Top 10 Books of 2023
(This is a repost of my 2023 wrap-up with a slightly cleaned-up transcript below for easy browsing. I write better than this I swear, I just speak in chaotic run-on sentences on camera.)
2023 has been one of the best reading years of my life both in terms of quantity and quality. I read around 70 books this year and all of them were bangers, pretty much. It was very good in terms of the stuff I read, so it means narrowing it down to 10 books was a challenge to say the least.
However, it was a challenge that I wanted to undertake because I don't do a lot of like ranking and stuff throughout the year. This is my one chance to look at everything I read and then really see how it stacked up against each other. I don't rate books of five or anything like that so this is my chance to say okay what stuck with me throughout the year, what did I really enjoy the most.
For me, that basically comes down to how rent free is this living in my head after all this time, after all of these other books that I've read. Am I still finding myself coming back to certain books again and again in terms of what I'm thinking about, what I'm recommending to people at my job, what I'm recommending to people here on the channel. That really helped narrow things down.
I was surprised when I did this that some of the things that I thought for sure were going to make the list didn't make the list. Then there were a couple of other things that I was on the fence about and once I really sat with the process of making the list, I was like, yeah, they definitely deserve to be here because I keep thinking about them.
So without further ado let's get into this. I have my top 10 books of the year and I have ranked them 10 to one so we'll dive in at 10 and we'll meet you at one.
10. The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings
(Buy it on Bookshop.org)
This book was one that I had my eye on for quite a while and when the paperback release finally came out I jumped on it. It's got an incredible cover and it's about music, mythology, and all sorts of cool stuff.
It's kind of an urban fantasy and what really sticks with with me is it's got kids as the main characters. You don't see that often in books for adults and I think that's really an underrepresented thing. So I really appreciated that aspect of it.
I think the language was beautiful and there's a lot of weird stuff that happens in the book so you needed that language to be able to paint these pictures that are both feelings and what's going on. It’s kind of cliche to be like “the book runs on vibes” but I mean it does. It's a book about art and what art means to people and what art can mean to a city.
I found this book to just be very fascinating. In my review of it (that barely anybody has watched) I compared it to kind of like Percy Jackson for adults as written by Neil Gaiman if that has you intrigued at all. I think reading the couple Percy Jackson books that I've read there's this element of kids being thrust into this world of gods and stuff. They're in over their heads and weird stuff keeps happening to them but ultimately it comes together and it makes sense. It's kind of how I feel about this book. There are big stretches where I was like I have no idea what's going on here but I like it. That's a big deal for me.
So I really like The Ballad of Parilous Graves. Check it out.
9. The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz
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This is responsible for my absolute favorite video that I made for the channel. If you haven't watched it consider watching it. I wrote a hardcore song as a review of The Terraformers and it was just incredibly fun making that video.
So, yeah, I'm going to have a soft spot for this book because of that. Beyond the review, I found this to be a really interesting science fiction book. It's so far in the future that what it means to be human and how we interact with the world around us has really really changed. And it's so far from what we are right now that it lets the author explore some topics that actually are relevant to us but in a very kind of outlandish sci-fi way. So I found that to be very cool.
It's told in three chunks and each one has a pretty big passage of time between. In each section you're getting to know new characters and discover new problems, all of it building off of the stuff that happened in the sections before. Since this is about terraforming, obviously a process that takes a long time, it's cool to see the whole scope of that and all the stuff that goes into it.
This is a book very heavily invested in themes. So if you’re looking for something that's going to make you think about our world today but do that through the lens of sci-fi, I think this is a great pick
8. In Conquest Born by C. S. Friedman
This was a book I did not know about before this year. It was recommended to me on the channel and I looked into it and thought it would be a great fit for me.
And, uh, it was.
I really dug it. It's an 80s sci-fi and it has a lot of the things that I really like from that era of sci-fi where it's a sweeping space opera but it's tackling social themes. It's set up with these two competing Empires and each has very strict ideas about what it means to be a member of their society. They're kind of Yin and Yang in that way so you get to see all the biases and all that stuff play into each other as they circle each other and try to one-up each other.
It’'s very very interesting. I thought the voice was very cool, it does some interesting literary things like it switches into first person for some chunks. So we see a broad scope of characters along with following the two main characters. I thought it was a very interesting way to tell this story and again give it that scope.
It's one of the few books that has actually reminded me of my experience reading Dune. Dune jumps so much from different heads that it really fills out that book in a way that if you were just stuck in one person's head it wouldn't work as well. They are very different books altogether but that aspect of reading it is something that reminded me of Dune.
I think this book sticks in my head because it was such a surprise, having this book that kind of came out of nowhere but has been around for a long time. I've never heard anybody else talk about it so to have that come into my reading life—and really set this foundation for some things that I would read later in the year—was very very cool. I love finding these kind of hidden gems, I mean it was pretty acclaimed at the time but it's been 40 years now basically so finding stuff like that is always awesome.
7. Mad Ship by Robin Hobb
(buy it on bookshop.org)
I started Live Ship Traders this year and I only made it through the first two and it's kind of because Mad Ship was so awesome that I wanted to savor it and give myself time before jumping into Ship of Destiny. I'm just now, six months later, ready to jump into Ship of Destiny so I'll be reading that in the first part of 2024.
My goodness, I knew I liked Robin Hobb from the Farseer Trilogy. That really impressed me but I wouldn't have put that in my top series of all time. Live Ship Traders I think will be up there. I am so into it. It's a different fantasy than I've ever read before. It's got really interesting worldbuilding and I love all the like the nautical stuff. I love being on the ships and the culture she's created.
I think it just does so many cool things and Robin Hobb’s mastery of character second to none. Her ability to start characters in different parts of their journey where you think you're going to hate somebody and then you get won over by them or you're like oh I think this is going to be a person I'm going to like and then they end up doing things that you absolutely despise. It's just like you never know where her characters are going to go and I think that is very cool. and you know just
The way that Mad Ship ended with what's going to happen leading into Ship of Destiny is so awesome. I very much love the series and keep recommending it to people. They just came out with the UK covers in the US. That just happened in December and I've been recommending them to people at my store and it's been very cool to see rando people in real life picking up the books that I see everybody talking about online.
6. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
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One of my goals for this year was to read something, at least one thing, in the magical realism world. This was the first one that came up for me and, uh, it's it's very good.
I have said that the word masterpiece gets thrown around a lot but this is one of the few books that I would think it really applies to. I've never read anything like this and it's really really impressive. I think the visceral nature of the prose is very impressive. I mean it gets down and dirty into some grim details but it's also told in this almost like fairy tale like quality at some points. You have this kind of shift of being up close and stuff’s happening and then kind of pulling back every now and again, which helps with the scope of the story.
It talks about an area of the world that I'm not as familiar with, being the privileged white guy that I am. So that's always a cool thing when you're reading a fiction book and then it makes you go look into real historical events. I appreciate that aspect of it and then you know just the characters in this book are unforgettable for me. They're just scenes that are etched into my brain.
I think the way that the magical realism elements are woven into this story is very interesting. It's so different than fantasy stuff that I typically read where the magic is there but it's not a focus at all. It's not something that's used to solve problems, it's just kind of an element of the world and people treat it that way. It’'s not The Force where people are going around and moving things with their mind and having magical battles, it's just kind of like this undercurrent that flows through the world. I found that to be a very cool way of telling a story and adding just enough of a buffer between the reader and some of the horrific events that happen that you can kind of tell yourself “oh this is just a story” when in reality a lot of it is based in truth. So you know that part is a bummer but the story is good.
5. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
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This one could be a little bit of recency bias but I think if anything I'm downplaying it. I'm intentionally not putting it like my number one read of the year because I just finished this trilogy.
I powered through it. I often do not read trilogies back to back to back— as evidenced by what I'm doing with Liveship where I've waited six months after Mad Ship—but I've read this whole thing in like two weeks. It has been really really impressive for me to read this book that I've had it on my TBR for years. Whenever it was being nominated for the Hugo, winning the Nebula, all that stuff, it got on my radar and for whatever reason I just didn't read it then. I was kind of in a period of time where I wasn't reading as much so it just kind of didn't make the cut at that time.
But they just put out new fancy editions of the trilogy because Ann Leckie wrote another book that's set in this universe and that kind of got my attention. We brought them back into the store and I said you know finally I have to read this book.
And it just blew me away. It's got elements of Murderbot in that you've got an AI as the main character but it does a lot of different things. I would describe this series and Murderbot as like a chef having the same ingredients but using those ingredients to make completely different meals. There are things that will be familiar but it's going to leave a different taste in your mouth.
I was a little bit worried that maybe the trilogy wasn't going to like stick the landing because I haven't heard as many people talk about this series over the last few years. So I thought maybe it went out on a whimper and people didn't like that and that's why it hasn't got so much love. But honestly, I love the ending to this trilogy and so that just makes me love Ancillary Justice that much more.
It's a great start to a trilogy. there's really cool stuff happening with how it's portraying humanity and AI and the question of what it means to be a person. Throughout the series, there's so much about ethics and morality. It does the sci-fi thing that I love, like that I keep talking about, where it takes the fantastical and sci-fi elements and uses them to focus the lens back on our world today. I think you could write a lot of papers based on the philosophies and things that are being discussed and exposed throughout these three books. It's very very good. If you haven't read very much sci-fi this is one you should for sure put on your radar.
4. Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay
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When I talk about books that stick with me and things that make this top 10 list, some of that has to do with expectations. Does a book live up to your expectations and that kind of thing.
I really liked the first book, Sailing to Sarantium. I was very impressed with it. I love everything that I’ve read by Guy Gavriel Kay so far and so I went in kind of thinking “cool I know what I'm going to get. I'm going to like this book and it's going to be another great Guy Gavriel Kay story”.
I was not prepared to love this book as much as I did.
It took everything from Sailing to Sarantium and then just ratcheted it up another level. I was fascinated by the choices he made and I love Guy Gavriel Kay's prose. I think he just does so many wonderful things with the English language and the way that he tells these stories is just…nobody else out there is doing what he's doing. He does it so well and his humor is underrated. There is one of the funniest lines in this book and it almost was like too funny and knocked me out of the story but it was solid gold and I'm glad that his editors let him keep that in there.
Yeah, Lord of Emperors. It's good GGK. I read this near the beginning of the year and it's still one I'm thinking about so it is awesome.
3. The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud
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I was kind of surprised that I ended up putting this at number three. But as I was going through all of the reads that I've had this year, this is one that has stuck with me the most.
I came across this book simply because I work at a bookstore and I'm looking at catalogs, seeing what's coming up, and trying to decide what I want to bring into my store. So basically every month I'm looking at what are the sci-fi fantasy releases this year, what are some of the ones I can highlight, what do I want to read.
This one caught my eye because it is a Sci-Fi story that's set on Mars and was kind of described as like The Martian Chronicles and True Grit had a baby. That is extremely up my alley so I gave it a go and it just, again, it surpassed my expectations. I thought it was going to be a fun romp of a story I guess and it ended up having so much depth to it.
If you want to talk about being able to write a thesis paper on what a book is saying you could definitely do that here. There's some interesting thematic parallels to things that have happened in the last few years and I love the way that the Sci-Fi elements are depicted in the story. It takes place in the 1930s but they're on Mars and so the science is the kind of like Jules Verne-type, HG Wells-type science where there's a little bit of fantasy mixed in there and there's a little bit of just go with it. I'm fine with that. If you give me one big thing that you're asking me to buy into, I will buy into that and then just give me the rest of it as a solid story. And that's what happens here.
The other element of this that I liked is that the author is primarily a horror writer. So they approach the story and character safety in a way that is more akin to horror than traditional sci-fi and fantasy where there's a kind of plot armor that often protects people. Not so much the case here. That's not really a spoiler but it's just kind of a brutal scenario and world that they're in and I just really liked it.
2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
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This is one of the most recent books I've read and this is going to be like a top 10 book of all time for me probably because it is just so good.
I'm not a big crier when it comes to reading books. I'll cry in movies but I don't tend to cry over books and, uh, yeah I done did some crying for this book. It's heartbreaking but it's beautiful. And the language! Multiple times while reading this book I kind of had to stop and just be like “I can't believe a human being wrote this amazing sentence”.
The descriptive elements and the scope of the story and how well you get to know these characters. It just hits so many things for me. The setting is around the dawn of the comic book era in the 30s and 40s and that's something that I hold near and dear to my heart with my love of comic books. So that sucked me into the story and then everything else that happens from there is just masterful.
This book deserves all the praise that it continually gets and, I keep saying it, but I would have read like 500 more pages of just these characters existing in the world. I loved it and was sad about the things that happened in the book and sad that the book ended. It's one that I'm going to reread probably again and again because I just loved it that much.
1. Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
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My number one book of the year, surprising absolutely nobody who has watched my channel, is Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway.
When I've talked about what makes a book stick in my brain and what makes me rank a book so high out of everything else I've read this year it comes down to expectations and the things that I personally love as a reader. This just hit so many things.
This was another one that I knew nothing about the author going in. I knew very little about what the story was going to be other than that it was a sci-fi detective book. I kind of expected this to be something that I enjoyed lightly in the moment and then would kind of forget about. As it happened I just keep thinking about this book. I wasn't prepared for it to be so good.
I love hard-boiled detective fiction. My two initial loves in reading are fantasy and then in college, I was introduced to hard-boiled detective fiction by a professor. I went on a binge there where I read a lot of stuff in that genre. I like the tropes of it. I love the kind of sardonic detective voice. I think hard-boiled detective Fiction—more than like cozy mystery or thrillers—there is a lot of social commentary that ends up happening because they end up in these situations where they're dealing with everybody from the bottom of society to the top of society. You're seeing how they view these various people, so seeing those reactions gives you this extra lens to view the world through and find that to be very compelling. So having that element done really well as a detective story was great.
Then the worldbuilding for this is kind of near future where there's this drug that makes people live longer it makes them physically bigger. The impact on society around that was very interesting, very cool. There's a lot of social commentary kind of running through the book. Then there's the fact that the people who take this drug and are bigger are called Titans, which brings to mind mythology. There's for sure an element of Greek mythology that runs through this as well. So looking at it through that lens was very cool.
This is a book that is rated really high for me specifically. I know a few other people who have read it and they've all liked it and they've all really enjoyed it. But I think because of my position of coming in knowing very little about it, having nobody tell me one way or another if it's good or not, and then just being kind of blown away by it, having it hit those specific notes around detective fiction and sci-fi that I really like, it was a perfect storm for being my favorite book of the year.
So I hope more people will continue to read Titanium Noir. I have since found out that Nick Harkaway is John LeCarre's son and that kind of explains why he is so good at this style of book. And I've been informed that other books by Nick Harkaway are very different and weird and awesome and that is just very much for me. So look out for more Nick Harkaway in 2024.
There we go, that's the top 10 of 2023. I read so much awesome stuff that I couldn't fit everything in here. There are a few books that I kind of can't believe I didn't end up putting in here but they just didn't quite live in my brain as much as the 10 here. So I'll link the videos down below that kind of correlate with my top 10 here and, yeah, I'll see you around.
Remember: Liking things is cool. Spend more time with stuff you like.
