2023 Reading Highlights
Some of my favorite reads from the year, in no particular order.
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.
One of my good friends from grad school launched a book club a year or so ago to help us recover our love of reading, and this was one of her picks. There were so many things to love about this book. It is one of the most thoughtful, loving treatments of North Americans’ relationships to their stuff that I’ve ever read. There is a Marie Kondo-esque character who is absolutely fantastic, a scene with a character buying a snow globe on eBay that was so gutting and several incredibly beautiful descriptions of kitschy snow globes, amazing descriptions of how parents think about their children, some really moving depictions of how trauma and stuff can be connected–I am not doing it justice, but I really enjoyed reading it. The cartoonish characters reminded me of White Teeth, but it is way more compassionate toward them than the early-20s-Zadie Smith was to hers.
Tenth of December by George Saunders.
It took me a while to figure out why this was on my TBR list, but I eventually realized that this was the book our dear friend Matt Vermaire (who blogs here) brought to a book exchange party. I listened to it on audio. It was painful in how it captures self-aggrandizing illusions, and yet it maintains some hope for something like love. “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” is one of the best stories I have ever read. I’m keeping this vague because if you are reading this, you should go find it and read it so I can talk with you about it.
Margaret Drabble Trilogy: The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, The Gates of Ivory.
This trilogy about three female friends who are middle-ish-class intellectuals living in London from the late seventies to the early nineties filled a hole in my dissertation project that I didn’t know was there. I’m about five years too late to get them in that project, but I think they’ll make it into a book I’m working on. Probably very few other people would be interested in these, but I was so delighted to read them.
The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr.
This is probably the most important book that I read all year. Barr is a historian, and the work that she does to unpack the patriarchal shaping of church history and theology is so needed. Reading this book was a bit like having someone peek at a long-festering wound in my heart, clean it out, and apply a salve. There is a chapter near the end on how common it is for evangelical churches to use heresy to justify the subjugation of women that was so clear and persuasive. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
She Deserves Better by Joanna Sawatsky, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Sheila Wray Gregoire.
This was probably the most important book I read this year as a parent of a girl. It helped me to clarify for myself and our family some church deal breakers–like, we can’t go to a church where women don’t regularly preach. This book has some incredible research behind it, too, about things that women believe about themselves and how those beliefs correlate to different life experiences (like the likelihood to stay in an abusive relationship).
Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
This is a book of political theory that I found absolutely compelling. It has problems, but it’s one of the first Marxist-ish books that I’ve read that has offered a hopeful reframing for how I think about politics, especially in relation to the production of art. There is so much here that I found engaging, and I’ll probably be writing about it for years, but I read this when I was thinking a lot about the politics of church structures (and reading the previous two books on this list). I was learning more about the Tampa Underground, which calls itself a network of microchurches and is a whole bunch of people empowering each other to nimbly address a huge and diverse range of needs in the community, and it sort of clicked for me why I like this model of church so much. It also clicked for me how a politics undergirded by unconditional love (which is, incredibly, what Multitude ends reflecting on) simply cannot be too concerned with trying to fix all of the enormous institutional problems. If there is no on-the-ground care for others, no thinking about how to help the people around us survive here and now, no networking within our community to give and take and figure out how to live together better on a small scale, then we’re only resounding gongs, clanging symbols.
All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior.
I get a lot of my parent book recs from another grad school friend who has impeccable taste, and this was a fantastic exploration of what it means to be a parent. I found this so deeply validating. One of the studies that Senior writes about is how, when given a list of household tasks to rank in order of preference, childcare comes in something like seventeenth, after laundry and dishes and all kinds of things. I think about this book every time that I play peekaboo with my toddler for the sake of trying to make progress on a chore–dishes, cooking, laundry. Now that we have more childcare, I feel like a much happier person, and I enjoy the time with my toddler a lot more, but this book captured the work of parenting so well. In relation to Multitude, I think that this book really helps to capture what is intolerable about the contexts in which people parent today, the most central being the isolation of everyday life for nuclear families. It captures some of the beauty and meaning of parenting, too, but it’s the other stuff that will stick with me.
How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis.
Apparently this is a TikTok book. I liked it anyway. The first big takeaway was a mental shift for thinking about the division of labor between partners as being about equal rest instead of equal work. After reading this book, I do less work in the evening and instead hang out on the couch with my husband and teenager, and I think my quality of life has dramatically improved. The second takeaway is her idea of closing duties, or having a list of things that you do before turning in for the night so that your next day is better. Maybe I’ll write about mine sometime, but again, great for my quality of life.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.
I read this and was so moved and also could not believe that in 2021 someone published such an earnest story about someone wanting to help someone else. I listened to it, and the narration was fantastic, which helped, I’m sure. (What follows gets spoilery.) But I absolutely loved this and might read it every year at Christmastime because it is all about cracking open the hard shell that 21st century capitalist society forms around nuclear families to keep neighbors from helping neighbors and people from engaging with others’ suffering. I personally think that is one of the core evils of our time and loved how this book undermined that. This story is about radical love in a way that resonated with Multitude and Saunders’s stories. I don’t think that Keegan is holding up the protagonist as some sort of uncomplicated savior–there are clearly stakes to choices that this guy is making that will unevenly affect his wife and daughters, and there is a lot to unpack about that. But I also think that he made the right choice.
