Books I Read in 2023

I did not read that many books in 2023. Sometimes I worry that my reading seems to have declined greatly from what I remember as a child and then a student, and I’m sure that it has – though to be honest, many years of books compress together and densify in the memory, and in college I did not necessarily fully read every book I claimed to have read, or did not read it with the patience to appreciate it. And I did begin to read more regularly again by the end of 2023, and I believe I read more than I did in 2022. I’m going to work my way up the list of the ten books I logged that I count as having read last year (with a somewhat liberal definition of ‘2023’), ending with the best – but each of these books was good.

10. Red Mars

I have a complicated relationship with science fiction. Sometimes I have started a book, suckered in by an ingenious premise, only to discover that the writing, narrative, and characterization are utter dreck. On the other hand, it’s been one of my favorite genres since childhood, and, crucially, one of the ones that reliably keeps me entertained and reading if I am otherwise lacking the discipline. It’s for that reason that I downloaded Kim Stanley Robinson’s classic Red Mars (1991) onto my phone to have something to read on the long train rides across central Europe at the end of 2022.

Initially I found the characters off-putting – they seemed petty and small in their intrigues and interpersonal conflicts, and I felt that the human narrative seemed to be a lower priority to Robinson than the technical fantasy of terraforming Mars, or Marxian social analysis. However, once I had gotten used to the kind of book it was, I began to appreciate the characters and the human narrative more. Robinson is a more interesting socialist precisely because he so clearly understands that humans are flawed and selfish in ways that persist even among his heroic scientific elites, and even under radically changed and even utopian material conditions. There’s a kind of honesty there – the desire to improve what can be improved, with the frankness to acknowledge the unbridgeable gap between that and perfection.

9. Idylls of the King

Alfred, Lord Tennyson is of course the institutional British poet par excellence, and he has written some of the poetry I find most moving and profound (In Memoriam A.H.H.). This retelling of the Matter of Britain has all his impressive strength as a poet on display; but it’s difficult to make the poem consistently sing at the emotional heights Tennyson is capable of elsewhere, when you factor in the constraints of the narrative form, the formalism of the verse, and the sheer length of the work. There are parts of this that aren’t really representative of how great Tennyson can be. But there remains a great deal of human depth in the work, and the final Passing of Arthur is beautiful.

As an aside, I took seven years to finish this book, partly because I insist on reading poetry aloud, but mostly because I had set it aside for a long time. My bookmark marks the day I believe I started – it’s my train ticket from Taichung to Taipei on April 30, 2016. I recall walking back and forth across Taipei reading the book out loud under my breath on the sidewalk, probably looking thoroughly insane to passersby.

8. Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall

I am trying to read more history and nonfiction, and it seems more important than ever to understand Russia. Of course, Andrew Meier’s journalistic travelogue memoir is a snapshot of its time – published in 2002, it reflects his experience living in Russia during and after the final years of the Soviet Union, but mainly it represents a series of journeys through Russia in the decade of chaos that was the 90s. This is no systemic analysis of what went wrong, and I don’t know how much it reveals about Russia now, after twenty years of Putin’s regime. But it opens a jarringly vivid experiential window into a few of the different Russias that existed in the opportunistic chaos of its day. It is not an encouraging book.

7. Green Mars

The second book in Robinson’s trilogy, published in 1993, is far stranger than the first. The degree of social imagination and the desire to explore alternative ways of living expand dramatically, and the characters’ experiences grow further away from the world we recognize – and yet I found this to really grow on me. This book follows through on the premises of the first, and pursues a bizarre but interesting line of thought.

6. The Future of Nostalgia

Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001) is a book I have now read three times. The first time, ten years ago now, I was writing a paper that involved nostalgia as a theme, and I wanted a source to talk about it, but I was in between college and grad school, so I couldn’t check anything out of academic libraries. I found Boym’s work on the shelf in the Suzzallo-Allen library at the UW, and read it at a desk in the library. In the end, it wasn’t actually that relevant to the paper I wrote, but the book helped me recognize my emotional obsession with longing and nostalgia simply by dissecting and delineating the concept in such detail. I read it the second time for the purpose of selecting excerpts to assign to my unfortunate students, who I am sure had other things they would rather be doing, and then I returned to it this last year out of, I suppose, nostalgia.

Far from simply being a theoretical discussion of a concept that was originally categorized as a medical condition, a literal homesickness, this book is specific and deeply personal. The late Professor Boym, who left us too early, immigrated to the United States from her hometown of Leningrad, and the book is replete with interesting cases of the nostalgia of displaced eastern European dissidents and artists. It’s also a reflection on the decade immediately following the collapse of communism, which left Warsaw-Pact cities struggling to discover and invent their new relationships to their past, sometimes by deconstructing all previous ideological and aesthetic regimes, sometimes by rushing into an artificially reconstructed traditionalism, and sometimes by actually engaging in half-ironic, half-sincere nostalgia for their recent communist past. At the same time, the work is universal, and it ably demonstrates the dictum that general truths are apprehended best in specific instances.

5. Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers

I wasn’t sure exactly how to evaluate Gentle and Lowly (2020). I did not necessarily enjoy the experience of reading it, because some of the encouraging things it says seem basic and not particularly revelatory to someone with a long history in the church. More importantly, like much theological and ministerial work that attempts to justify the ways of God to men, or in this case, to explain the heart of God, it will often say something that is meant to be reassuring, only for me to immediately recognize that there is still some kind of caveat or condition for resentment and anxiety to latch onto. I’m not sure that’s so much an issue with the book itself, as it is a struggle I have with orthodox evangelical theology. The prose is also not particularly impressive, and is more sincerely sentimental and stylistically successful. I also am not sure what to make of Dane Ortlund, the author, who it seems may not always embody the gentleness he writes of, although there isn’t really enough to draw a strong conclusion from here: https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2022/december/illinois-investigation-eeoc-employment-ortlund.html.

Having said all that, at the end of the day, whether or not one is fully comforted by it or feels it lives up to its promise, the book does make a strong and encouraging case for the primacy of love in God’s character and attitude toward people, and in that core message I think it is both correct and encouraging, my issues notwithstanding. I would recommend this, perhaps not as something that answers all doubts or objections, but as a helpful corrective to our tendency to feel antagonized by God at various times for different reasons.

4. Blue Mars

The final book in the Mars Trilogy, published in 1995, is also the strongest. As I said at the start of this post, I began the trilogy feeling put off by its characters and the entire human social dynamic of the story. I felt convinced that, like so much science fiction, that would be the series’ Achilles’ heel, with the technical details taking priority. In the end, I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Blue Mars is first and foremost about the human experience of wonder at the beauty of the world, colliding with our experience of mortality, aging, and the collapse of memory and mental identity on which we have relied for ourselves. By the end of the series, Robinson has almost pulled a bait and switch on me – I thought I was getting a treatise on how to terraform Mars, but it ended up focusing on the tiny details of human life, and on those people. There are moments of description in here which are actual poetry.

3. Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year

Malcolm Guite’s 2011 volume of poetry focused on the liturgical calendar doesn’t just have one of the most beautiful cover designs of recent years – it actually achieves what it sets out to do, poetically. I realize this is a pitch clean over home plate for me, since it appeals to all my vague aesthetic affections for a sort of imagined Oxford Anglicanism, but I think the substance here is real and moving. Most of all, these poems actually changed how I felt about God in a positive and marked way, as I was reading them – while also simply being beautiful poems.

2. The Thirty Years War

The great historian C.V. Wedgwood published her masterpiece on the great German conflagration of the seventeenth century in 1938, when she was only twenty-eight years old, in the longed-for land of Oxford in the 1930s, a place and time where scholars didn’t even bother translating French and Latin because they assumed the reader spoke them. The book is a gripping account of the complicated causes of the war, and ways in which it became a self-perpetuating entity, which would find replacement combatants as nations dropped out. There’s a focus on the horrible suffering of the German peasantry at the hands of nearly every other country around them, as the Holy Roman Empire shattered in the wake of the Reformation and opportunistic mercenaries and princes rushed into on all sides. But this book is not simply a fascinating piece of historical narrative; it’s an ominous and freighted portent when read in its own context: a book about a war of unimaginable human suffering in Germany, fought for no good reason at all, and written in the aftermath of the First World War, and only the year before the outbreak of the Second. With that in mind, I’d like to quote two excerpts from the final pages of the book, where Wedgwood reflects on her context – painfully conscious of the First World War, and perhaps unconsciously anticipating the next. Here they are:

"After the expenditure of so much human life to so little purpose, men might have grasped the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgement of the sword. Instead, they rejected religion as an object to fight for and found others.

As there was no compulsion towards a conflict which, in despite of the apparent bitterness of parties, took so long to engage and needed so much assiduous blowing to fan the flame, so no right was vindicated by its ragged end. The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict. The overwhelming majority in Europe, the overwhelming majority in Germany, wanted no war; powerless and voiceless, there was no need even to persuade them that they did. The decision was made without thought of them. Yet of those who, one by one, let themselves be drawn into the conflict, few were irresponsible and nearly all were genuinely anxious for an ultimate and better peace. Almost all - one excepts the King of Sweden - were actuated rather by fear than by lust of conquest or passion of faith. They wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not since, that war breeds only war."

And reflecting on the unbelievable reports of mass death in the war:

"Yet this exaggeration is in itself significant, for at least in official documents, it would not have been possible without some element of truth to bear it out; and if contemporary writers wail in too long-sustained and high a monotone, that is significant, if not of a fact, at least of a mood which must have had root somewhere in actuality. Whether Germany lost three-quarters of her population, or a small percentage, it is certain that never before, and possibly never since, in her history had there been so universal a sense of irretrievable disaster, so widespread a consciousness of the horror of the period which lay behind."

1. Selected Stories (Alice Munro)

For about a semester or two in my sophomore year of college I flirted with the idea of being a creative writing major, and in one of the only classes I took in the subject, we were assigned one of Alice Munro’s short stories. At that time I was not a great reader of short stories, and I did now know who Alice Munro was – she did not win the Nobel Prize until two years later. But that one story made such a strong impression on me, not for its plot or characters or themes even, but for how it was observed, written, and how it felt, that I left that class with an eternal attachment to Munro and her work.

This selection, which I picked up in the University Bookstore in Seattle on one of the rainy nights I had walked to the library to research one of my papers, was compiled in 1996, though the stories were written between the mid-‘60s through the early ‘90s. There is a remarkable consistency to Munro’s work: each story has the same feeling of quiet, faded memory. The characters all resemble each other and are often reminiscing about lives in the same rural corner of Ontario, yet somehow that never for a moment feels old. To the degree that Munro is thematically repetitive, it’s a good kind of repetition, like how a symphony will repeat a musical theme in different movements. But instead of the sound of music, here there is an audible silence, a present absence, as Munro traces the shadows of lives like faded rings left by cups on the surface of a table. Alice Munro is one of the greatest writers of all time, and I believe any collection of her work would automatically be one of the best books I’ve ever read.