Best Books of 2023

Nov 21, 2024

...and for publishing!

Back in the spring I released my second book The Life Council: 10 Friends Every Woman Needs and while I can say that working a lot definitely impacts my reading life, I'm also so proud of that book and the many conversations it started.

(It also ended up being more complicated than I was anticipating to publish a book on friendship, and navigating the public and privates parts this made for an emotional year. I talk about more about this on my podcast on Ep 201: 10 Things I Learned in 2023)

If you haven't picked up The Life Council yet, I encourage you to grab one for yourself or as a gift. The only way authors can continue to write books is for people to buy books, which is why I always champion books and reading on social media, my podcast, and anywhere I can. The Life Council is available in hard cover, paperback, audiobook (which I read myself), and right now it's on kindle sale!

Releasing a book is not the same thing as writing a book, and while I wrote The Life Council almost entirely in 2022, I didn't get enough writing done in 2023, which is something I hope to change this year. But I did get some reading in!

Some stats about my 2023 reading:

I read 59 books.

Which is on par with the general pace I've been reading the last few years. I typically read about a book a week, give or take, with a few extra when traveling and a few less when I read something really long (like The Stand, which we read for Stephen King Summer this year).

Of those 59 books:

32 were fiction

27 were nonfiction

And this feels about right.

I also started using StoryGraph this year to track my reading (moving away from Goodreads, which drives me nuts) and they give all kinds of interesting stats for your reading.

As usual, this list is coming out the first week of January since I give myself until midnight on December 31 to cram all the holiday reading in.

Okay, here are my Top Ten Favorite Reads of 2023...

In the past I've picked 10 Fiction and 10 Nonfiction, but this year I just went with one big Top 10 list and a few honorable mentions. With the number of books I'm reading a year, it didn't feel like a true Best Of if half the books I read made it on the year-end list.

So here they all are, a mix of fiction and nonfiction, books published in 2023 and books published years ago. Just a pure BEST OF this time.

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BELOVED by Toni Morrison

This stands out as one of the most notable experiences of my reading life. This novel is stunning and shocking and will stay with me forever. I am so mad at myself for not reading this book earlier in my life.

It deserves all the praise it's ever gotten. I know a lot of students read this one in high school, but I'm not sure I would have grasped the gravity and genius of it then.

We read BELOVED for the Secret Stuff Book Club and had a fantastic conversation about it over zoom that only enhanced my love for this classic.

SHARK HEART by Emily Habeck

This was my favorite book published in 2023. It's about newlyweds who discover after their marriage that the husband is slowly turning into a great white shark. Literally.

Don't dismiss it just because that premise sounds too wacky (although if you're like me, that premise bumped it right to the top of my To Read list). This story is incredible. It's about identity and love and letting go.

I've talked about this book so much on the podcast this year (links below) and hope I did the title (and author) justice.

HAPPINESS FALLS by Angie Kim

This book was the surprise of the year for me! I picked it up as a palette cleanser in the fall and it just knocked my socks off. I liked it even more than Kim's previous novel Miracle Creek.

This book is a little hard to explain in blurb form, but in the opening pages you realize this is about a family and the dad/husband has gone mysteriously missing after going to the park with his teenage, nonverbal son.

This story has dysfunctional family dynamics and science and hope and, yes, a mystery at the center of it. I've never read anything like it and couldn't stop thinking about it.

THE PERFECTIONIST’S GUIDE TO LOSING CONTROL by Katherine Morgan Schafler

I know this title has some of you quaking in your boots! But I felt SO SEEN by this book after years (a lifetime?) of beating myself up for control issues, perfectionist tendencies, and how it all plays into sometimes debilitating anxiety.

This book let me see some of these things as strengths and not as something to be wrestled out of me.

BONUS: The Perfectionist's Guide To Losing Control is the October 2024 selection for the SECRET STUFF BOOK CLUB and Katherine Morgan Schafler plans to join in our book club zoom meeting! I'm already counting down the months.

You can join the Secret Stuff Book Club (and see everything we're reading in 2024 here).

SEARCH by Michelle Huneven

This 2022 novel was not on my radar until recently and I've been talking about it ever since.

It's about the search committee looking for a new pastor of a Unitarian Universalist church. The narrator is a successful food writer and restaurant critic (much like the author herself) and though it's set in a church, the story is not at all religious.

It's about a group of people on a true search for the best path forward, with various personalities, demographics, and agendas in mind for the future of their beloved institution.

It's a microcosm for any group I've ever been a part of, and there's a scene towards the end that I'll never forget.

THE SENTENCE by Louise Erdrich

Yet another author that I am kicking myself that I didn't read earlier!

The Sentence is one of Louise Erdrich's latest novels but it has me wanting to read her entire backlist. It's set in a bookstore in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, with the pandemic raging and the amidst the murder (and subsequent protests) of George Floyd.

I was so taken with Erdrich's writing that I made a point to visit her actual bookstore (which is eerily similiar to the one in the book) when I was in Minnesota this summer.

IT WAS AN UGLY COUCH ANYWAY by Elizabeth Passarella

This is the first book on the list that I listened to as an audiobook and it's great in that format. However some of Passarella's lines are so good I wish I had a pen with me to underline.

This is a book about grief. And home. And it's laugh out loud funny while also staying so tender.

I had Elizabeth on the podcast in the spring on Episode 178 and she's just as delightful as you would imagine.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

This book is all over everyone's end-of-2023 lists and I totally get why.

This is a family novel (very loosely based on or borrowed from Little Women, which didn't affect me much but made it extra special for many readers) about sisters and their significant others and their choices.

I loved this story and it inspired a very lively conversation in my real life book club (we did not all agree on various character's motivations or decisions) and was just a fiction standout in my reading life last year.

HOW TO SELL A HAUNTED HOUSE by Grady Hendrix

Gear up because this book is about killer puppets.

And even though it is ridiculous and campy, I did still get a little spooked with this novel, which is also about families and sibling relationships and addiction and mental health.

This is one of those books that had to grow on me. I'm not even sure what I rated it when I was finished, but I read it early in the year and I was still talking about in December, so that's worth landing on this list.

HOW TO STAY MARRIED by Harrison Scott Key

I listened to this book on audio and I highly recommend you do the same, because the delivery here is unmatched.

This is a marriage memoir from a period when Harrison Scott Key discovered his wife had been having an affair. So, not a light topic and not treated with a light hand but still somehow hilarious and heart wrenching and gave me a ton to think about. (Would also make for a great book club book, but beware that I could see the book flaring up a lot of emotions.)

This book does have a faith element to it, which I know is not everyone's jam. It's one of those books that I wanted to do errands or just drive around my neighborhood because I couldn't stop listening.

There were so many books that didn't make the Top 10, but here are a few that I especially want to mention:

SPARE by Prince Harry

What can I say? I loved this memoir. I'm not a royal watcher, so I didn't have any attachments to what was said here, but I was fascinated from page 1. Audio is the way to go on this one.

THE FUTURE by Naomi Alderman

I just finished this one over the holiday and it was really creative (and possibly prescient in some ways). I didn't like it quite as much as The Power, but I just enjoy Alderman's storytelling a lot. She will be an auto buy for me now.

WE ALL WANT IMPOSSIBLE THINGS by Catherine Newman

This was the first book I read in 2023 and it was such a fresh, sardonic, anti-hero voice tackling the impossible task of caring for a best friend who is dying.

YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL by Maggie Smith

This is a divorce memoir that will break your heart and in many ways says some of the things about marriage out loud that I hadn't read quite like this before.

And those are my favorites of the year!