The best books of 2023

This list is part of the best books of 2023.

Join 1,708 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal

Elisabeth Luard I this book because...

I've been recommending this brilliant re-appraisal of Darwinism to everyone I know (and plenty I don't!) for months. 

The underlying message is that the author of Evolution of Species was a Victorian pater familias who considered women fit only for childbirth and domestic duties, incapable of rational decision-taking - a view he applied to females of all species from the great apes to nematode worms.

The idea that it's the male who chooses the female and so decides the path of evolution is blown out of the water by this marvelous book.

A group of young female scientists have been examining what actually happens in the natural world. It turns out it's not the peacock who takes the decision to sprout a gaudy bunch of feathers - and incidentally attracting every passing predator - but the little brown peahen encouraging him from the sidelines. Revolutionary, or what?

By Lucy Cooke,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

'A dazzling, funny and elegantly angry demolition of our preconceptions about female behaviour and sex in the animal kingdom ... Bitch is a blast. I read it, my jaw sagging in astonishment, jotting down favourite parts to send to friends and reading out snippets gleefully...' Observer

'A book that is tearing down the stereotypes and the biases. Absolutely fascinating.' BBC R4 Woman's Hour

'From the heir to Attenborough. 5*' - Telegraph

'Glorious ... A bold and gripping takedown of the sexist mythology baked into biology ... Full of marvellous surprises. Guardian

'Colourful, committed and deeply informed.' Sunday Times

'Gloriously original'…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World

Elisabeth Luard I this book because...

I was hooked from the very first page, when the author reports a brief conversation with a top-of-the-heap oil-man who thought the idea of a philosophical book about food ridiculous. Sitopia asks how the lessons learned from the past might be applied to the way we might live now.

Her first book, Hungry City, is a panoramic sweep of human history from hunter-gatherer cave-dwellers to urban sprawl, bringing an architect's understanding of the development of cities. The first book established the author's reputation as philosopher, cultural historian, and prizewinning food writer.

Booksellers don't know where to put her on the shelves. If Hungry City asks the questions, Sitopia (a made-up word from the Greek for food + place) looks for the answers.

This book is intelligent and brave - and she writes like a dream. 

By Carolyn Steel,

Why should I read it?

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


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My 3rd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

Elisabeth Luard I this book because...

My kind of history - a 400-page bird's-eye view of Chinese gastronomy by a woman who knows how to tell a good story and isn't afraid to bring herself to the page - so important in a work of high scholarship, as this certainly is. 

The author just happens to be fluent in Mandarin, trained as a chef in the culinary academy in Sizchuan as earning a degree from its university, which makes her unusually qualified to set the record straight on what's surely the most complex, exacting, and least-understood of the world's great culinary traditions.

Noodles in the north, rice in the south - her travels over the years have taken her to every corner of China's vastness. She's won all the glittering prizes for her cookbooks and written an acclaimed autobiography, but this looks like the book she was always meant to write. Lucky us!

By Fuchsia Dunlop,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Invitation to a Banquet as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world's best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication-but today that is beginning to change.

In Invitation to a Banquet, award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

The Old World Kitchen: The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cooking

By Elisabeth Luard,

Book cover of The Old World Kitchen: The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cooking

What is my book about?

First published in 1985 In the UK and in the US as The Old World Kitchen, EPC is now recognised as a valuable record of a way of life - self-sufficient, dependent on season, latitude, geography, and trade-routes - that's almost vanished but which is nevertheless the bedrock of Europe's regional culinary habit.

Today, as climate change threatens the world's food supply, the old ways provide a blueprint for how we might live in harmony with the natural world.