Thomas Reed's 3 favorite reads in 2023

From the first time I read The Great Gatsby, I’ve loved dark variations on The American Dream.

I began Trust expecting a straightforward tale of a dramatic rise and fall in New York’s circles of financial power, and Diaz’s captivating opening section bore out many of my expectations. Then, as though the book were a snake shedding its old skin, an altered but kindred narrative emerged from the first—and then another—and then another.

Add sharply etched, quirky, and multifaceted characters, and you have a succinct masterpiece I wished were twice as long. Although it’s set in the last century, Trust is a quintessential novel of 2020s America.

Each section title—for example, "Trust," "Bonds," "Futures"—is ambiguous in ways that reflect the manipulations of reality around which the narrative grippingly (and disconcertingly!) turns. Topical yet timeless, this is as good a book as I've read in years.

Great Circle revolves around two women I found fascinatingly complex—twentieth-century aviator Marian Graves, bent on circling the globe via the poles, and twenty-first-century actor Hadley Baxter, who struggles to capture the ineffable Marian in a Hollywood biopic.

I was blown away by the geographical and historical scope of Shipstead’s book, darting from Glasgow to Missoula, London to Alaska, from the opening of the American West through the days of Prohibition and the Second World War to contemporary Hollywood.

The cast of characters is equally huge, deftly developed, often eccentric, always interesting. For sheer societal scope, I was reminded of James Michener, but the intensity and focus of the drama are more like Melville’s in Moby Dick.

Better to say that Great Circle deserves to sit on the same shelf as another book of female adventurers I hold in awe, Sena Jeter Naslund’s remarkable Ahab’s Wife.

I picked up Pachinko to learn more about Korean culture and the ways twentieth-century Koreans suffered at the hands of the Japanese—bookending what I knew about the Holocaust.

I finished it with a vastly fuller sense of the potential impact of bias in any advanced society. Lee doesn’t hold a mirror directly up to American culture, but there were many times that was the effect for me.

Characters I cared about wrestled with nationality, gender, sexual identity, ambition, and altruism in strongly emblematic ways, but always as fleshed-out individuals whose joys and sufferings grabbed me like they were members of my own family.

Lee isn’t one of those authors unwilling to expose her characters to the random accidents of history. They’re as vulnerable to turns of plot as they are to the biases that surround them. I found the result to be a novel of rare poignancy and moral power.