The best books of 2023

This list is part of the best books of 2023.

We've asked 1,708 authors and super readers for their 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

Robert Zimdahl I this book because...

Everyone is going to die. Everyone knows that, and very few deal with it.

Even though we know it’s going to happen, thinking about it and preparing is always postponed. This book introduces us to a uniquely meaningful way to deal with death. It is also a love story.

It was first written in Italian, translated to English, and is set in Japan. All these make for a different and very useful view of how to deal with death.

By Laura Imai Messina,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Laura Imai Messina’s international bestselling novel is a story about grief, mourning, and the joy of survival, inspired by a real phone booth in Japan with its disconnected “wind” phone, a place of pilgrimage and solace since the 2011 tsunami.

When Yui loses both her mother and her daughter in the tsunami, she begins to mark the passage of time from that date onward: Everything is relative to March 11, 2011, the day the tsunami tore Japan apart, and when grief took hold of her life. Yui struggles to continue on, alone with her pain.

Then one day she hears…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Small Great Things

Robert Zimdahl I this book because...

This is a fictional novel about the real, continuing moral dilemma of racism and prejudice in the United States and other countries.

It is based on actual events. A black woman who was a capable registered nurse worked many years in the pediatric ward of a hospital. As is typical of hospital pediatric wards, many things were happening at the same time. She was not supposed to attend the birth of a child but happened to be the only one available

The father, a white man, was extremely prejudiced, complained to hospital authorities, and caused a series of problems for the nurse, who basically lost her job.

I will not reveal the ending because one must read the story to learn about themselves, racism in the United States, the resolution of difficult moral problems, and how the existence of racism, even in a hospital, affects many lives.

By Jodi Picoult,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Small Great Things as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Small Great Things is the most important novel Jodi Picoult has ever written ... It will challenge her readers ... [and] expand our cultural conversation about race and prejudice.' - The Washington Post

When a newborn baby dies after a routine hospital procedure, there is no doubt about who will be held responsible: the nurse who had been banned from looking after him by his father.

What the nurse, her lawyer and the father of the child cannot know is how this death will irrevocably change all of their lives, in ways both expected and not.

Small Great Things is…


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My 3rd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

Robert Zimdahl I this book because...

We all eat because we must and often because we enjoy it. 

We all need to pay more attention to what we eat, where words come from, and what happens as we lose some of the diversity of our food.

As we sacrifice diversity, we ALL sacrifice the places and people who preserve ecological and dietary diversity. The author this innumerable endangered foods and food cultures across the planet and encourages us to think about why they’re important

By Dan Saladino,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Eating to Extinction as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like “foodie,” but a form of reverence . . . Enchanting." ―Molly Young, The New York Times

Dan Saladino's Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s pathbreaking tour of the world’s vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Key Issues in Agricultural Ethics

By Robert Zimdahl,

Book cover of Key Issues in Agricultural Ethics

What is my book about?

Agriculture continues to face unprecedented scrutiny for its social and environmental effects. The book probes the key ethical debate surrounding agriculture and agri-food supply chains.

The chapters written by 12 authors from six countries the book laid a firm foundation for ethical consideration in all forms of agriculture and associated technologies in effects on the environment, plants, animals, and human societies.