Author Sociologist
The best books of 2023

This list is part of the best books of 2023.

We've asked 1,633 authors and super readers for their 3 favorite reads of the year.

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My favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of The Bloodied Ivy

Barbara Katz Rothman Why did I love this book?

The Nero Wolfe books are the most comforting reading I can do. My family knows that if you’re ever calling the ambulance for me, grab one! Whatever is going on in my life, however stressed I am, I know that Wolfe will go up to the orchids each day, that Fritz will cook dinner, Archie will seat someone in the red leather chair, and the crime will be solved. 

Rex Stout created that world—but maybe the sweetest thing ever—Robert Goldsborough’s mother had read them all, so he wrote some more!

I have read all of them, everyone, but I pick one up and reread as needed. Yeah, life can be rough—bless you both for helping me through!

By Robert Goldsborough,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Bloodied Ivy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A professor's death lures the reclusive detective and his sidekick to a bucolic crime scene: "Goldsborough does a masterly job with the Wolfe legacy" (Booklist).

An academic so conservative he thought Ronald Reagan was a pinko, Hale Markham rules Prescott University like an intellectual tyrant-until the morning he's found dead at the bottom of one of Prescott's famously beautiful ravines. Every liberal on campus hated the crotchety old crank, but which one is responsible for giving Markham his final push to the right? The case so intrigues the incomparable, reclusive master detective Nero Wolfe that he takes the unusual step…


My 2nd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Erotic Love in Sociology, Philosophy and Literature: From Romanticism to Rationality

Barbara Katz Rothman Why did I love this book?

I'm an academic sociologist. I have to teach Marx, Weber, and Durkheim year after year.

I read this book and, wow, laughed and shook my head in wonder—I'd never really thought about their sex lives, their sexuality, or what sex meant to them. I should have read this when it came out, but...it sat on the shelf.

Then, I was heading to the UK, participating in a conference on transgender issues, and I pulled this down to actually read it. I learned so much to think of erotic love as a "minimal communism," a "violation of the social order," and its exclusiveness pulling us out of the social world. I learned something on every page.

My 3rd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of The Chamber

Barbara Katz Rothman Why did I love this book?

I read a lot of mysteries. Grisham’s are dependable—I’ll be caught up and lose myself in it. This one was really hard, the death penalty, a Klansman, 676 pages on a person you know you’d hate, but dammit, no! Not the gas chamber!

I almost didn’t want to keep reading because I knew where we were going. But yeah, cliché or not, I couldn’t stop. The grandson lawyer, the rotten convict, the evil system…I’d open it up and promise myself just one or two chapters, but somehow, I kept going. 

The book did what I want these mysteries to do—pull me out of my life, out of my work, out of my worries, and plop me down somewhere new to me. Yup, the gas chamber—a break from my real world.

By John Grisham,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Chamber as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • "A dark and thoughtful tale... Grisham is at his best." —People

In the corridors of Chicago's top law firm: Twenty -six-year-old Adam Hall stands on the brink of a brilliant legal career. Now he is risking it all for a death-row killer and an impossible case.

Maximum Security Unit, Mississippi State Prison: Sam Cayhall is a former Klansman and unrepentant racist now facing the death penalty for a fatal bombing in 1967. He has run out of chances -- except for one: the young, liberal Chicago lawyer who just happens to be his…


Plus, check out my book…

The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Barbara Katz Rothman,

Book cover of The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic

What is my book about?

We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power.

Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity and access to essential goods and services rely on approval and legitimation by biomedicine. Moreover, a vast and powerful global market has risen up around the empire, making it one of the largest economic forces in the world.

Katz Rothman shows that biomedicine has the key elements of an imperial power.