10. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
The story of two sisters in occupied France, this is a gripping mix of Resistance history, wartime domesticity, and romance. Isabelle, the plucky heroine, joins a secret group that helps captured Allied soldiers escape through the Pyrenees. Her sister Vianne raises a Jewish child as her own after his parents are deported. Both have love interests, but it is fundamentally a story about the role women played in WW2. I’m not someone who cries easily, but I was sobbing by the end of this book. After The Great Beyond and this, Kristin Hannah is one of those big authors whose name I trust.
9. Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
While known primarily as a singer/songwriter, Patti Smith is also a remarkably gifted writer. This is my third read of hers, and it won’t be my last. At New Year’s, after a show at the Fillmore, Patti goes to a hotel in Santa Cruz. She mingles with locals, catalogs her dreams, and accepts a ride south from strangers. I haven’t read The Beats, but I have a feeling this is inspired by Kerouac. It’s not really clear what is reality, dream, memoir. Whatever this story is, it was gripping from one page to the next.
8. Morning Sun in Wuhan by Ying Chang Compestine
A lovely story about how food brings people together, this joins a growing list of novels inspired by the Covid 2020 lockdowns. 13-year-old Mai has lost her mother and rarely sees her father, a doctor at a hospital in Wuhan, China, when the pandemic hits, shutting schools and all but essential businesses. Mai spends her days playing video games with friends online and cooking for herself in an empty apartment. Her loneliness is punctuated by the sounds of a girl upstairs practicing piano. After witnessing hot meals being dropped off for shut-ins, Mai is inspired to volunteer as a cook at her favorite restaurant. The charming coming-of-age story is accompanied by recipes.
7. The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave
Hannah Hall is a woodworker living on a floating home in Sausalito, CA, with her husband, Owen and teenage stepdaughter, Bailey. When her husband’s tech company is investigated by the SEC, he disappears, leaving a duffel bag full of cash and a note that reads Protect Her. Hannah and Bailey travel to Austin to uncover who Owen really was. This is a well-paced suspense novel with some charming local Austin detail. Unlike a lot of titles in this category, it has the feel of something that might actually happen. The epilogue gave me chills.
6. Feel The Bern by Andrew Shaffer
I would not have predicted a year ago that a cozy mystery would be on my Best Of 2023 list, but it just shows that something done right can appeal to a lot of people. Crash (named after Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham) is a recent college grad who lands a coveted internship with Senator Bernie Sanders and accompanies him on a stump speech stop to her hometown of Eagle Creek, Vermont. Before you can say Jessica Fletcher, a local turns up dead in the lake, his lungs filled with maple syrup. In addition to being a charming mystery, it is full of details about Vermont and syrup making. (Alternate title: The Sugar Makers) I really enjoyed it.
5. Fly Girl by Ann Hood
Due to a mild fear of flying, I could never be a flight attendant. Perhaps because of this, I find the job tantalizing in a way that is reserved for things that are forbidden. (The power of denial, as Liane Moriarty once wrote.) Ann Hood is the perfect person to chronicle the profession, as she is a chatty memoir writer with a journalist’s eye for particular detail. This is full of her personal stories as a TWA flight attendant in the 1970s and 1980s — the meal service detail alone was fascinating — and also full of fun facts about the profession. 75% of flight attendants are female. (And, yes, most male flight attendants are gay.) The first flight attendant created the jump seat because of her concern about passengers opening the cabin door. And the song “Sara Smile” by Hall & Oates was written for a flight attendant. I loved nearly every minute of this throughly entertaining chronicle of a flight attendant’s life.
4. Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park
Perhaps because of the title, I picked this up at a bookstore expecting to be annoyed by it. Do I need to read a cotton candy story about gay sex in Seoul? As it turns out, this is not at all what I thought it would be. In fact, it is a beautifully written, slightly dark story of a gay man’s triumphs and trials. The proverbial original voice has been found! I would re-read it just to experience that haunting final line again.
3. Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo
A compelling story about midlife reinvention, this novel tells the story of a biracial woman, Anna, who discovers information in her late mother’s journals about her biological father, a man she never knew. After deciding to visit him, she is forced to deal with the peculiarities of meeting a VIP family of strangers. The setting, a politically unstable West African nation, was intriguing and I couldn’t help but root for Anna.
2. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yahisawa
I have a weakness for charm, in people and in books. This slim novel has an enchanting quality that is hard to put into words. After her boyfriend casually dumps her for another woman, Takako agrees to move into her uncle’s ramshackle used book store in a neighborhood in Tokyo populated with hundreds of specialty bookshops. (Apparently this is a real place called Jimbocho.) She’s not a reader, and spends most of her time sleeping in the loft. Slowly, though, she warms to the pleasures of books and new adventures. I love it when novels unfold in acts, and the final stretch of this is magical. This story made me want to visit Japan.
- On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
This novel was so beautifully written that I couldn’t give the top spot to anyone else. It is pure poetry, a work of fiction that reads like a memoir and slowly guides the readers through the relationship between a son and his barely literate mother. The dislocation of immigrants, the alienation of queer youth, and the cruel beauty of life are rendered through the most evocative prose I’ve read this year. This really is a masterpiece.
Books Smitten 