By Jay Innis Murray
So, that was 2023. I finished 60 books this year. Some of them were short, but 60 is a high number for me. My website does not seem to generate much browsing. That’s either a bug or a feature. I’ll let somebody else decide, but I’ll use this opportunity to link some of the reviews I wrote this year in case you’re interested and missed them along the way.
The first book I finished was The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. Won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2022. Considering the events of this year, that’s a dark beginning, but it didn’t seem so at the time. It’s a funny novel that gets better and better until it becomes a triumph of comic writing at the end. Needs to be read by everyone at this point. In January, I also finished Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and The Poor Mouth by Flann O’Brien.
In February, I wrote my first review of the year of The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis. Here is the link.
In February, I also read Ellis’ non-fiction book White, which I did not like very much. It provided some good prep material for The Shards. I read two excellent books by Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life. Both are pretty haunted. I highly recommend both. I also read about 70% of Fisher’s k-punk blog (if you can’t get enough hauntology). Also read George Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money.
In March, I discovered a new writer, Gerardo Sámano Córdova. I reviewed his 2023 novel Monstrilio, which was a delightful surprise and turned out to be one of my most visited posts of the year. Here is the link below. I moved my site from Square Space to Word Press this year, so apologies for any weird formatting that I haven’t got around to fixing yet.
In March, I also finished The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson and a volume of Kafka’s Aphorisms. All great.
In April I read 10 books. Six of these were books published in 1923, which I read in honor of the 100-year century mark (not that they were published in April; I didn’t check the months). This included the great New Hampshire by Robert Frost and the incomparably great Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, both re-reads that were much overdue. Also read A Lost Lady by Willa Cather and The Rover, which is Joseph Conrad’s last complete novel and a wonderful Dickensian historical piece. Also from 1923 were Pablo Neruda’s Book of Twilight and DH Lawrence’s bizarre book of poems Birds, Beasts and Flowers.
The other four from April were Harold Bloom’s Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles (2020), The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson, The Cherry Orchard (1904) by Chekhov and Peer Gynt (1876) by Ibsen. The Ibsen is probably among the Top 50 best books I’ve ever read.
I reviewed two books in May. The first was Jen Craig’s 2023 novel Wall. This excellent book was one of my contenders for book of the year. Here is the link.
I also loved and reviewed The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher. Here is the link to my review and some interview questions Matt was generous enough to answer for me.
I read two more century-old books in May. These were Duino Elegies by Rilke (another all-time favorite) and a book of stories by Elizabeth Bowen called Encounters. Other books from May were How to Read and Why by Bloom, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, and Mary, a very early novel by Nabokov of his emigrant years in Berlin.
In June, I read and really enjoyed Neutral Evil (2019) by my Twitter mutual Lee Klein and another early Nabokov King, Queen, Knave (1928). Most of the month was taken up by The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James. The culmination of the early period for James as well as a certain kind of novel in English, this monster pushes close to 250,000 words. It’s worth all the time and effort of concentration.
I read a lot over the summer but somehow only finished two books in July. One was my third complete read of Madame Bovary. Definitely the best read of my three in the Lydia Davis translation. I also read and reviewed The Strange (2023) by Nathan Ballingrud. A ghost story on Mars. Here is the link.
In August, I read two books by Kate Zambreno. These were Drifts and To Write As If Already Dead. The two books orbit around each other’s themes. I think this similarity made me like Drifts somewhat less than I might have. The latter book is another impressive title from the Columbia University Press Rereadings series. https://cup.columbia.edu/series/rereadings
I also read, in August, Rikki Ducornet’s The Plotinus (2023), which is very fun, The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare, All the Names by Saramago, and Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac. Living in Lowell for the past seven years, I have been reading in and around Kerouac’s works. Enjoying most of them.
I posted two reviews in September. The first was another new discovery for me. I loved Angela O’Keeffe’s 2023 novel The Sitter. Here is the link to my review below.
I also reviewed one of the big releases for autofiction this year, Tremor by Teju Cole. Link:
The other September reads were A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) by Thoreau, Pure Colour (2022) by Sheila Heti, Jack’s Book (about Kerouac) by Barry Gifford and Chip Delany’s wonderful 1967 novel The Einstein Intersection.
October was a month of diverse interests for me. I read four very different books. The first was a carry-over from the previous month, Delany’s Babel-17 (1966). Next, I was thrilled to read Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, which came to my attention with the controversy around the Frankfurt Book Fair. I hate that I did not know of it sooner. It’s a wrenching, timely book. I loved Lynn Wolff’s WG Sebald’s Hybrid Poetics (2014), which was her dissertation polished and expanded into a lovely and enlightening book. Lastly, I did not quite know what to make of Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway. It’s a book that explores areas of knowledge outside my own. Our dog passed away this year after a long, happy life together, and something about Haraway’s narratives of how species live and survive together touched my heart. I wrote her an email about it, and she was kind enough to write back.
I finished three books in November and reviewed two of those. The first was Sebastian Barry’s 2023 novel Old God’s Time. Here is the link to my review.
I also read and loved Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims. In my review, I declared this book my Book of the Year for 2023. Here is my review.
I also finished Our Beloved Kin (2019) by Lisa Brooks. This excellent history of King Philip’s War in New England won the Bancroft Prize in 2019. Highly recommended for readers of history. The book explores indigenous perspectives on the war in ways I have never encountered before.
Finally, here in December I have a dozen books going and have finished another five. Grand Tour (2023) by Elisa Gonzalez is a devastating book of poems by a shockingly talented young poet. I also re-read All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy and liked it better than the last time a decade ago. I read the volume titled Prose by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, and, last book of the year, Doctor Sax by Kerouac. It’s a strange one, and a fun closer.
Happy New Year to you all.
Talking Big 
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