Matt Weber's 3 favorite reads in 2023

It’s everything I loved about Game of Thrones—a sprawling family saga, a web of intrigue between warring houses, a nation on the brink of revolution, a complex world where trade and politics are cutthroat—but with wuxia and gangsters.

The first book is laser-focused on the conflict between two warrior clans fighting for control of the nation of Kekon’s capital city, but the aperture widens across the series to encompass the major powers (of which Kekon isn’t one)… and as we spend time with the members of the Kaul family, it’s impossible not to see how the dynamics of the family and the war feed into one another. Just excellently crafted fantasy.

The Human Target is a man whose specialty is drawing fire for superheroes and supervillains who fear for their lives, and living through it—but he’s caught by something he doesn’t see coming, and he’s only got twelve days to live.

Human Target is Tom King right in his wheelhouse: twisty mysteries and genuinely heartfelt romances, unearthing the buried emotional possibilities of the superhero comic in a way that’s so different, and much richer, than the deconstructions that Frank Miller and Alan Moore made trendy.

King also continues his unbroken streak of working with visual geniuses; Greg Smallwood’s retro-Americana art style and his versatility with color are a constant joy through the twelve issues. It’s a small story, but so worth your time.

I’m a sucker for found narratives, for stories told in annotations, and for ambiguous endings; there was no way I wasn’t loving this book.

Art Barbara saw some stuff, or thinks he did, when he was a kid. The stuff involved his friend, who’s drifted in and out of his life over the decades. He’s written a memoir, and his friend has found it, and… the blurb says, “she’s making cuts,” but really what she’s doing is adding her own opinion, or at least her own spin.

Both voices are engaging and distinct, both in the prose and in the narration by Graham Halstead and Xe Sands. Tremblay’s novels are all great, but whether it’s because it was my first or his latest, I liked this one the best.

Space fantasy adventure where the fate of not one but five worlds are at stake!

Lovable outcast kid heroes, an insidious villain who grows in power over the series, a pyrotechnic showdown in book 5! Beautiful, color-drenched comic art that evokes Moebius and She-Ra! What self-respecting kid could say no?

Imagine you’re 10 and you’ve already memorized the attacks, evolutions, and imperial and metric weights of Pokemon from every region. You’ve watched the D&D movie and realized there’s a whole world of owlbears, displacer beasts, and gelatinous cubes out there… and you don’t have the vital statistics for any of them.

Thankfully, Wizards of the Coast has got you covered. (Parent warning: Be prepared to do things like “explain how to calculate the area of a cone of fire,” “argue over whether a lich or a demilich should really have a higher challenge rating,” and “run a D&D campaign.”)

My 12-year-old is not super free with her opinions, but I read this book and we did talk a lot about it.

This is a book whose form and components are a fairy tale’s, but although it stays true to its fairy tale nature, it goes to some very contemporary places: To the seductions of simple answers, to parents’ best-intentioned misuses of their power over children, to a person’s right to make their family in the way they want and need. I think she knows enough to see how those themes connect with the world around her.

(Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the heroine is a magical girl whose name sounds a lot like hers, or that she’s friends with a cute little dragon.)