Best Books of 2023

The greatest of traditions have a timeless quality that allows us to imagine ourselves inhabiting an unbroken chain of custom that goes back into the mists of the ancient past. And so it is with Monsters & Manuals 'Best Books of...' lists, which each year are keenly awaited by small, ruddy-cheeked children up and down the land, so that they can refer to it when deciding what to put on their Christmas lists to St Nick.

This year, the recommendations will be as follows. I limiting myself here to five books, as is the tradition; according to Goodreads - where I religiously review every book I read - I read thirty-three books in total this year, which I think is less than usual. I went back and forth over whether to include Beowulf, literally the last thing I 'read', but technically I didn't read it (I listened) and it was the subject of my most recent blog entry anyway (and will be the subject also of the next). 

So, in no particular order, the top five are:

1. Who Framed Colin Wallace? by Paul Foot. This, an account of the trial for murder of a British serviceman who blew the whistle on a 'dirty tricks' campaign by MI5 in Northern Ireland, has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter of this blog, but I thought the book was a great read and highly recommend it. From my Goodreads review:

I was swept up in this tale, which is written in an utterly absorbing way and which successfully builds a meticulously researched and argued case that Wallace was framed. The account of his trial in itself is absolutely superb - indeed, it's difficult to imagine a better example of a detailed dissection of court-room procedure in all of non-fiction. The book is marred slightly by the author's evident biases, which at times lead one to question whether he can have viewed the evidence dispassionately. But even if one does not agree with its conclusions, it's impossible to put down.

2. The Knight and The Wizard by Gene Wolfe (okay - I suppose I lied when I said this list would contain five books). I wrote a series of posts (beginning here) on the blog about The Wizard Knight after reading the series, and probably bored the pants off my readership through repeated references to it thereafter, but the fact of the matter is that great books sometimes have that effect - and these are genuinely Great Books. From my Goodreads reviews:

(The Knight) I read this almost 20 years ago and liked it, but second time around it has grown immeasurably in the telling, possibly because a middle-aged man can see within it themes which a younger man ignores or rejects. It is very much a tale about men and manhood, and I suspect quite alienating to female readers as a result, but there's nothing really wrong with that (I've got no problem with books being written by women for women) - and what it has to say about the subject is extremely important, counter-cultural and profound. 

(The Wizard) I am thoroughly prepared to accept that the first Act of this novel is too long and at times tortuous. This probably means I should give it less than 5 stars. But in a way the difficulty of that section is almost worth it for the emotional payoff of what comes after. Wolfe here achieves that rarest of things in contemporary fiction: a genuinely happy ending (who has the guts to try to write one of those these days?) that is thoroughly convincing and satisfying. In this respect, it reminded me a lot of TH White's The Ill-Made Knight, to which it makes an excellent companion piece.

3. Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich. I am a huge fan of Alexievich's work but nothing could prepare me for the emotional body blow that comes from reading this book for the first time. Simply a retelling, in their own words, of the stories of people who had been children in the Soviet Union (chiefly Belarus) at the time of the Nazi invasion in 1941, it contains the full gamut of human experience across the spectrum - the depths of sorrow and despair, and the glory of hope and love, and all that lies between. An amazing, 'Best Books of a Lifetime" contender. From my Goodreads review:

The less said about some books the better, because they cannot be improved by another's words - only diminished. This is indeed the philosophy underlying all of Alexievich's work: that other people's stories must speak for themselves and could only be made worse by inserting the interviewer's perspective. This, in any case, is an unspeakably moving book - suffering on every page, but also survival and redemption. It made me understand the human condition better for having read it.

4. The Inheritors by William Golding. The short, terrible, horrifying, and disturbing tale of the meeting between a group of neanderthals and a group of homo sapiens, and of the passing away of one world and its replacement with the next. Somebody recommended in the comments to an entry on this blog that I should read this, and I'm very glad they did (it might even have been this guy); it changed my perspective on what fiction could be. From my Goodreads review:

A great novel will make you understand human nature better, and in a different way. This novel is very great, because it does this with stark purity by forcing us to confront humanity from the outside, as it would be perceived by minds that are not our own. This is an achievement that truly merits being labelled a work of genius. That it is also a work of great lyrical beauty and terrible tragedy makes that achievement more unlikely, and more impressive still.

5. Now We Are Six by A A Milne. Is this cheating? I suppose it might be cheating. But I deeply enjoyed the experience of reading the poems in this collection to my eldest child, over and over again, during the course of the year. To the adult ear there is something truly magical about the rhythms and cadences of Milne's; one rarely ever reads poetry nowadays, really, and when one does one tends to read pretentious and impenetrable stuff like Pablo Neruda or free verse like Raymond Carver. Milne set himself an altogether different task: picking a meter (sometimes quite a complex one), sticking strictly to it, and communicating clearly and effectively - and beautifully - while doing so. This is enough to inspire one to try it oneself. From my Goodreads review:

These poems must be read out loud (ideally to one's son or daughter) in order to appreciate the sonorous cadences of AA Milne's verse. Things have changed in the last 100 years; what was expected of the reader in terms of poetic literacy were much higher in 1927, and some of the rhyme structures and rhythms strike the modern ear as genuinely complex. This makes the book all the more useful in communicating to a child the beauty of the English language deployed well.

*

A funny year, in retrospect, in that I read almost no SF or fantasy (Gene Wolfe excepted, and unless you count The Inheritors), and read very few books that really had me properly hooked - I noted down quite a few two- and three-star reviews. But the ones that I loved, I really loved. 

Do feel free to leave your own lists in the comments - I can never have enough recommendations for good reading material.