Joshua Gaylord's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Charles Portis makes me want to be a better writer. I read this book and thought, “I didn’t know you were allowed to write like this.” 

The narrative is meandering but still poignant. The language sometimes soars and sometimes boils and sometimes crawls through the gutter. But there is a feeling of inevitability on every page, as though you were witnessing, with every line of dialogue or description, a shift in the earth, the creep of a glacier. You think: “There is no other way this book could be written.”  With each event, you think, “There is no other way this could have gone. How did he know?” 

Portis has the voice of a vulgar oracle, and I find myself penitent at his feet.

Offill’s book reads like a contemporary John Updike slathered in poetry.

The relationship at the center of the book is something we view through the honeyed distortion of language, but don’t all relationships have their own honeyed distortions? The beginnings of the relationship are beautiful, and so are the endings because every spring and every fall are natural inversions of one another.

As a result, Offill’s version of love is one I find deeply affecting. She whispers secrets to me, telling me that every tragedy contains within it the hope and beauty of some fresh-feathered beginning, a beginning, in fact, that is never very far removed from where we are.

This is a little bit of a cheat. I’ve read this book before. But I read it again this year. I tend to read it every year.

In an era when time is a commodity constantly depleted by phones and screens when we don’t have the luxury of boredom to foster daydreaming, Brautigan celebrates the power of the imagination. His writing feels like what you would get if I sat you down at the side of an empty rural highway to wait for a bus that never comes, and all you have to occupy yourself are the flights of your own fancy.

It’s the literature of the fabulating mind, and, for all its surrealness, it manages to communicate a heartbreaking poignancy.