Ten Best Books Read in 2023

I started a list of the best books I read this year and it originally had almost 20 entries. I realized this was a bit excessive, so decided to cut it down to five. That didn’t really work because I couldn’t pick my favourites. So I upped it a bit to ten and that seemed to work (edited to add an eleventh – I couldn’t help it). I noticed that they’re almost all non-fiction. I had more fiction in my original list of 20 books, but nonfiction seemed to resonate more with me this year. We’ll see what next year brings.

Would love to read your own recommendations in the comments, and your thoughts on some of these books!

A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung (2023)

A deceptively spare book about caring for aging parents from a distance, in a medical system designed for anything but helping people. Chung and her family live across the country from her adoptive parents, which makes it difficult financially and logistically to visit regularly. But when her father falls ill from kidney disease and diabetes complications, she tries to be there as much as possible while also managing life at home. Then the unthinkable happens—not a year after her father dies, her mother gets cancer, and she has to reckon with the isolation of the COVID pandemic. I loved this book because it was so quietly devastating. It made me tear up at times—not something that often happens when I’m reading.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (2022)

A US government program designed to promote patriotism means that books are banned, online searches for specific topics are limited, and people of Asian descent are targeted by a “patriotic” American public. In this environment, 12-year-old Bird, whose mother has been gone for three years and whom his father never mentions, receives a cryptic letter from her that leads him on an odyssey through a world he has been sheltered from until now. What hit me about this book was how easily the same thing could happen today. As Ng said in an interview with Debbie Millman, “the scary thing about dystopia, what makes it resonate, is that we’re not actually as far from it as we think we are.”

Drawing Botany Home by Lyn Baldwin (2023)

I hope my book is as good as this one. A botany professor at Thompson Rivers University, Baldwin visits locations around Kamloops, field notebook in hand, sketching and annotating landscapes, plants, and animals with such detail that you want to touch them. Some of her notebook pages are reproduced in this book, and she’s also had art exhibits of her drawings. She writes lyrically about our place in nature and the seasons of life, as attentive to her word choices as she is to her drawings. Highly recommend.

Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle (2022)

I had to read this book twice to absorb its fascinating message, and even then I think I could have read it again and again and gotten something new out of it each time. Bridle talks about how we decide what is intelligent and what intelligence is. He explores our ambition to replicate the natural world with models, describing a range of increasingly complex models and asking how intelligent those models are. His focus is on relationships—between us and the more-than-human world, and between humans themselves. His oft-repeated catchphrase is “The world is not like a computer. Computers are like the world.” Especially important in the AI age.

Unearthing by Kyo Maclear (2023)

I loved Maclear’s first book, Birds Art Life, and this one—though extremely different—was just as good, if not better. Three months after her father dies, Maclear learns that he wasn’t her biological father. What follows is her attempt to find out who her ‘real’ father was, through her mother’s unreliable memories and her own investigations. A meditation on what makes family and what we inherit, and how that shapes us throughout our lives.

Hollow Bamboo by William Ping (2023)

This one is hard to describe. I got it as a gift from my sister, who had been to his book launch in St. John’s, Newfoundland. At first I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, but then I couldn’t put it down. A story of the Chinese diaspora in St. John’s, and how they built their own community in the face of outright racism from St. John’s residents, it uses magical realism to make the main character watch a ‘movie’ of how his family came to Newfoundland. Ping takes on the long journey from China to Canada, the Chinese head tax, the deplorable working conditions of Chinese people, and the conflicts within their own community. I have never been as enthralled by a work of history as I was with this book.

The Exceptions by Kate Zernike (2023)

In the early 1990’s, Nancy Hopkins, a professor at MIT, realized she was given less research space than her male colleagues. Together with a team of women in the sciences, she put together a report for the MIT President outlining the ways in which the institution discriminated against women in science. The President took their report and enacted changes right away, a triumph for the women who had worked so hard to be heard. Zernike writes compellingly and clearly about the struggles faced by Hopkins throughout her career, starting with her undergraduate degree. I couldn’t put the book down, it was that well-written. Even if you don’t care about women in science, you’ll care about the story of this particular woman if only for her unwavering enthusiasm for her research and science in general.

Brave the Wild River by Melissa Sevigny (2023)

Imagine being a woman scientist in 1938. Now imagine rafting down the Grand Canyon with another woman and four men to collect botanical specimens from the region. Sounds like it couldn’t happen? Well it did, and Melissa Sevigny brings the story of Lois Jotter and Elzada Clover to life through their archival journal entries and letters. They were the first white women to raft the Grand Canyon, and no one expected them to make it. Spoiler alert: they proved everyone wrong. The book tackles a range of topics: women in science, botany, women in the outdoors, and more. Sevigny’s writing is poetic and compelling—this is a book you’ll want to keep reading way past your bedtime.

The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush (2023)

A braided memoir about Antarctica, motherhood, and building community: on an Antarctic research vessel, of writers, and for a child. Rush joins a scientific research cruise to the Thwaites Glacier, which has never been visited before. Along the way she talks to the crew and other scientists about their lives off-ship and the stories they were told about their birth. She assists with their scientific work, digging up penguin bones and sectioning sediment cores. She finds that the myth of Antarctica as a place only for male explorers is proved wrong both by the women on the ship and by women who have written about the continent. A strong memoir that Rush deftly weaves together. Highly recommend.

Cacophony of Bone by Kerri ní Dochartaigh (2023)

See my review in a previous blog post: here.

Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk (2022)

I’m not sure how I discovered this book. I even forgot I had ordered it from my local bookstore until I had an email saying it was ready to pick up. I’m sure glad I found it, though, as it ties into a lot of my thinking about writing and the environment. I have to say up front that I only found the first half of the book compelling—the second half, which deals with AI and larps (live action role playing games), is not that interesting to me. Wilk explores the links between literature and the environment, between imagination and the real world. She draws on a wide range of literary minds, including Jeff VanderMeer, Anne Carson, and Octavia Butler. I’m in the midst of re-reading it, so will use a quote from the publisher’s blurb here: “[Wilks reveals] how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.”

Other books that were good but didn’t make my top 10 were:

• Crossings by Ben Goldfarb
• Fire Weather by John Vaillant
• Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby van Pelt
• Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice
• The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton
• Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
• The Diary of a Bookseller & Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
• The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh
• The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig
• Trashlands by Alison Stine

I love hearing about what other people recommend for 2023 – post your favourites in the comments below!

Note: I added an eleventh book to my top 10 on 28 December. Elizabeth Rush’s The Quickening. How could I have forgotten it?