Wendy Bashant's 3 favorite reads in 2023

This is a many-layered story about three high-achieving friends who make video games. It is a book that I shouldn’t have liked—I don’t know anything about video games—but I did.

Sadie wants to write games that break boundaries to show the male-dominated video world what she can do. Sam has grown up poor with severe health problems and thus wants to make games that are crowd pleasers. Marx is the practical mind who tries to accommodate their disparate creativity and mold it into something that sells.

The characters find that they need each other, but as time passes, they also discover how messy life is when imagination, business, friendship, and love compete in real life. 

A discarded painting, the bones of a horse, an art historian, a naturalist: this enthralling tale takes these fragments from the basement of museums and the dustbin of history and builds a heart-wrenching novel.

Her two main modern characters are, as she is, scholars. One is Australian, the other British with a Nigerian mother. Through their “outsider” status and their overlapping academic interests, they slowly uncover the story of Lexington, one of America’s great racehorses, Jarret, his enslaved keeper, and almost 200 years of American history.

As they piece together this complicated history, they become entangled in its threads. They discover, as we do, that the sins of our past continue into our present.

Keegan’s book is slight, intense, and poetic. It is 1985, a bitter winter in Ireland. A coal seller in a small village reflects on his good fortune.

He came from humble beginnings, but his family is healthy—five girls. He has a happy marriage and is prosperous in these hard times. He even has enough to be generous to neighbors who have less. His comfortable position, however, is shaken when he discovers a secret in the locked barn by the convent.

With that discovery, the novella morphs from a fairy tale to a moral fable. It asks hard questions of us: What is our responsibility when we see something wrong? What power do we have to speak up?