#and seeing that landscape and culture depicted in the book (as irrevocably altered by/lost to climate change) added to the experience for m

[pentanguine]

Favorite Books of 2023

So I didn’t quite get to it in January, but I did finally finish this list!! (And as always, I'm longwinded)

My reading taste was all over the place last year. I intended for it to be the year I read neglected fantasy trilogies gathering dust on my bookshelf, but instead I joined a book club for grad school and got shoved out of my comfort zone; ended up with a boyfriend (now ex, aka EBF) and read anything and everything he recommended; suddenly got into nonfiction and horror for no explicable reason; joined another book club for work and ended up reading even more books outside my wheelhouse; and discovered that I enjoyed hate-reading books during slow periods at work and on my lunch break. It was a mess. But somehow, a few favorites came out of it!

1. The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles by Jason Guriel– What the fuck even is this book. It’s a book about a book about teenage werewolves on a quest to outwit some pirates and recover a lost treasure. It’s the story of a young woman in a post-climate crisis earth living in a Gothic mansion in Japan and questing for her favorite author inside a high-tech diorama. It’s about the aftermath of environmental destruction, invasive technology and autonomy, the power of fandom and transforming stories through your love for them, fathers (love for, betrayal by, forgiveness of), and worlds within worlds. It asks meaty questions about the role of technology in generating change for the better and creating hope when that same tech is eroding what it even means to be human and experience reality. It’s the kind of cli-fi that offers hope, that’s warm, that makes you think of alternatives. It’s dense with speculative worldbuilding and plays dizzyingly with metafiction, and the whole damn thing is written in couplets!!

I feel like I can’t adequately express how much I love the things this book does. It experiments with form and language, which would be cool enough, except it goes on to explore complex themes in a thought-provoking way while throwing in a bizarre and delightful clusterfuck of elements like robot werewolves and tree furries. Most importantly, it was just so much fun to read. I want a sequel with these characters. I want to go to a con dressed as one of the garden wolves. I want to study this book for English class and write an essay on it in rhyming couplets. I did not at all expect this to be my favorite book of the year, but it absolutely is. (It also only has 19 ratings and 4 reviews on Goodreads, so if it sounds at all up your alley, please read it!!)

2. The Mask of Mirrors by M. A. Carrick– What many of my favorite books have in common this year is that they were incredibly fun to read. Mask of Mirrors is entertaining from start to finish, as schemes that would fill a lesser book are introduced and then resolved in mere chapters, and the climax is nothing but action-packed chaos. The world-building is dense and rewarding, the plot is twisty, and Ren is conning everyone, all the time, in at least 6 different ways, which of course makes it more satisfying when she ends up conning herself into actually caring about her marks. You'll like this if you enjoy a TTRPG flavor of storytelling (it started as an RPG, which makes sense once you know it), or if you enjoyed the basics of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint but wished it had more action and large-scale worldbuilding. There is a lot going on in these books, in the best possible way.

3. Starling House by Alix E. Harrow – There’s so much I loved about this book: the slow Gothic creep, the stories within a story, the eerie illustrations, the immersive sense of place. Surprisingly, it was the grounded, realistic parts of the book that were the most compelling to me. This is a fantasy, but it’s also a small-town family drama and coming of age story that could have been literary fiction with a few changes. The prose is just gorgeous, beautiful without ever getting purple. This is ultimately the story of the most bloody-minded woman in Kentucky slowly finding a home in the place she’s lived her whole life, while she falls in love with an equally bloody-minded man. Like The Raven Cycle as haunted house story, with overtones of Hades and Persephone and Beauty and the Beast.

4. The Necessity of Stars by E. Catherine Tobler – This is an 80 page novella that I usually wouldn’t count as a book, but it’s simply too good to leave off this list. It’s a strange and beautiful story about aging, climate change, sexism and exploitation, memory and language and how they shape our identities, and how we move through time. In such a short page count, there are so many powerful images that have stuck with me over six months later, including a sea of deep purple irises and a woman and an alien making love under…amidst…as? the stars. There’s something very Le Guin-like about this story with its setting of stars, shadows, and trees, and its sense of humanity. Mind-blowingly good; I highly recommend anything from Neon Hemlock Press.

5. Heir’s Game by suspu– This is a webtoon and not a novel, but I included a 100k Sherlock fanfic in my best books of 2017, so I’m also counting this. It’s a fluffy, bloodthirsty, melodramatic, swashbuckling high adventure found family story with an entertainment value off the charts. It balances a lot of different story elements and tones, each character and arc is developed so well, and there’s a truly satisfying number of pretty men covered in blood. If you’re devouring it over the course of a few days like I did, you also get to watch the author’s art style improve over the course of the four years it took them to write this. I’m morbidly impressed by the amount of effort that goes into panels I read in 2 seconds. Disclaimer that I read this alongside EBF, which may have biased my feelings towards it.

6. Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson – A lovely blend of sweet(?), sexy romance and lush description with visceral horror, creeping menace, and strong dramatic irony.* The last chapter I found a little dumb and overly conclusive, but I’m willing to forgive that due to the immersive atmosphere and tension for most of the book. Ro, the protagonist, is heartbreakingly vulnerable in her twisted justifications for why her first sapphic relationship is actually so Beautiful and Good, and Ash feels like a good depiction of a non-traditional abuser. It’s indulgent and suspenseful, and it’s also got Things to Say.

*(In response to people complaining on Goodreads that the “twist” is obvious, I would like to say: Ash is a baker/cook, the jacket contains the word “consumes” and “devouring,” and there’s a flayed body on the cover. I think a blurb may have comped it to Hannibal. If you read all that and think the publishers are spoiling the “twist” of the book instead of just advertising what the book is about, that’s a you problem. This is not a thriller trying to set up a shocking twist and leave you guessing; it’s horror, and the horror comes from knowing what’s coming and watching Ro stumble right into it with nothing we can do to stop it. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.)

7. The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach– The thing I loved most about this book is that it’s truly, delightfully original. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything remotely like it. There’s living technology that’s based on plants and syncs with human biology, a fresh system of gods and resurrection, a found family pirate ship, and some viscerally disturbing body horror. I often found myself sitting still for a minute with my mouth open, head tilted slightly to the side, thinking “…how the fuck did she come up with that.” This is also such a satisfyingly queer book. It very much centers found family, and unapologetic abundance saves the day. I wish I could remember more specifics of this book, but mostly what stuck with me is that it’s weird as shit and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

8. This is Ear Hustle by Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods –This is the book form of an award-winning podcast discussing the realities of life in the American prison system, from those on both the inside and outside. It’s an often intense read, which I took in pieces over two months, but the storytelling is so engrossing, and introduces its audience to people and circumstances they most likely wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. I would never have guessed that San Quentin has skill-building and education programs, including the media lab where the Ear Hustle podcast is produced, or that at least one woman began a relationship with someone already in prison, moved her entire life to a desert prison town, and raised a family there. Each story in this book humanizes people who are often given little sympathy or understanding by society (even if they have been or are cruel and violent; redemption is not the point). The system they live in is definitely cruel and violent, but they are, like everyone, multifaceted people with loved ones and hobbies. Everyone has a story. This is the best kind of nonfiction to me, the kind that alters your view of the world and is still cropping up in your thoughts over six months later.

9. They Were Here Before Us by Eric LaRocca – I went through a big Eric LaRocca phase last fall, and I think this is overall the strongest of his works. The stories range from existentially shocking tales of nature at its darkest and most unnatural(?), to grotesque body horror, to unsettling tension that creeps across the pages like a serial killer stalking outside your window. A lot of the stories deal with the desperation, grotesqueness, and violation that comes with loving another person, and there’s a recurring contrast between bodies as vessels for love and as simply meat. Bearing in mind that I once said, in bemused shock, “Is Gideon the Ninth horror??”: it pushed against the boundaries of what I was comfortable reading and thinking about, without being shock for shock value. His writing is just viscerally fucked up.

10. The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer – This is a fucking dark and bleak book that officially hooked me at the end of Part One, when what I thought would be the reveal of the entire book…happened. And so I said “well, now what??” And plunged into a brutally depressing, borderline nihilistic, violently hopeful story about the nature of humanity and finding purpose in life. There are heartwarming moments in this book too, and also some funny or trivial moments that remind you this book is, for some random reason, YA.* If you enjoy sci-fi that grapples with the dizzying feeling of our microscopic place in the unending void of the cosmos, I highly recommend this one. And if you read Emma Newman’s Before Mars and want more in that vein, you’ll find a lot to love here.

*Unlike some people on Goodreads, I do see a reason for the protagonists to be teenagers, but you can very much write an adult book about teenagers

11. So You Want to be a Wizard by Diane Duane – I regret not discovering this book as a child, because I would have loved it. It’s the story of two children who teach themselves wizardry and become embroiled in an ongoing struggle for the fate of the world. The poetic writing, the way trees are held in reverence, and the way language is magic in and of itself are all things that appeal to me as an adult, but would have been even more meaningful when I was younger. I especially loved how matter of fact the children are about discovering magic: of course there’s magic in the world. They’re children, and they can believe in anything.

Honorable Mentions:

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

Smiler’s Fair by Rebecca Levene