Jessica Barksdale Inclan's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What interests me as a reader and a human being is how the past effects the future. In Rebecca Makkai’s novel The Great Believers, we see how the past—a time of crisis in the gay community and in all communities—devastated her characters.

In the 1980s section, we see how AIDS creeps into their lives and changes them, and then 30 years later, we see how those hard years made them who they are—or who they might have been.

Makkai spins out a wonderful, intergenerational story, one that breathes such humanity into her characters, who are rich, vital, and so human. We see the power of love through the decades, as well as the great need to let go of the past in order to have a future.

More importantly, this story reminded me that I’ve lived through not one but two pandemics. While the AIDS crisis was much different than COVID-19 in terms of contagion and outcome, this story showed me the awful ways we dealt with AIDS as a society and how long it takes us to grapple with the facts. More importantly, both diseases are still with us, and somehow, we have managed to live on and through. yet both diseases have left us with the need to reckon with the future in unimaginable ways.

I loved that the characters were so real, so filled with hope and the need to survive. they all broke my heart, even the ones that made it through the entire story. This book was believable and true.

I’m a big fan of Emily St. John Mandel, and when COVID emerged, I reread her novel Station Eleven in almost horror as well as appreciation. How could she have known and forecast?

In Sea of Tranquility, not only is one of the characters living into the start of a pandemic but grappling with a past that comes to her not in the usual manner but through time. Furthermore, she was able to weave in timelines from the early 20th century and the future, bringing characters in and out of each others’ lives seamlessly. We see the cause and effect of actions over hundreds of years, and as a reader, that causality is engaging.

Also, one of the main characters, Olive Llewellyn, is a writer on a long and arduous book tour, and as a writer, I related to some of the situations she finds herself in. Of course, St. John Mandel is a much more famous writer than I am, and I could see her using her vast publicity experiences here. The tour was exhausting and funny and interesting—and also important as Olive has to make choices that will affect her timeline and other characters as well.

This book was a great read.

I read Verghese’s novel Cutting for Stone years ago, and in that book, I so appreciated the writer’s ability to bring me to a place and time I have never been. In The Covenant of Water, I was again in an unknown—to me—place, Kerala in South India.

But what I was able to relate to was the way he introduced characters and showed how the past—in this case, a disease that effected many of the characters and their families for generations—held many of the characters in its grip. This intergenerational tale of a family suffering from an affliction is in-depth, rich, and wonderful. What was heartening was to see how, over time, the family members were able to address the condition and bring changes to their family and to a wider group of people.

It is a lovely story, one that I could have kept reading, as I wanted to know more about how the characters lived into the future.