My Top 3 Books of 2023
Of all the books I read in 2023, here were my favorites.
1. The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
Mandel, Emily St. John. Sea of Tranquility: A novel (p. 199). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
There are so many things I love about this book. It is subtly intertwined with Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, but easily stands alone. If you haven’t read the other two novels, you probably wouldn’t even realize this book references any others. The writing is beautiful.
The Sea of Tranquility isn’t solely about a pandemic, but there’s a good stretch of the book that is about a pandemic. I’ve read a lot of pandemic novels, but this one was written after Covid. There are things you learn and experience living through a pandemic that aren’t quite what you would have imagined. Reading a pandemic story written post-covid is a different experience. Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a pandemic?
Are there other post-Covid pandemic novels you love?
Finally, this is one of the only stories I’ve encountered that does time travel in a way that I didn’t find annoying (The End of Eternity by Asimov is another). Instead of the massive plot holes so often found in time travel fiction, the reader might be left wondering if the characters exist in a simulation or finite time-loop
2. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
“Sofia says to me today, I just can’t understand it. What that? I asked.
Why we ain’t already kill them off.”
I somehow hadn’t read this until 2023. It’s hard to fully explain my appreciation of this book without doing a deep dive into literary analysis. The book touches on obvious themes of racism and sexism, but also poses questions about power structures in so many forms: government, society, relationships, family and religion.
3. The End of Everything by Katie Mack
From time to time, a universe fluctuates out of the heat bath into a very low entropy starting state, and then evolves forward (with increasing entropy) until it gets to its own Heat Death, decaying back into the background de Sitter universe. And from time to time, the fluctuation doesn’t produce a Big Bang, it just re-creates last Tuesday — specifically, that moment when you stubbed your toe on the kitchen table and spilled an entire cup of coffee on the floor. That moment. And every other moment of your life. And everyone else’s.
Mack, Katie. The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) (p. 100). Scribner. Kindle Edition.
Physics is stranger than fiction or religion. As the title suggests, this book discusses all the ways the universe could end. It also covers some of the more awe-inspiring parts of astrophysics: chaos, relativity, time. The End of Everything makes a lot of science-fiction and religion feel a little boring. There are possibilities based in math and science that are apparently stranger than most of the things people imagine. For example, the Boltzmann Brain.
You don’t need to have a background in physics or astronomy to enjoy this book (I don’t). It would be easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed if you let yourself get caught up in trying to fully understand everything in this book. This is one you can read and trust that you’re absorbing the big concepts even if you feel a little lost sometimes.
