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 Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Rosemary Sullivan Why did I love this book?

Macfarlane took me under the earth: I climbed with him into dark caves miles deep, into prehistoric burial sites 65,000 years old, into the understory of living creatures just beneath our feet and the wide web of the forest that connects all trees into a community, and into underground spaces where physicists unravel the cosmos searching for dark matter.

I now know there is a doomsday vault in the Arctic that preserves ninety million seeds for a post-apocalyptic future. I can never look at trees, the earth, or the cosmos in the same way. He warns of “species loneliness” if extinctions continue. But Macfarlane offers hope.

The world is utterly precious. Mystery abounds. There is so much to discover. 

By Robert Macfarlane,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked Underland as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time-from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come-Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.

Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay

Rosemary Sullivan Why did I love this book?

Nothing is more delightful than reading about improbable lives. In her biography of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, Merilyn Simonds writes about a woman whose life could not be predicted.

She was born in Sweden into a wealthy aristocratic family. Trained as a nurse, when she was twenty-three, she fell in love with a White Russian POW in a Swedish rehab camp and followed him back to his country in 1918. Captured by the Bolsheviks, the couple were separated. Louise waited 4 years in Moscow before accepting that he’d been executed.

She moved to the isolation of Northern Ontario and became a well-known ornithologist, writing six books and over one hundred articles. What makes this book wonderful is Simonds’s passionate enthusiasm, her knowledge as a birder, and her exquisite writing.

By Merilyn Simonds,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

From award-winning author Merilyn Simonds, a remarkable biography of anextraordinary woman ― a Swedish aristocrat who survived the Russian Revolution to become an internationally renowned naturalist, one of the first to track the mid-century decline of songbirds.

2022 Foreword Indies Award Winner for the Editor’s Choice Prize, non fiction

“[A] lyrical, passionate, and deeply researched portrait.” ― Margaret Atwood

“This brilliant account does justice to a pioneering figure who merits wider recognition.” ― Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[A] marvelous biography of a true pioneer of ornithology.” ― Booklist, starred review

“Woman, Watching is an entrancing blend of biography, memoir, history,…


My 3rd favorite read in 2023

Book cover of When We Cease to Understand the World

Rosemary Sullivan Why did I love this book?

Labatut has called his book “a work of fiction based on real events.” His personages are scientists, fascinating in their obsessions.

There are 5 sections to the book; they deal with brilliance and madness. Fritz Haber who pioneered the use of chlorine gas, which evolved into Zyklon B later used to kill millions in the Nazi concentration camps, seemed to have had no regrets about his discovery, but his wife committed suicide. The physicist who conjectured the existence of black holes died in a military hospital in 1915 from a skin infection, possibly cause by poison gas.

The book seems to despair at the human capacity for destruction.  

By Benjamin Labatut, Adrian Nathan West (translator),

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked When We Cease to Understand the World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain.

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At breakneck pace and with wondrous detail, Benjamin Labatut uses the…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Where the World Was: A Memoir

By Rosemary Sullivan,

Book cover of Where the World Was: A Memoir

What is my book about?

During the Covid lockdown, I compiled a collection of journeys I’d written about over the years. There were so many of them: trips to Russia, Czechoslovakia, England, India, Egypt, Cuba, Chile, Mexico, France, and Greece.

I wrote the outlandish story of the murder in our Moscow Airbnb while researching Stalin’s Daughter. I traveled to Chile during Augusto Pinochet’s regime, talking to writers. I followed D. H. Lawrence to visit the Etruscan tombs. Sometimes, I was trying to reinvent myself, attending a Sufi summer camp or exploring the trail of my ancestors. I ended my travels in the Great Bear Rainforest, astonished by the beauty of the wild.

I’ve been a traveler all my life. Organizing these journeys chronologically, I’ve discovered they describe who I am.

Book cover of Underland: A Deep Time Journey
Book cover of Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay
Book cover of When We Cease to Understand the World

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