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A Year in Reading: 2023
Welcome to the 19th installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series! YIR gathers together some of today's most exciting writers, thinkers, and tastemakers to share the books that shaped their year. What makes the series special is that it celebrates the subjectivity of reading: where yearend best-of lists pass off their value judgement as definitive, YIR essayists take a more phenomenological tact, focusing instead on capturing the experience of the books they read. (I'm not particularly interested in handing down a decision on "The 10 Best Books of 2023," and neither are this year's contributors.) This, of course, makes for great, probing essays—in writing about our reading lives, we inevitably write about our inner lives.
YIR contributors were encouraged approach the assignment—to reflect on the books they read this year, an intentionally vague prompt—however they wanted, and many did so with dazzling creativity. One contributor, a former writer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, arranged her essay like an art gallery, with each book she read assigned a museum wall label. Another, whose work revolves around revolutionary and utopian movements in history, organized her year by the long-defunct French Revolutionary calendar. Some opted to write personal narratives, while others embraced the listicle format. Some divided up their reading between work and pleasure; for others, the two blended together (as is often the case for those of us in the literary profession).
The books that populate this year's essays also varied widely. Some contributors read with intention: one writer of nonfiction returned to reading fiction for the first time in 13 years; one poet decided to read only Black romance in the second half of 2023. For two new parents, their years in reading were defined by the many picture books that they read to their infants. There were, however, common threads. This year, contributors read one book more than any other: Catherine Lacey's novel Biography of X, which chronicles the life of a fictional artist against the backdrop of an alternate America. Also widely read and written about were Dan Sinykin's Big Fiction, an analysis of the conglomeration of the publishing industry, and the works of Annie Ernaux (a star of last year's YIR as well).
I'm profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year's contributors, the names of whom will be revealed below as entries are published throughout the month, concluding on Thursday, December 21. Be sure to bookmark this page and follow us on Twitter to stay up to date.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Emily Wilson, classicist and translator of The IliadVauhini Vara, author of This Is SalvagedJenn Shapland, author of Thin Skin
From the Newsstand: Lorrie Moore on Barthelme
One of the familiar knocks on the short story master Donald Barthelme is that his fiction is all artifice - that, to quote Saul Bellow, it "lack[s] an inner life." Well, Lorrie Moore, having digested the new Barthelme biography, Hiding Man, is having none of it. "In a way," she explains in the current New York Review of Books,Barthelme's work was all inner life, partially concealed, partially displayed. His stories are a registration of a certain kind of churning mind, cerebral fragments stitched together in the bricolage fashion of beatnik poetry. The muzzled cool, the giddy play, the tossed salad of high and low...Here, ladies and gentlemen, is contrarian criticism at its very best: illuminating rather than annihilating. Similarly surprising, and revealing, is Moore's decision to consider the Barthelme oeuvre alongside that of Raymond Carver, in many ways his stylistic opposite. Moore is no short-story slouch herself, and one suspects she's learned a trick or two from the School of Don B. This might help account for her sure-handed handling of Barthelme's life and work. At any rate, like Deborah Eisenberg and Zadie Smith, whose essays have also enlivened recent issues of the NYRB, she has the virtue not only of writing like a reader, but of reading like a writer. Check out her Barthelme essay, "How He Wrote His Songs."
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