Among the various unfortunate side effects of writing is the issue of recommendations. I finally understand the plight of my father, an orthopedic surgeon, who scarcely makes it through a Bar Mitzvah party or a trip to the grocery store without being asked for a free consultation. While I have you, doc, my gout has been acting up. Any recommendations?
Writers are not the only people expected to proffer an endless stream of recs. The celebrity book club cottage industry has trickled down to influencers, and everyone from President Barack Obama to Tinx offers “curated” best-of lists. These book lists are personal to an extent, in that they function as expressions of personal brands, one of the few unironic status symbols left. This is better than what can be said of the end-of-the-year lists of many major publications, whose books sections are glorified P.R. for publishing conglomerates (though at this point, traditional or digital media is less likely to move the needle than the BookTok algorithm).
All this coincides with the season of gifting, when publishers and bookstores make up for the rest of the year’s losses by pushing the same dozen bestsellers and award-winners onto bespoke holiday gift guides. What do you get the person who has everything? A book, of course, but not just any book. A new book, preferably hardcover, and well-known enough to be a conversation piece when it’s accidentally left on the mantle.
I don’t mean to shame those who crave the hot book of the moment, or those whose jobs depend on sponsored listicles treating books like any other commodity. I recognize their taste is different from mine, and while I think mine is better, I try not to hold it against them. I judge them the same way I judge someone who prefers pork hot dogs to beef, wears an ugly jacket, or drives a gaudy car. Everyone ought to read what they like, but readers at least deserve some alternative versions of what they ought to like untethered to the Q4 marketing calendar.
A related problem: it’s much easier to tell what someone will hate than what they’ll enjoy (“Taste is made of a thousand distates.”) This introduces some awkwardness into the job of the honest recommender. The new Knausgaard is life-changing, but I doubt you’d like it… or, even worse, Rushdie’s latest was criminally overrated, but it’s right up your alley!
Again I think of my father, who may dread off-the-clock check-ups but is always willing to use our couch as an examination table when my friends sprain their ankles, and eager to talk a family member through an important medical decision. Recommendations are best when they’re organic, or at least specific.
My imperfect solution is to refuse to limit my recommendations to the arbitrarily chosen strictures of the last ten months. I’m sure there were great books published in 2023, but we have the rest of our lives to find them. What follows is a list of the six best novels I read in 2023, along with the type of reader that might like them. None of them came out this year. And now that they’re on the record, can we please talk about something else at the holiday party?
[Links are to Bookshop.org, which sources from independent bookstores across the country. If you use my affiliate links embedded in this post, I will receive a small commission from your purchase. Titles not available on Bookshop.org have links to Biblio or Abebooks (owned by Amazon). Better yet, if you don’t want to support me or Jeff Bezos, walk down to your local bookstore and ask them to order it for you.]
Mating by Norman Rush (1991) [Bookshop.org]
For the person who geeks out on obscure anthropology and political science / your friend in a codependent relationship with an alluring mercurial genius
Narrated by a female American graduate student living in Botswana, Rush’s expansive and esoteric first novel won the National Book Award but was largely forgotten until its resurrection by the word-of-mouth enthusiasm of 30-something digital magazine editors in New York City, and I have to say, they nailed this one. Our unnamed narrator follows the legendary Nelson DeNoon to his mysterious experimental community in the Kalahari Desert, where she finds Tsau, a collectivist society run entirely by women. Decades before the coinage of “heteropessimism,” Rush’s ambitious novel interrogates inequality on a deeply personal and world-historical level, asking hard questions about romantic love and how to organize a society. The narrative voice is energetic, wickedly ironic, and deeply strange - this book exists beyond comparison in a category of its own. Warning: not for those annoyed by obscure, pretentious vocab
The Cheffe by Marie NDiaye (2019) [Bookshop.org] [Abebooks.com]
For the self-taught cook who can’t keep their life as clean as their kitchen
NDiaye, one of France’s foremost living writers, explores the unlikely origins of the artist through a poor household servant whose gluttonous employers (the hilariously bourgeois Clapeaus) nurture her preternatural culinary talent. The detailed pleasures of French recipes come with a side of class resentment. Narrated by the Cheffe’s young, troubled admirer, this simply told and emotionally complex novel of the Cheffe’s professional triumphs and personal travails is exquisitely crafted, much like her infamous peach tartine.
Tuff by Paul Beatty (2000) [Bookshop.org]
For your friend who can actually take a joke
The heroic, irreverent story of Winston “Tuffy” Foshay by the author of the Booker Prize winner The Sellout. Tuffy is 19 years old, 320 pounds, and stuck on a stoop in Harlem, perpetually disappointing his girl, his kid, and his crew of misfits. At the urging of Inez, his adoptive Marxist revolutionary mother, and Spencer Throckmorton, Black Rabbi and Tuffy’s Big Brother-appointed mentor, he launches a longshot campaign for city council. Tuffy’s unorthodox campaign is a send-up of New York City politics and stereotypes about young Black men. Like all Beatty, fearlessly funny yet tender. Bonus: permission to tell whoever sees you reading it that the person who recommended it to you (me) has met with Paul Beatty at a “cat cafe” on the Lower East Side, even though we are both allergic to cats.
The Employees Olga Ravn (2020) [Bookshop.org]
For science fiction heads / your friend who needs to leave their soulless job
From the Danish poet and writer Ravn, a “workplace novel of the 22nd Century.” Presented as a series of interviews and progress reports with the disgruntled humans and humanoids of a distant spaceship. The crew’s existential reaction to the appearance of certain Earth-evoking “objects” causes an H.R. headache for their masters. For fans of Severance on AppleTV+.
Libra by Don DeLillo (1988) [Bookshop.org]
For the skeptic (some might call them a “conspiracy” “theorist”)
Fictionalization of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, who went to middle school blocks from where Don grew up in the Bronx. Come for DeLillo’s paranoid descriptions of mid-century Fort Worth and the Soviet Union, stay for his obsessively researched account of Oswald and the Cold War intelligence community. Based on DeLillo’s 1983 Rolling Stone article “American Blood,” wherein he describes the Kennedy assassination as “a story about our uncertain grip on the world - a story exploded into life by a homeless man who himself could not grip things tightly and hold them fast, whose soul-scarred loneliness and rage led him to invent an American moment that echoes down the decades.” The rest of the article has disappeared forever, wiped from the internet archive without a trace. I’m just saying!
Real People by Alison Lurie (1969) [Abebooks.com] [Biblio]
For the person having a mid- (or quarter-) life crisis / your friend who just needs a large property upstate to realize their untapped artistic potential
Janet is a moderately successful short-story writer trapped in her suburban New Jersey life, where she plays housewife for an insurance executive husband. But for a few weeks each summer she escapes to Illyria, an artist colony at a New England mansion where she can be her true self. When the proprietor’s nubile granddaughter Anna May comes to visit, Janet’s fellow artists, no matter how esteemed or bohemian, lose their wits, and the vices of the real world threaten to destroy her artistic paradise. Lurie’s observant eye is witty and surprising, and her thinly veiled characters are a snapshot of the 1960s New York intellectuals. A slim, gossipy novel that “goes down pleasantly, like a glass of lemonade.”
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Happy reading,
Micah