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 Dream of Scipio

Mary Doria Russell Why did I love this book?

When I am overwhelmed by awful news about plagues, wars, ecological disasters, financial implosions, and the rise of homegrown American fascism, I find it oddly comforting to learn about earlier eras when everything was falling apart. That’s why – every few years – I reread A Dream of Scipio.

The story takes place in a single village in France, but at three different times when the End of the World was nigh: the final days of the Roman Empire when the barbarians actually were at the gate; the months of the medieval Black Death, when the whole world seemed to be dying; and the years of the Nazi-occupation of France, when European civilization was devolving into mechanized savagery.

This novel is about finding a way to behave ethically in a time when doing so can get you killed. Sometimes there is a price for being decent and kind and humane. A Dream of Scipio demands answers to age-old questions about history. How could this have happened? What would I have done?

I reread A Dream of Scipio when I need to brace myself for whatever comes next in our own chaotic and unpredictable era of human history. Putting myself into the minds of the characters in each of the three eras is a useful way to tell myself “this, too, shall pass.” Life will go on. Maybe not the life I’d have wished for, but... Life. 

By Iain Pears,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Dream of Scipio as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In national bestseller The Dream of Scipio, acclaimed author Iain Pears intertwines three intellectual mysteries, three love stories, and three of the darkest moments in human history. United by a classical text called "The Dream of Scipio," three men struggle to find refuge for their hearts and minds from the madness that surrounds them in the final days of the Roman Empire, in the grim years of the Black Death, and in the direst hours of World War II. An ALA Booklist Editors' Choice.

Iain Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost and The Portrait are also available from Riverhead Books.


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: The Intersecting Lives of Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped

Mary Doria Russell Why did I love this book?

My novel about World War II Italy depicts only one of the many times when the peninsula was a battleground from the Alps to Sicily. This book is narrative nonfiction that recounts medieval history with three extraordinary personalities that came together in 1502: Leonardo DaVinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia.

Borgia was the son of Pope Alexander VI, and in his brutal campaign to forge dozens of warring states into a unified empire, he employed Leonardo to design and build seige engines, while negotiating with Machiavelli for the freedom of Florence. Borgia later became The Prince in Macchiavelli’s book on the realities of power politics.

Again: this book assures me that no matter how dark the tapestry history weaves for us, there is always “a thread of grace.”

By Paul Strathern,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In the autumn of 1502 three giants of the Renaissance period - Cesare Borgia, Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli - set out on one of the most treacherous military campaigns of the period. Cesare Borgia was a ferocious military leader whose name was synonymous with brutality and whose reputation was marred with the suspicion of incest. Niccolo Machiavelli was a witty and subversive intellectual, more suited to the silken diplomacy of royal courts than the sodden encampments of a military campaign. And Leonardo da Vinci was a visionary master and the most talented military engineer in Italy. What led…


My 3rd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of The Periodic Table

Mary Doria Russell Why did I love this book?

The Periodic Table is by Primo Levi, a chemist and one of the few thousand Italian Jews who were not successfully hidden during World War II. If you are curious about the pre-war culture of the Italkim (Italian Jews), this book is a window into a beautifully rendered lost world.

Primo Levi was ultimately imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he was sort of adopted by an illiterate Italian peasant who was swept up in the forced labor sweeps. The two of them were liberated and walked back to Italy together after the war.

What makes this book extraordinary is the way Primo Levi teaches you a little chemistry with every chapter, as he keeps his own sanity by finding a scientific worldview that is out of reach of the brutality of the concentration camps.  

By Primo Levi, Raymond Rosenthal (translator),

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked The Periodic Table as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An extraordinary kind of autobiography in which each of the 21 chapters takes its title and its starting-point from one of the elements in the periodic table. Mingling fact and fiction, science and personal record, history and anecdote, Levi uses his training as an industrial chemist and the terrible years he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz to illuminate the human condition. Yet this exquisitely lucid text is also humourous and even witty in a way possible only to one who has looked into the abyss.


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

A Thread of Grace

By Mary Doria Russell,

Book cover of A Thread of Grace

What is my book about?

It is September 8, 1943. Fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum and her father are among thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the French Alps, hoping to find safety in Italy, which has just broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies.

What no one realizes yet is that Italy has just become a Nazi-occupied country and will soon be a new battlefield in a brutal war. As the Blums race to stay one step ahead of the Nazis, they are aided by a vast underground network of Italian priests, nuns, and ordinary citizens. A Thread of Grace is based on the true story of Jewish survival in Italy during the last 20 months of World War II.