The best books of 2023

This list is part of the best books of 2023.

Join 1,708 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of Conquered City

Zeese Papanikolas I this book because...

Why do utopias fail? Why does the world of human dignity and equality they aspire to so often ossify into a mechanism of repression that strangles the very people revolutionaries attempted to liberate? 

Victor Serge is, for me, one of the essential writers of the 20th and now 21st centuries. A rebel since adolescence, he watched the revolution he had become part of in Russia begin to devour itself through internal terror, while at the same time fighting against the White terror of its opponents.

This novel gives an insider view of St. Petersburg, once the Czarist capital of Russia under the Bolsheviks in 1919-1920. What is remarkable in all of Serge’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, is that in spite of being nearly killed by the revolution he worked for, he never turned away from his ideals and belief that a new form of society was possible.

By Victor Serge, Richard Greeman (translator),

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

1919–1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the Revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the city’s new masters seek to cement their control, even as the counterrevolutionary White Army regroups. Conquered City, Victor Serge’s most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story, one in which the new political regime tracks down and eliminates its enemies—the spies, speculators, and traitors hidden among the mass of common people. 

Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, the Communists who have dared to pick up…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of The Sympathizer

Zeese Papanikolas I this book because...

Like many of my generation of Americans I demonstrated against the Vietnam War which I saw unfolding at a distance through the newspapers and the television screen. 

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel has a remarkable sense of being inside the skin of his title character, a young Vietnamese sympathizer of the North Vietnamese as they attempt to free the South. This is a book of great complexity.

Through the eyes of the protagonist, a double agent working for the South Vietnamese, we see the fall of Saigon, the escape of those who have connections on the final flights out and, in the United States, the escaped officers and former South Vietnamese movers-and-shakers who now own hole-in-the-wall restaurants in San Jose and work in menial jobs while plotting the overthrow of the communist regime.  

But we also see the revolution hardening, the re-education camps, the human sympathy drained out of the victors. This isn’t a tract or a manifesto. It’s a novel, full of human sympathy, comedy, and terror.

By Viet Thanh Nguyen,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked The Sympathizer as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016

It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain:…


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My 3rd favorite read in 2023…

Book cover of The Years

Zeese Papanikolas I this book because...

The Years is a novel in the form of an autobiography but a novel stripped of the usual cohesion and sense that its protagonist’s life is all moving in a direction that will eventually cohere into some final meaning and that everything in its pages, its various settings, its observations, its smallest details, will all make a single story with its beginning, middle and end.  

But is anyone’s life like that? An epigraph from Ortega Y Gasset gives the clue to how this book unfolds and the atmosphere that moves through it: “All we have is our history, and it does not belong to us.” The narrator, who distances herself from her autobiography by writing about herself in the third person, is born just after World War Two in a provincial town haunted by the war. 

She looks at photographs of herself at various stages of her life, she remembers what movies were playing, what she thought, what she read. She writes of the politics of France in the sixties and seventies. Her marriage and the gadgets that were so much a part of our lives that came and went as they were replaced by other gadgets.  

It’s all as if her life is, and isn’t hers, as if she’s come across the contents of the desk of a stranger with its odd bits of life, old photographs, theater tickets, newspaper clippings. The Years is at once intimate and distant, very real and very moving.

By Annie Ernaux, Alison L. Strayer (translator),

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked The Years as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times),…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World

By Zeese Papanikolas,

Book cover of An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World

What is my book about?

Enslaved people practiced a kind of psychological resistance to their masters by satirizing them and their airs in a dance called the cakewalk, which came to be danced to the ragtime music of the 1890s with its African rhythms bumping up against the conventional rhythms of Europe. Both the dance and its music become a template for my study of a group of poets, writers, philosophers, and, of course, ragtime and jazz musicians who questioned the dominant American culture not by colliding into it headlong, but by glancing off it – through playful and serious variations upending conventional expectations. Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Charles Sanders Peirce, Thorstein Veblen, both William and Henry James, Abraham Cahan, Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Charles Mingus are major figures in the book.