BOOKS
- Mind of My Mind – Octavia Butler**
- Clay’s Ark – Octavia Butler***
- Skeleton Crew – Stephen King
- The Memory Police – Yoko Ogawa
- How to Love – Thich Nhat Hanh
- Meal – Blue Delliquanti & Soleil Ho
- This Party of the Soft Things – Nhatt Nichols
- Begin the World Over – Kung Li Sun
- O Human Star: Volume One – Blue Delliquanti
- A Memory Called Empire – Arkady Martine*
- Gender Queer – Maia Kobabe
- The Midwinter Witch – Molly Knox Ostertag
- Red Milk – Sjon
- Spare – Prince Harry
- Playing Fair – Pepper Mint
- Revenge – Yoko Ogawa*
- Why It’s Ok to Not Be Monogamous – Justin Clardy
- The Diving Pool – Yoko Ogawa
- The Swimmers – Julie Otsuka**
- Women Talking – Miriam Toews*
- War in Ukraine* – Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J.S. Davies
- Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Club: Roll Call – Molly Knox Ostertag & Xanthe Bouma
- Dead-End Memories – Banana Yoshimoto
- Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters***
- Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
- Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma – Claire Dederer***
- Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology – Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya, Eds.
- Sapiens: A Graphic History: The Birth of Humankind, Volume 1 – Yuval Noah Harari, David Casanave, et al
- A Quick & Easy Guide to Sex & Disability – A. Andrews
- All Systems Red – Martha Wells
- What Makes You Not A Buddhist – Dzongsar Jamyang Khyenstse
- Becoming Your Own Therapist – Lama Thubten Yeshe
- Heartstopper Voumel 1 – Alice Oseman
- Heartstopper Volume 2 – Alice Oseman
- Artificial Condition – Martha Wells
- Heartstopper Volume 3 – Alice Oseman
- Heartstopper Volume 4 – Alice Oseman
- Rogue Protocol – Martha Wells
- Conspirituality – Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker**
- Loveless – Alice Oseman**
- Exit Strategy – Martha Wells
- Yellowface ** – R.F. Kuang
- Gender: A Graphic Guide – Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele
- Washington’s Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron Von Steuben – John Trujillo & Levi Hastings (illus)
- Solitaire – Alice Oseman
- It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth – Zoe Thorogood*
- Cultish – Amanda Montell*
- Afterlife – Michael Dhyne
OVERVIEW
- The gender balance across books was 33 by women or nonbinary authors, and the remaining 16 by men (I previously counted co-written works as half, but this year am switching to full authorship, resulting in a total of 49 authors over 48 books).
- The above list includes graphic novels, which I include as books when they are singular narrative works. Trade paperback collections of serial issues of a comic book are counted separately below.
- The titles marked with asterisks are the titles I enjoyed the most, which made the most powerful impression on me, or both.
- Two authors who I got particularly deep into in 2023 were Alice Oseman, the creator/author of books set in the Heartstopper universe, and Martha Wells, who has published several books in the Murderbot series.
NOT FINISHED
In late 2022 and crossing over into January 2023, I read the books in Octavia Butler’s Patternist series. There is an additional book, titled Survivor, that was originally published as part of the series, but which she subsequently disavowed and allowed to go out-of-print because she realized it was pretty shoddy in its metaphorical dealings with race via alienness. I tracked down a copy in the collection of the University of Washington, and requested it via the Seattle Public Library’s interlibrary loan program. However, after about 30 pages, I gave up on it. Butler was right; it had none of the art, beauty, or complexity I regularly expect from her, and which even books written around the same time usually display. But through reading (or not reading) something disappointing by an author whose work I admire so much, I was able to appreciate how much more brilliant her known work is, and was reminded that creating good work requires making some bad work on the way.
SPECIFIC REVIEWS
Mind of My Mind and Clay’s Ark by Octavia Butler
These two works are set in the Patternist universe, Butler’s main other universe besides the Parable and Xenogenesis/Lilith’s Brood ones. However, they still feel very different, in that the second work in a much more self-contained dystopian story centering around a pandemic brought to earth by a returning astronaut, with elements of survival and body horror thrown in. Mind of My MInd, however, is the second part of an overall story arc carried through Patternmaster (first published in the series), Wild Seed, and Clay’s Ark, focused around the efforts of an immortal superhuman with immense telepathic power to shape the future of humanity through creating a new race with powers like his own. Wild Seed is chronologically the first story, but was published third (or fourth, if you include Survivor). Questions of the responsible use of power and the all-too-easy potential for abuse, as well as conceptions of family, race, and gender — which became familiar themes through Butler’s work — are deeply examined throughout this series. I’d suggest reading these in the chronological order of the story — Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, then Patternmaster — to ensure you get the overall context of the story as it develops over time. There is a collection called Seed to Harvest that compiles the four novels in this order.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
This novel — about three women, both trans and cis — who struggle with questions of womanhood, motherhood, and family after an unexpected pregnancy was absolutely brilliant, and so hard-to-put down. Peters takes no prisoners, and protects few — if any — sacred cows around feminism and trans experience, showing all the certainties so many of us — cis or trans — seek to hold onto around how we love, who we love, what we love, and what we want, are so shaky, and much more messy that we want to admit. I kept feeling like Peters was letting me in on secrets — desires, regrets, dreams — the three main characters didn’t even want to admit to themselves, and thus, showing how much pressure around different types of performance — particularly around, but not limited to gender — keeps us from moving towards the things we truly want. The result is one of the most hilarious, tragic, and truest books I think I’ve ever read.
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
In a year of some really amazing reads, this was probably my favorite book of the year. In 2017, Dederer published an essay called “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” in the literary magazine The Paris Review. While that essay, in and of itself, is a profound wrestling with this question condensed into 5200 words, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, is an expansion of this wrestling. I was both so pleasantly surprised by its boldness that I began raving about it to people I know while only about a quarter of the way through. As I wrote on Facebook, shortly after starting it: “It asks hard questions and provides no easy answers, and points over and over to the messy choices people frequently make in dropping this artist while staying with another, and digs into the monstrosity within each and every one of us. And that’s just 20 pages in.” Dederer oscillates between the personal and larger social impacts of this wrestling, detailing not only her own perspectives and experiences with the work of the artists examined — Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Picasso, Michael Jackson, Hemingway — but pulling back to consider questions of how our collective consensus around “great art” is carefully policed and maintained to reinforce hegemonic norms, particularly patriarchy.
One of the more interesting parts of this book, however, is that Dederer doesn’t just look at male artists only to highlight how misogyny shapes common understandings of who can create art, and who does it well, but how prevalent the narrative is that female creators’ creativity renders them less capable of being fully “woman,” with implications for what paths they may themselves seen as valid for them to choose in their larger life — such as motherhood. Going further, Dederer describes her own struggles as an alcoholic (now in recovery), mother, and writer, laying out the notion of how tied monstrosity and the failure to fulfill (or outright refusal to perform) patriarchal gender roles is for women, whether creators or not.
This book is one of those amazing, powerful works where the language and thinking have been so thoughtfully distilled that every paragraph hits hard, every sentence carving through the brambles of the ways we talk (and avoid talking about this subject) to consider or present some seed of brutal, uncomfortable truth. These seeds sprout and grow throughout the book, to form a rich tangle of unflinching reflections: about the frequently principled, but sometimes unavoidably arbitrary lines we all draw and cross with artists who create work we love, but who also commit acts we despise; how the label “genius” is applied to many (usually male) artists to deflect criticism from their awful, abusive actions, even when those may be directly represented in their work; and how gender-bound many of our conceptions of what “great art” is. In the end, it neither sidesteps the question, “Can you separate the art from the artist?,” nor fully legitimizes it, but instead pushes for an honest understanding of our experiences and subsequent love (or hatred) for artistic works and those who create them as subjective, messy, and anything but simple, to possibly pose a counter-question, “How do we (individually and collectively) navigate our love or appreciation of an artist’s work alongside our disgust with how they live(d) their life?” And beyond art, “How do we learn to live alongside people who sometimes create harm and hurt? And how do we learn to live with the harm and hurt we ourselves create?” If you are at all interested in these questions, please, please read this book. But content warning: there are discussions of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and abuse in this book.
Loveless by Alice Oseman
This sweet book — by Alice Oseman, creator of the lovely Heartstopper graphic novel series and author of a few related novels — is a novel about a young woman’s journey towards discovering she is both aromantic and asexual during her freshman year at university (it’s set in the UK). It’s a great exploration of the social scripts dominating relationships, attraction, and sexuality, especially at such a turbulent, transitional time in young people’s lives. It’s a beautiful ode to the power of platonic love and chosen family, and challenged me to expand my understanding of queerness.
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
This book was an absolute hoot, an enjoyable trainwreck. Premise is that it’s told from the perspective of a young mediocre white writer who happens to be friends with a brilliant young Asian writer who has been anointed the next big thing in the world of literature. When her friend dies unexpectedly, what does the white writer do? Steal her friend’s unseen, unpublished manuscript, rework it slightly, and publish it as her own. That’s just the beginning of many bad choices made throughout this novel by the main character, whose triumph is followed up by a complex, torturous, and well-deserved fall. Along the way, Kuang painstakingly skewers the contemporary publishing and literary landscape, in particular the ridiculously performative ways it simultaneously celebrates and tokenizes the voices and experiences writers of color, as well as the role perception (and the manipulation of perception) plays in determining what stories — and what storytellers — are platformed.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
I found this short story collection of dark (not quite horror) tales by the author of the novel The Memory Police much more compelling. Ogawa’s work really disorients readers and characters alike, leaving both left dumbstruck in a world they thought they knew, but eludes their understanding. If you like mysterious, supernaturally/fantastically-tinged fiction, check this one out.
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
This book was another big favorite of mine this year. It starts by focusing on the community that develops around a recreational pool, the aftermath of the appearance of a crack at the bottom of it, and then follows the path of one particular character and her mother (one of the swimmers) for the remainder of the book. It speaks about how we come together and how we come apart, as communities, and in our familial connections.
It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood
This amazing fever dream of a graphic memoir provides a visual representation of six months of depression, tragedy, and heartbreak in the life of the author/artist. I say that because just when I think I’ve seen everything in comics, I read this book, which fearlessly renders both Thorogood’s internal and external experience through a sprawling diversity of tones and styles. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had told me this was an anthology by a dozen different artists, but instead it’s a masterfully complex journey crafted by one immensely talented mind.
Cultish by Amanda Montell
Cults, new religious movements, and alternative subcultures (especially communities shaped by conspiracy theory) are a morbid fascination of mine. This book by Amanda Montell, a linguist and cultural critic who also co-hosts a podcast named Sound Like a Cult, goes beyond the common studies and histories of many popular cults to discuss how alternative subcultures are created and maintained via the use of shared language. Montell details the various ways in which these subcultures not only repurpose existing language, but invent new terms in these efforts, all towards reshaping their participants’ understanding of their own experiences, and effectively, creating an alternative reality for them. The potential of this reshaping to lead to inspiration is noted here, but more importantly, so is the possibility for abuse and harm, with cultish language opening up opportunities for control, and even great damage. One of the distinctions of this book is that Montell’s interest extends to not simply explicitly religious or spiritual communities, but the increasingly cultish world of wellness and fitness communities (such as CrossFit). This reaching beyond the usual suspects (usual for me, at least, as an avid reader of books and watcher of documentaries on cults) shows just how easily all types of community — which we all need in some form to nourish us — can so easily turn each of us against ourselves.
Afterlife by Michael Dhyne – I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a plug for my friend Michael Dhyne’s first poetry collection, centering around the immeasurable impact of the death of his father when he was a young child. In this slim book, Michael gorgeously crafts a multiplicity of moments through which the ravenous gnawing of grief is held alongside the relentless spill of beauty and small, surprising joys created by emerging love, deep friendship, and shared vulnerability. PS: I met Michael during my years in Charlottesville, and he’s one of the most wonderful men I know. His birthday is the day after mine.)
TRADE PAPERBACKS
My trade paperback count (collections of individual comics issues into a single volume) is 11, down from 17 last year. FYI: I put “et al” in recognition of the fact that while the first person listed below is usually the primary author, there are other folks (colorers, letterers, editors, etc.) who contribute to comics.
There were no real major standouts among these that I recall. Well, maybe the first volume of Immortal X-Men by Kieron Gillen, who is a master of comics storytelling centering around ensembles/teams.
- Darth Vader Vol 2: Into the Fire – Greg Pak, et al
- Darth Vader Vol 3: War of the Bounty Hunters – Greg Pak, et al
- Darth Vader Volume 4: Crimson Reign – Greg Pak, et all
- Immortal X-Men: Volume 1 – Kieron Gillen, et al
- Radiant Black: Volume 1 – Kyle Higgins, et al
- Radiant Black: Volume 2 Team Up – Kyle Higgins, et al
- Radiant Black: Volume 3 – Rogues’ Gallery – Kyle Higgins, et al
- Outer Darkness: Volume 1: At Each Others’ Throats – John Layman, Afu Chan, et al
- Minor Threats: Volume 1: A Quick End to a Long Beginning – Patton Oswalt, Jordan Blum, et al
- Quinicredible: Volume 1: Quest to be the Best – Rodney Barnes, Selena Espiritu, et al
- Rain – Joe Hill, David Booher, et al