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 Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

Neil Baldwin Why did I love this book?

I have written about indigenous peoples and about the idealized trajectory of American history.

But neither of these projects prepared me for the astonishing, mind-bending lens-reversal of Indigenous Continent, the story of “what happened here,” from the point of view of the first tribal-nations occupants through a narrative that gives the lie to Robert Frost’s “the land was ours before we were the land’s.” Scrupulously researched, not a polemic, Hamalainen’s text feels like a bracing corrective. 

By Pekka Hämäläinen,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Indigenous Continent as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

American history and self-understanding have long depended on the notion of a "colonial America", an era that-according to prevailing accounts-laid the foundation for the modern United States. In Indigenous Continent, the acclaimed historian Pekka Hamalainen shatters this Eurocentric narrative by retelling the four centuries between first contacts and the peak of Native power from Indigenous points of view. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth, the American Revolution and other well-worn episodes on the conventional timeline, Hamalainen depicts a sovereign world of distinctive Native nations whose members, far from simple victims of colonial aggression, controlled the continent well into the…


When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

My 2nd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of All the Pretty Horses

Neil Baldwin Why did I love this book?

For more than three decades, since it won the National Book Award for Fiction, this classic has been sitting unread on my shelf – out a woefully-misconstrued fear that I would find it abstruse, even “precious.”

How abysmally, embarassingly wrong I have been  and how thrilled I am to commend this elegaic, landscape-driven prose poem to everyone who loves an impeccably-constructed masterpiece, its violence transcendant, its young protagonist, John Grady Cole, stoic and enduring, its spirit of place on the Southwest frontier tipping into Mexico replete with beauty and tragedy. 

By Cormac McCarthy,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked All the Pretty Horses as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

The first volume in McCarthy's legendary Border Trilogy, All The Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about the passing of childhood, of innocence and a vanished American…


My 3rd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of The Farm

Neil Baldwin Why did I love this book?

The Swedish-English author Tom Rob Smith made his smashing debut with the international best-seller Child 44, in 2008 which, after I devoured it, I figured he couldn’t supercede.

On the contrary – The Farm, a multi-layered, tricky, shape-shifting meditation on truth-telling – is now securely on my most-loved list. The premise is simple: Our narrator, Daniel, travels from his home in London to the remote farm in Sweden where he believes his parents are enjoying a pleasurable retirement, only to be warned by his mother that “everything that Father has told you is a lie…I need the police.”

The labyrinthine struggle between illusion and veracity never lets up, and to call this book a page-turner is inadequate – it’s an open-ended page-blurrer that left me wilfully disoriented and manipulated.   

By Tom Rob Smith,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

From the author of Child 44, soon to be a major film starring Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and Gary Oldman, comes an intricately-knitted thriller in the vein of John Le Carre's APerfect Spy.

Daniel believed that his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden, the country of his mother's birth. But with a single phone call, everything changes.

Your mother... she's not well, his father tells him. She's been imagining things - terrible, terrible things.In fact, she has been committed to a mental hospital.

Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother calls:…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern

By Neil Baldwin,

Book cover of Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern

What is my book about?

Time magazine called her “the Dancer of the Century.” Her technique, used by dance companies throughout the world, became the first long-lasting alternative to the idiom of classical ballet. Her pioneering movements—powerful, dynamic, jagged, edgy, forthright—combined with her distinctive system of training, were the epitome of American modernism, performance as art. Her work continued to astonish and inspire for more than sixty years as she choreographed more than 180 works.

Neil Baldwin, author of admired biographies of Man Ray and Thomas Edison, gives us the artist and performer, the dance monument who led a cult of dance worshippers as well as the woman herself in all of her complexity. 

My 6-year-old's favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Purple Coyote

Neil Baldwin Why did they love this book?

I have read this book to my grandson at least ten times and now he reads it by himself.

He loves it because it is relatable (main character besides the Coyote is a little boy), funny (the convoluted conversations between the two), and most of all, tricky (there’s a pervasive unanswered question that, when finally answered, causes some very strange things to happen).

By Cornette,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Purple Coyote as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 3, 4, 5, and 6.

What is this book about?

One day, a purple coyote appeared on the hill. A coyote unlike any other. A purple coyote.

Jim's never seen a purple coyote before, and he's determined to find out how the creature got his unusual color. But the coyote isn't saying. It's a big secret. So is the reason why the coyote howls a strange howl and dances a strange dance. Jim is stumped, and the more he questions the coyote, the more frustrated he becomes. Then one day the secret is revealed . . . .


Explore all books for 6-year-olds

Book cover of Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America
Book cover of All the Pretty Horses
Book cover of The Farm

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,459

readers submitted
so far, will you?