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 Fairy Tale

Glynn Owen Barrass Why did I love this book?

I’ve always been a fan of King’s work, and the title of this intrigued me. When I began reading it, I was hooked.

It is the story of Charlie, a teenager with a bad past who yearns to be a better person. This really spoke to me and mirrors my own life to an extent. Charlie finds his chance when he saves Howard Bowditch from a fall and encounters the man’s pet dog, Radar, who is also old and failing with only limited time left.

Radar’s plight, the love Charlie and others who know Radar feel for him, actually made me cry. Charlie must go on a hero’s quest to save Radar, away from this world and into another. This book has had such a profound effect on me, more so than any other I’ve read in recent years.

By Stephen King,

Why should I read it?

11 authors picked Fairy Tale as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A #1 New York Times Bestseller and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice!

Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for that world or ours.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was seven, and grief drove his dad…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Kindred

Glynn Owen Barrass Why did I love this book?

I learned of this book from watching the television series, although I am a fan of Butler’s works anyway. The TV series was canceled (the episodes reached the halfway mark of the book), and I chose to read it due to how much I enjoyed the show. I was hooked and found it difficult to put this book down.

The protagonist lives between two worlds and suffers so many trials as she is bounced around from the present to the past. I felt her plight and admired the character’s strength in the face of every adversity.

By Octavia E. Butler,

Why should I read it?

15 authors picked Kindred as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner

The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon…


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My 3rd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Something Wicked This Way Comes

Glynn Owen Barrass Why did I love this book?

I decided to read this book after learning of its connection to Stephen King’s Fairy Tale, for King hints in the novel that Ray Bradbury himself may have visited the same lands Charlie has. From the start, though, I was won over by Bradbury’s beautiful and unparalleled prose. Every paragraph is a work of lyrical art, and I became so intrigued by the story and the mysteries that unfolded.

This is a coming-of-age adventure, and Bradbury has you caring for his characters from the beginning.

By Ray Bradbury,

Why should I read it?

11 authors picked Something Wicked This Way Comes as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One of Ray Bradbury’s best-known and most popular novels, Something Wicked This Way Comes, now featuring a new introduction and material about its longstanding influence on culture and genre.

For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

In the Court of the Yellow King

By Glynn Owen Barrass, Lucy Snyder, Robert Price

Book cover of In the Court of the Yellow King

What is my book about?

This book is a tribute to the works of author Robert W. Chambers, and more specifically, his collection of short stories: The King in Yellow.

Chambers wrote of a play with the power to drive its readers insane, or transport them into the bizarre world of Carcosa and its strange and deadly inhabitants. This fictional play was banned, burned, yet never totally destroyed, living on, and rotting away the veneer of civilization.

The mystery of this play has excited and enticed readers for decades. In this anthology, I brought a number of the world’s finest weird fiction authors together, to continue the legend of The King in Yellow.