10 Favorite Books I Read in 2023
I started thinking of myself as a walker this year. In 2022 I really started walking in earnest, walking up and down the Raquette River once or twice a day. All the same, I didn’t consider myself to be a walker. This year, I’ve walked miles and miles in my office park lot and the adjoining trails along the Merrimack River. I picked up a book called a Philosophy of Walking not too long after my son was born. At the moment of decision, I realized walking wasn’t just something I did, but a part of who I am. Looking back, the books I loved have almost all been about walking or at the least walking plays a big role. This is supposed to be my Top 10 Favorite Books I read this year, so why am I talking so much about walking? Walking helped me read more. I absolutely don’t listen to books while walking, but walking, as it became tied into my prayer life, helped me work things out. Because of that, books didn’t need to solve things for me. Walking also got me past the fact that books can never capture the full embodied and occasionally ineffable experience of existence, by being embodied and occasionally ineffable. I also got to see a lot of birds. Eased of these burdens and disappointments, I could read just looking for a story.
Full disclosure, I left a good amount of Wendell Berry out of my top ten for variety’s sake. Otherwise, Wendell Berry would have been literally half of the list. My wife’s also a big reader, and her list is here!
Jayber Crow - Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry is an author you have to be ready for. He’s not going to demand your attention, he’s certainly not going to try to grab it. He believes walking is the ideal pace for life, and his books embrace that deliberate pace. A few years ago when I first learned about Berry, I wasn’t ready. But for Christmas last year, my brother got me Jayber Crow, and I was finally ready. The walking helped. Jayber Crow is a book about a small town barber, Jayber, looking back on how his life and community of Port William has changed over the course of his life. The book wanders through thoughts about farming, barbering, religion, and philosophy all the while grounding itself in the story of Jayber’s life and the life of Port William. I loved Jayber Crow. It made me want to read everything else Berry wrote, and then for the rest of the year I did.
The Peregrine - J.A. Baker
The Peregrine wasn’t my favorite book of the year. Some of the long walks over the English estuary drag. But it did inspire me to spend the rest of the year writing about my daily meetings with ordinary birds.
Hannah Coulter - Wendell Berry
Hannah Coulter is the perfection of Wendell Berry’s series of books about the town of Port William. Where Jayber tends toward the abstract, Hannah is always grounded in the concrete. Her concern with farming techniques comes from her farm. Her concern with the future comes from the lives of her children. While Berry has a clear and distinct philosophy which weaves through his fiction (for better and for worse), Hannah Coulter is above all interested in telling the story of a woman of steadfast love, for her family, her home, and her way of life, and of determined hope that her family, home, and way of life can carry on despite all the near inexorable forces pulling them apart.
Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver
Demon Copperhead is an incredible book, and its greatest strength is the singular voice of Demon. A boy orphaned, abandoned, and abused, Demon struggles to make his way through the foster system, school, and just survive living in Appalachia in the worst of the opioid epidemic. He is fiercely resilient and doggedly determined to thrive in terrible circumstances, while at the same time he maintains a deep core of vulnerability and, despite the pain, and loss after loss, and heartbreakingly bad choices, Demon has a sort of innocence. Immediately, you want this kid to make it, and you spend the rest of the book just wishing he could catch a break or just make the right decisions. It deserves every award it’s won.
A Divine Language - Alec Wilkinson
This was my most anticipated book of the year. Alec Wilkinson is a journalist who tries to return to and master mathematics after failing in grade school, and along the way he discovers the mystical world opened up by the deceptively simple question: is mathematics invented or discovered? Make what you will of this being my most anticipated book of the year, but it was everything I hoped it would be. It’s a book that falls in love with math, while also being one of the greatest acts of humility I’ve ever read, because at the end he still can’t really do math. And it’s a search for God. Plato held mathematics as the pinnacle of education because it naturally brings us into contact with the transcendent (even if math education rarely feels that way) and a Divine Language follows in those footsteps.
Devotions - Mary Oliver
The first poetry collection to make my end of year lists, Devotions is an auto-selection of poems by Mary Oliver not long before her death. I read these poems in the month before and after my son’s birth in July. Devotions is not really about walking, but it’s about walking. Most of Oliver’s poems were formed and written as she walked throughout Cape Cod, and they are an act of prayer, giving thanks for all this life, and lifting up the prayers and praises of all the creatures, trees, stones, dogs, and sea birds who cannot give them full voice. It is a collection of profound attention, and as Oliver says, Attention is the beginning of devotion.
The Blue Fox - Sjon
The Blue Fox is dominated by a long, snow-crusted hunt on foot for the elusive, magical blue fox. I picked up this short novel while in Iceland. The prose is crisp and direct. The meaning is evasive. In the fog of newborn care, this cut through, a cool relief. It’s a brutal book and a tender book, tying together the lives of three villagers, trying to catch a glimpse of how love, and how a lack of love, transforms us.
A Philosophy of Walking - Frederic Gros
When I saw this book I realized I was a walker. I enjoy much of a Philosophy of Walking though my favorite part might be that it is called a Philosophy and not the Philosophy. That simple article opened up the question of my philosophy of walking. Because Frederic Gros and I are quite different. He loves walking as an escape: from a desk, from external time pressure, from the myriad of things that encumber our passage through life. In his philosophy, walking lets us escape all things extraneous and find the raw core of our being. For me, walking lets me see. When I leave my office to walk, I don’t do so to escape my desk. I walk so I can see birds. I don’t walk to strip everything away. I walk to find out what’s around the next corner, to see how today is different than yesterday. So sometime I’ll have to write another philosophy of walking, walking not as escape but as discovery.
The Old Ways - Robert Macfarlane
Another book explicitly about walking, the Old Ways tells Robert Macfarlane’s stories from the semi forgotten footpaths and sea roads of England and Scotland. While Gros sees walking as escape, and I see walking as discovery, Macfarlane sees walking as connection. He wants to know why a path is linked to two particular places, what would cause people to go from one place to another. For him the destination is not incidental. A particular, repeated destination gives rise to and preserves a path, and Macfarlane eagerly seeks out the relationships which walk us back and forth between two places.
The Lives We Actually Have - Jessica Richie and Kate Bowler
This is a book of blessings. Blessings for good days, for garbage days, for ordinary days, for tired days, and for holy days. My wife and I took turns picking a blessing to summarize the day or to anticipate the day to come and we read it together before bed. I love it deeply.
Honorable Mentions
Because I ended up reading a lot more this year than the last few years I have some Honorable Mentions. I’ll restrict myself to one sentence about them.
A Place on Earth - Wendell Berry
Where Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow follow one character over time, a Place on Earth looks at Port William in 1945.
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The book that most exceeded my expectations, Dracula was very different than I thought it would be, being interested in the limits of human capacities for knowing, and just a lot more fun.
The Wisdom of the Desert - Thomas Merton
Merton has a gift for making the Desert Fathers much more approachable and comprehensible.
That Distant Land - Wendell Berry
If any Port William book is going to edge out Hannah Coulter as my favorite it’s this short story anthology which slowly centers around the life and mystery of Burly Coulter, the unhero-like hero of Port William.
The Memory of Old Jack - Wendell Berry
Even after I thought I knew everyone in Port William, this look on Uncle Jack Beechem surprised me with its tragic and almost mythic quality.
Iron Flame - Rebecca Yarros
For good and for ill, Iron Flame is definitely a fantasy novel written in 2023 but does lots of things well, gets the job done, and I burned through it in just a few days.
The Other Name - Jon Fosse
This almost made my list, if not for knotty ending, but it surprised me by being a book about contemplative prayer and how prayer can envelope and transform a ragged life.
