Anna David's 3 favorite reads in 2023

• 2023
• 2024

First, let me say that this is not a new book: it came out in 2011. And the author is someone I know. Even though I’m obsessed with her Substack and have loved every essay I’ve ever read, for some reason, I’d never read her books.

I picked Skinny because I liked the title, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter what Diana Spechler is writing—what the plot is, who the characters are—because every word she writes just sings.

This is a novel about a woman whose father dies, and she becomes a counselor at a diet camp because a girl she thinks is her half-sister is one of the campers. But, like I said, the plot is irrelevant. Diana Spechler just has this way of turning a phrase that manages to be hilarious, biting, descriptive, and original.

This book addresses female issues with weight in a way that you couldn’t get away with in 2023. It’s not particularly PC, but it’s honest, real, and funny.

This surely isn’t an original choice, but I devoured Yellowface.

There’s something about the publishing industry that’s a very specific kind of cutthroat, and it feels like very few people are honest about it. This novel is incredibly dark and has the publishing industry nailed, to the point that you actually understand how it could drive someone to pass off a recently departed friend’s work as their own.

It also captures the paranoia of the world we now live in, where we’re all one tweet away from having our lives destroyed. Being able to make a novel about the book publishing industry into a thriller is no small feat, but Kuang did it!

Again not an original choice, but I couldn’t put The Guest down. I loved it because Emma Cline has this way of creating characters that are simultaneously specific and vague.

The whole time you’re reading, you have no idea how the main character, Alex, has burned her life to the ground, where she comes from, or who she actually is, but you can’t look away from her because she’s so consistent in her pretty horrifying behavior.

It’s one of those books where you really don’t want to relate to the protagonist, but a part of me did: the way Alex has to morph herself to fit whatever circumstances she’s in hit painfully home.