Jim O'Loughlin's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Louise Erdrich’s most recent novel continues the trend of her recent work of venturing into different kinds of novels. In recent years, she has published dystopian fiction and fiction hueing closely to her family’s personal history.

The Sentence is set in Erdrich’s Minneapolis-based bookstore, Birchbark Books, during the pandemic and George Floyd protests, and, though clearly fiction, it has the feel of a first-person dispatch from our recent tumultuous times.

It is also a ghost story, and it brings together Erdrich’s trademark insightful characterization with a willingness to consider the world as a mysterious place that is sometimes dangerous, sometimes humorous, and always made better by the care of individuals for one another.

Though this book came out a little while ago, I first listened to it this year. Little Eyes is a near-future novel in which the latest technological fad are Kentukis (the novel’s original title in Spanish), networked devices that allow strangers to either be “keepers” or “dwellers” of these household objects (picture what you’d get if you combined Chatroulette, Furbies, and Roombas).

The popularity of this seemingly innocuous toy soon has a massive social impact throughout the globe, and the novel traces a range of unanticipated uses and consequences of this merger of public and private life.

The plausibility of this future makes the story all the more compelling

I knew going in that Trust was a co-winner of the 2023 Pulitzer, so I was going to give it a chance. But for a long time, I found myself asking, “Why did this win the Pulitzer?”

However, six and a half hours in (that’s a long time!), it all started to make sense, and I realized that this really is a tour de force kind of book (what a compelling ending!). But fair warning, you really have to stick with it.

I hate to say much more than that because almost any description will involve spoilers due to the novel’s inventively experimental form.