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 The Dog of the South

Joshua Gaylord Why did I love this book?

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.

By Charles Portis,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Dog of the South as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Ray Midge is waiting for his credit card bill to arrive. His wife, Norma, has run off with her ex-husband, taking Ray's cards, shotgun and car. But from the receipts, Ray can track where they've gone. He takes off after them, as does an irritatingly tenacious bail bondsman, both following the romantic couple's spending as far as Mexico. There Ray meets Dr Reo Symes, the seemingly down-on-his-luck and rather eccentric owner of a beaten up and broken down bus, who needs a ride to Belize. The further they drive, in a car held together by coat-hangers and excesses of oil,…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of Dept. of Speculation

Joshua Gaylord Why did I love this book?

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.

By Jenny Offill,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Dept. of Speculation as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.

They used to be young, brave, and giddy with hopes for their future. They got married, had a child, and skated through all the small calamities of family life. But then, slowly, quietly something changes. As the years rush by, fears creep in and doubts accumulate until finally their life as they know it cracks apart and they find themselves forced to reassess what they have lost, what is left, and what they want now.

Written with the dazzling lucidity of poetry, Dept.…


My 3rd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of Trout Fishing In America

Joshua Gaylord Why did I love this book?

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.  

By Richard Brautigan,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Trout Fishing In America as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Richard Brautigan's wonderfully zany, hilarious episodic novel set amongst the rural waterways of America.

Here's a journey that begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square, wanders through the wonders of America's rural waterways and ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. With pure inventiveness and free-wheeling energy, the counterpoint to all those angry Beatniks, Brautigan tells the story of rural America, and the hunt for a bit of trout fishing. Funny, wild and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration - of a country and a mind.


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

When We Were Animals

By Joshua Gaylord,

Book cover of When We Were Animals

What is my book about?

Nobody knew why, but when the boys and girls reached a certain age, the parents locked themselves up in their houses, and the teenagers ran wild.

Lumen Fowler knows she is different. While the rest of her peers are falling beneath the sway of her community's darkest rite of passage, she resists.

For Lumen has a secret. Her mother never 'breached,' and she knows she won't either. But as she investigates her town's strange traditions and unearths stories from her family's past, she soon realizes she may not know herself or her wild side at all.