do you know, Toni Morrison is in the background! I later learned that she’d edited this collection. Gorilla, My Love is really lively, engaging, meaningful, and grounding. Bambara speaks essential truths through her raucous characters, but it never feels too on the nose because, I think, these are truths that don’t get said enough. Things like: kindness isn’t only for the politically correct. And, fulfilled greed is not a status to strive for. And, we are not all born with the same opportunities and so there is no such thing as an even playing field. (Can that ever be stated enough?)
Long Division by Kiese Laymon, originally published in 2013, rereleased by Scribner, 2021
Voice-driven adventure tale going backwards and forwards
This novel, in particular, is really about the power of Laymon’s voice—and about what it means that his voice is printed on a page. In this fast-moving novel, the main characters each come upon a book written in a voice they’ve never seen on the page before, a voice speaking right to them—young Black boys who can wield fancy spelling bee words alongside the language of their grandmas and their neighbors. Long Division is super meta without being annoying or too mind-bending. You feel the book acting for readers in the way the book in the novel acts for the characters—sharing a voice that hasn’t been shared before and giving their realities gravity. This book is in lineage with Bambara and Morrison, for sure—two writers who also wrote about Black lives that otherwise, and until then, were never allowed on the page. It’s a book about life, and how books give people life.
Water, Wood, and Wild Things by Hannah Kirshner, Penguin, 2021
A devoted exploration of Japanese craftwork
Chapter by chapter, Kirshner describes different old world crafts still being made in the small Japanese town where she’s living. My favorite chapter was about making sake! Kirshner is devoted to the small details, and so you get to know precisely how experts maintain each tradition. I felt a lot of vicarious longing—for the experiences Kirshner was having, my own times in Japan, and the crafts that are lost everyday all over the world. Also… recipes!
In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan, originally published in 1968, in a new compilation published by Mariner Books, 1989
Surrealist commune comedy, ahead of its time
My brother Zak told me I wasn’t allowed to publish my upcoming book, Group Living and Other Recipes, until I’d read Brautigan’s famous novel, In Watermelon Sugar. He called it the quintessential commune novel. I was dreading it because, somewhere along the line, I’d decided that Brautigan would be really woo woo in a humorless way. Oh boy was I wrong! This book is hilarious and strange. The commune is called iDeath. YES, that’s right! Brautigan was prescient enough to stick a little i in front of a capital word, and he chose the right one: Death! The narrator inhabits a fantastical (and often horrific) world made of watermelon sugar. You go right along with it, seeing through its translucent forms all the ridiculousness of the commune experience and also its strange appeal. Thanks, Zak, you were right!
Wolfish by Erica Berry, Flatiron, 2023
Woven exploration of wolves and fear
And last but hardly least, I met Berry when she moderated Elizabeth Rush’s Powells reading for her book The Quickening (which I just finished! So… 2024 list!). Berry is, more or less, my neighbor! To my absolute delight, Wolfish is very much about Oregon, and the reintroduction of wolves here, something I realized I knew nothing about. Equally woven throughout the book are Berry’s experiences navigating her fears. This, too, was nearby terrain I knew little of—so many female friends experience fear like Berry’s, fear I recollect from Melissa Febos’ book but haven’t experienced myself—legitimate fears that sometimes bleed into other parts of their lives when they least want it. Throughout, Berry asks: What should we fear? And what fears should we transmute into something new?
I love seeing reading lists like this! I just finished the audio version of The Covenant of Water after pulling that name from another similar list. Totally different type of book than any on your list I think, but a beautiful portrait of South India through the 20th century. I love stories that follow multiple generations, giving some history for place - the book The Living is another example, and the looong movie The Best of Youth (La meglio gioventù) being another. Your mention of SciFi and post apocalyptic stories reminded me of two I've read that also choose something other than the Mad Max route - A Canticle for Leibowitz, and The Dazzle of Day - the later taking place in space, but on an agrarian space station searching for a habitable planet.
Thanks for such a great reading list!