The best books of 2023

This list is part of the best books of 2023.

Join 1,707 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2023

Book cover of Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings

Amy M. Reade Why did I love this book?

For anyone who’s ever read and enjoyed Shirley Jackson’s work, this book is a treasure. It contains previously unpublished essays, short stories, musings, and even drawings by the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

The stories are quintessential Jackson: eerie, poignant, sometimes funny, always memorable, and each is very different from the next. Jackson writes about her kids, her husband, her house, and the mundane in a way that’s charming and relatable.

Her stories touch on subjects from distrust to marital harmony (sometimes these topics are two sides of the same coin!) to the supernatural to the game of bridge. She was a truly gifted and extremely skilled writer—how thrilling to be able to read these pieces.

By Shirley Jackson, Sarah Hyman DeWitt (editor), Laurence Jackson Hyman (editor) , Ruth Franklin (foreword)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Let Me Tell You as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the peerless author of The Lottery and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a treasure trove of deliciously dark and funny stories, essays, lectures, letters and drawings.

Let Me Tell You brings together the brilliantly eerie short stories Jackson is best known for with frank and inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays she wrote about her large, rowdy family; and revelatory personal letters and drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic - dinner parties, children's games and neighbourly gossip - but one that is continually threatened and subverted in her unsettling, inimitable prose. This collection…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of The Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Nights)

Amy M. Reade Why did I love this book?

This book is a collection of Arabian folk tales, stories that have been told for centuries. It hooked me from the start.

It’s told as a story within a story, and it starts out as the doomed Scheherazade’s ruse to keep a ruthless tyrant from marrying and then killing the women of his kingdom (including her). Every night she builds on the previous night’s story by spinning a different tale of intrigue and excitement, of men and women, children and adults, beggars and royalty, and as the king is drawn into her world, so are we.

Scheherazade is witty and wise, and her stories feature characters, especially women, who are equally cunning and clever, touching on subjects that range from misogyny to love to revenge. This is a must-read.

My 3rd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of The Hunting Party

Amy M. Reade Why did I love this book?

I’ve read several of Lucy Foley’s books, and this one is excellent. She’s a master of the locked room mystery.

This story has all the earmarks of a good, twisty tale: a group of friends with latent and simmering resentments and secrets, a magnificent estate deep in the forested hills of Scotland, a blizzard that has everyone on edge, a groundskeeper with a dark past, and some bizarre strangers thrown into the mix.

This is the type of story I gravitate toward—as backstories are revealed, the tension ramps up until there’s an explosion no one could stop. It’s a whodunit with a twist at the end that I didn’t see coming. 

By Lucy Foley,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked The Hunting Party as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

*The Sunday Times No.1 bestseller*

EVERYONE'S INVITED.
EVERYONE'S A SUSPECT.
AND EVERYONE'S TALKING ABOUT IT.

'Ripping, riveting' A. J. Finn
'Clever, twisty and sleek' Daily Mail
'Unputdownable' John Boyne
'Foley is superb' The Times
'Chilling' Adele Parks
'Terrific, riveting' Dinah Jefferies

In a remote hunting lodge, deep in the Scottish wilderness, old friends gather for New Year.

The beautiful one
The golden couple
The volatile one
The new parents
The quiet one
The city boy
The outsider

The victim.

Not an accident - a murder among friends.


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Cape Menace: A Cape May Historical Mystery

By Amy M. Reade,

Book cover of Cape Menace: A Cape May Historical Mystery

What is my book about?

Two years have passed since Ruth Hanover vanished without a trace, leaving behind her husband, William, and their daughter, Sarah. William and Sarah have never stopped hoping that Ruth will return, but their hopes are beginning to fade.

Sarah, an intelligent and curious young woman, has questions her father refuses to answer. Why is he conducting business with a mysterious stranger in the middle of the night? What is at the root of the sudden increase in his income?

When the time comes for Sarah to face her father’s secrets and discover why her mother never came home that December day in 1712, what she learns will shock her tiny community on the New Jersey cape and leave her fighting for her life.

Book cover of Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings
Book cover of The Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Nights)
Book cover of The Hunting Party

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