My Books of 2023

A review of the books I read in the past year, inspired by my friend Dan Park’s incomparable annual list.

• Can We Talk About Israel? by Daniel Sokatch. A readable and compassionate primer on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, made all the more relevant by recent events.
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. A book that had been on my reading bucket list for decades. Moving realist depiction of the plight of the migrants from the Dust Bowl states to California in the 1930s. I did sometimes find the rambling asides overbearing, and I didn’t love the ending. But the messages on the virtues of solidarity for and among the oppressed resonated.
• Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. This one was another selection from my bucket list and it was worth the wait. Unexpectedly absorbing, rich in details that bring to life 19th century imperial Russia, and a masterful probing of the human psyche.
• Stay True, by Hua Hsu. Loved this coming-of-age memoir from the author’s years as a student at Berkeley in the 1990s. The author’s reflections on the tragedy at the heart of the story are told with a restraint that makes them all the more moving.
• Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr. A dazzling narrative stretching from antiquity on through to centuries after our own. Rich in historical details of late Byzantine-era Constantinople alongside a harrowing vision of a future Earth ravaged by climate change. Also a welcome paean to the power of libraries, books and storytelling to help us cope through challenging times.
• Inside Out and Back Again, by Thanhha Lai. The most moving book I read in 2023. A young adult story written in free verse that tells a tale of flight from Vietnam and resettlement in the southeastern U.S. from the perspective of an adolescent girl, based on the author’s lived experience. Strongly recommend for readers of every age.
• Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. Engrossing story of the rise, fall, and redemption of Pip, and biting commentary on the iniquities of life in class-conscious, mid 19th century England in the heart of the industrial revolution. Another from my bucket list that I found unexpectedly engrossing.
• A Day of Pleasure, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Short stories that take the reader through the author’s coming of age in the lost world of early 20th century Warsaw’s Jewish quarter. Moving to me as it felt like a direct eye into the life of my great-grandparents, who lived in Warsaw in the period just before Singer’s stories.
• The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner. A woman with a difficult upbringing is imprisoned after killing her stalker. She struggles to find dignity in her life in prison, and to reunite with her son. Gut-wrenching conclusion.
• Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. Stunning weaving of individual perspectives of a host of characters who cross paths during a single day in the life of the protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway. Fascinating to compare the depiction of London in the postwar 1920s with that in Dickens’ writings 70 years earlier.
• Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura. Captivating — The taut prose keeps the tension high in this story of a translator at an international tribunal in The Hague as she navigates complex situations in her personal and professional lives, amidst her search for love, meaning, and home. At one point the protagonist translates from Dioula to French to English — which resonated personally from my time living in West Africa. I loved that it wasn’t a terribly complex story — it was a concise but intense construction of a character with a handful of specific challenges she was working through.
• The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton. Another young adult selection that I read at the recommendation of my daughter. Unexpectedly dark and gritty, it explores friction across social classes among the youth of an Oklahoma town, and the ways that family and community can sustain us when we need them most.
• The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Sulayman and Michael Bhaskar. An excellent primer on how AI, synthetic biology, and other emerging technologies will shape our future, and how we should approach them from the perspective of public policy and organizational governance. I appreciated the effort to focus on long-term, existential risks while also acknowledging and addressing nearer-term ones.