Happy holidays! Welcome to my last post of 2023, in which I reflect on my ten favorite reads from this year:
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi
This poetry collection is gorgeous, healing, and packed with wisdom and meditations on events and phenomena that often feel formidable and unknowable. This was my introduction to Franny Choi’s writing, and I’m very grateful for it since a lot of my year has been filled with Choi and Danez' Smith’s VS poetry podcast.
Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life.
The day A. died, the sun was brighter than any sun. I answered the phone, and a channel opened between my stupid head and heaven, or what was left of it. The blankness stared back; and I made sound after sound with my blood-wet gullet. O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then: you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment; you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason.
-CATASTROPHE IS NEXT TO GODLINESS, Franny Choi
The Deep Sky by Yumi Kitasei
Debut author alert! Kitasei’s climate fiction mystery was a mesmerizing tale that holds up a mirror to our current world while charting an imaginative course forward into a new one. It was impressive and complex in scope but emotionally grounded, and I loved the throughline about the protagonist Asuka’s fascination with birds while in such a lifeless ship.
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
I really did not think that I would remember This is How You Lose the Time War with such fondness, but it was refreshing, poetic, and lyrical. The plot was simple enough, but executed so well: enemy agents in a time war fall in love. I liked the unconventional structure and adored experiencing it as an audiobook. The best romance book.
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Despite this book being over 600 pages, I didn’t get enough of it. The story was quietly devastating and the characters were so vivid that they could be people I’ve known my whole life. Absolutely amazing. The heart of the story was Marian, who is born in the early 1900s and dreams of being a pilot.
Does she regret the flight? She decides she doesn’t. She would have peered out of the cockpit and into something bottomless and unfathomable sooner or later. At some point she would have found the edge of her own courage. There is nothing for it but to adjust, be humbled. So she is not exactly who she had thought. So what. She will be someone different.
Like?
Remnants of Partition by Aanchal Malhotra
I was always going to love this book. Like many desi people, I carry the legacy of the Partition in my bones. Malhotra’s essays speak to the horrors of the Partition and the strength of the human spirit. Her use of materialism as a lens grounds the essays and focuses the stories enough to clarify all the different perspectives she incorporates.
The Terra Ignota Series by Ada Palmer
This series is dense, confusing and the narrative is often jarring and jumps between characters. The narrator is often a bit of an idiot and constantly breaks the fourth wall to beg for the reader’s patience. I love it so much. The story is set in an uneasy utopia with humanity separated into vales-based Hives and religion and gender stigmatized. The premise has a lot to be explored, and Palmer does so through the philosophy of Enlightenment-era philosophers and thinkers.
Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games
Look, I love essays and I love video games. This was an excellent collection of essays by acclaimed writers who truly love the video game medium.
How To Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
This is easily one of the best books I’ve read in my life, never mind this year. I listened to it as an audiobook because Sinclair narrates it herself. Sinclair weaves a rich tapestry of her family’s collective history, being both exacting and generous in detail. I love non-fiction written by poets because it will never, ever be dry and they are the best at telling stories in unconventional ways.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is fast becoming one of my favorite writers with this ability to slice to the core of the human condition, excavate it and ask real questions. Is everyone deserving of forgiveness? Why does our society thrive on cruelty? What does bearing witness mean? You can tell through reading his work that he is not leading the readers to an answer so much as creating a medium through which author and reader can both have the space to answer these questions. The story in Chain-Gang All-Stars provides this space by making the reader complicit in the horror of the book. Prisoners in America fight gladiator-style death matches for a slim chance of freedom. It’s the worst of corporate power, the prison industrial complex, and the sports industry rolled into one, with the reader unable to judge fans of these matches while they themselves are so enthralled in the story.
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler
Sabrina Imbler’s book of memoir essays uses marine animals to reflect their life, family and coming of age. Imbler shows us that we can find radical but old notions of care, family and community if we take a look at our oceans. Imbler is a queer, mixed race writer working in a largely white, male field and they use this background to write some incredible essays, my favorite being the mother octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs and Imbler’s own relationship to her mother. I listened to this as an audiobook as well, since Imbler narrates it.
A couple more truly incredible books that I adored and marked up excessively:
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty // Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed // The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing // No Meat Required by Alicia Kennedy // Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
“Circles are wondrous because they are endless. Anything endless is wondrous. But endlessness is torture, too“
Also completely forgot Hadley is a character in this book. Great list!
you just gave me the push to start How to Say Babylon on audio - its part of my Scribd subscription and there is nothing better than a free audiobook/thing you’ve already “paid” for. :)