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The best books of 2023

This list is part of the best books of 2023.

We've asked 1,608 authors and super readers for their 3 favorite reads of the year.

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My favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of King: A Life

W. Jason Miller Why did I love this book?

Written with true marvelousity, this overdue biography of King reads like a movie you can hold. 

Supported by both fresh interviews and old family histories long overlooked, King’s wife, Coretta, is valiantly lifted from obscurity even while her husband exemplifies the truth that habits are harder to break than promises.  

Eig is truly one of our generation’s master storytellers.    

By Jonathan Eig,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. - and the first to include recently declassified FBI files.

In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself.

He casts fresh light on the King family's origins as well as MLK's complex relationships with…


My 2nd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs

W. Jason Miller Why did I love this book?

This book re-deepened my lifelong devotion to all things Dylan.

Part humorist, unsurpassed musicologist, and full-time narrative genius, Marcus’s deep dives into seven of Dylan’s most iconic songs left me re-listening to each one as if they had been newly remastered. 

Who knew Bob Dylan could write a song with three faces? Trust me, you need to be introduced to each of them.      

By Greil Marcus,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Acclaimed cultural critic Greil Marcus tells the story of Bob Dylan through the lens of seven penetrating songs

"The most interesting writer on Dylan over the years has been the cultural critic Greil Marcus. . . . No one alive knows the music that fueled Dylan's imagination better. . . . Folk Music . . . [is an] ingenious book of close listening."-David Remnick, New Yorker

Named a Best Music Book of 2022 by Rolling Stone

"Further elevates Marcus to what he has always been: a supreme artist-critic."-Hilton Als

Across seven decades, Bob Dylan has been the first singer of…


My 3rd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Let America Be America Again: Conversations with Langston Hughes

W. Jason Miller Why did I love this book?

A vibrant Hughes is presented here much as he often appeared in life: raising a glass of gin to salute dear friends.

With a remarkable cast of characters that includes James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, these long-forgotten interviews and speeches of poet Langston Hughes bring us face-to-face with his extraordinary literary (and musical) contemporaries. 

Mischievous, controversial, and indefatigably affable, few literary figures ever combined such a diverse and rich inner spirit— all while writing some of the world’s most iconic poems.              

By Langston Hughes, Christopher C. De Santis (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Let America Be America Again as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A collection of interviews, speeches, and essays by Langston Hughes.

Let America Be America Again: Conversations with Langston Hughes is a record of a remarkable man talking. In texts ranging from early interviews in the 1920s, when he was a busboy and scribbling out poems on hotel napkins, to major speeches, such as his keynote address at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, Hughes's words further amplify the international reputation he established over the course of five decades through more widely-published and
well-known poems, stories, novels, and plays.

In these interviews, speeches, and conversational…


Plus, check out my book…

Langston Hughes

By W. Jason Miller,

Book cover of Langston Hughes

What is my book about?

As the first black author in America to make his living exclusively by writing, Langston Hughes inspired a generation of writers and activists. One of the pioneers of jazz poetry, Hughes led the Harlem Renaissance, while Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked Hughes’s signature metaphor of dreaming in his speeches.

In this new biography, W. Jason Miller illuminates Hughes’s status as an international literary figure through a compelling look at the relationship between his extraordinary life and his canonical works.

Drawing on unpublished letters and manuscripts, Miller addresses Hughes’s often ignored contributions to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, as well as his complex and well-guarded sexuality, and repositions him as a writer rather than merely the most beloved African-American poet of the twentieth century.