Matt Witten's 3 favorite reads in 2023

I loved this book; I think because my mother is in the generation of women this book is about. Like the main character, my mother was smart and multitalented, with a lot to offer. But she came of age, got married, and had kids before women’s lib, and her life choices were greatly circumscribed. When she was dissatisfied with her life, the doctors prescribed valium.

I hope with this intro I’m not making the book sound depressing because it definitely is not. It’s a lot of fun. The main character faces all of these same obstacles but heroically overcomes them. She’s a lively, enterprising, entertaining heroine who’s way more clear-eyed and intelligent than everyone around her, exposing the hypocrisies her whole generation of women had to face.

This book has an epic sweep and reminded me of The World According to Garp. But it’s even better!

I loved this and really looked forward to reading it in the evenings. It's a cross between Isaac Bashevis Singer and chick lit.

The two main characters are a grandmother who was a matchmaker on the Lower East Side a hundred years ago and a granddaughter who's a divorce lawyer in modern-day New York. The book takes place in both time periods. It’s a meditation on love and marriage in which everything comes out well in the end, and all the characters we're rooting for meet their “beshert,” their destined one.

My younger son has a theory that when someone recommends a book, movie, or TV show that's outside their usual genre, you should take that recommendation extra seriously; and if that's true, then take this rec seriously! :) Because this book is far outside my usual genre, which is thrillers.

I found The Matchmaker's Gift totally charming. I loved the one-hundred-year-old story and the current story equally.

This is a mind-blowing book. It’s also a quick read because the author focused on very rootable individual characters and stories. A Fever in the Heartland tells the story of the Klan’s terrifying rise in the 1920s and their fall.

I knew the Klan had a resurgence in the 1920s, but I had no idea it was this powerful. One-third of White people in Indiana, and a lot of other states, were Klan members. It was big not just in the South but in Oregon, California, and elsewhere. It wasn't just a secret society: a lot of people, both men and women, were very open about being members. They had a huge impact on local and national politics.

With the election coming up, I found this book both scary and somewhat reassuring. Scary because it reinforces that a lot of the white nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay crap going on in our country today has very deep roots. Somewhat reassuring because we did manage to fight this stuff off in the 1920s; hopefully, we'll fight it off today.

Hopefully.