This should have been my first post of 2023, but here, belatedly, is a list of the books I read in 2023:
Fiction
Companion Piece by Ali Smith
Daydreams of Angels by Heather O’Neill
Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet
Foster by Claire Keegan
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
Look at me by Jennifer Egan
Nirliit by Juliana Léveillé-Trudel (en Français)
Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood
Tenth of December by George Saunders
The Hour after Happy Hour by Mary O’Donoghue
The Singularities by John Banville
The Writer’s Torch ed. by Boumans, et al
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
Tiohtiá:ke by Michel Jean (en Français)
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Poetry
Ariel – The Restored Edition by Syliva Plath
If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin
Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert
Non-fiction
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy
Negative Space by Cristín Leach
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
It's hard to pick a favourite from this list, but I particularly loved the novels by Paul Harding and Claire Keegan and their completely opposite approaches: the former for the brilliance of his prose in capturing the immediate experience of his characters, and the latter for the deceptive simplicity of her narration and the way it creeps up on you. The non-fiction work by Cristín Leach is wonderfully insightful on the intersection between writing lives and personal lives and I added many quotes from it to my notebook.
See also:
September 2021 - December 2022 reading list
January 2020 - August 2021 reading list
