As with last year, this list isn’t composed only of books released in 2023. It’s a list of my favorite books among those I read this year, regardless of when the book was published. Also, this list doesn’t include books I reread this year, only those books I read for the first time.

It was an unusual year of reading for me, in part because I started a fictional series by author Craig Johnson. The Walt Longmire Mysteries series, which resulted in a TV show that debuted in 2012 (and which I watched at the time), is now over 20 books. It’s not a series I would normally embrace, but it is based in my home state of Wyoming, and my trip there this past summer – during Longmire Days no less – prompted me to check out the book series (helpfully available on audiobook from my local library). None of the books from that series made this list, but it did provide some relief and escape from my normal routine of informative but often burdensome nonfiction.

That said, only one novel made my list this year (although Birnam Wood was very close). I hope to read more fiction next year…2024 is going to be rough in the real world.

In the nonfiction category, I read several books that didn’t make my list, but may have done so had I picked my top ten on a different day. Notable examples include Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology and The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources.

I read 81 books in 2023. Here are my 10 favorite books I read (or listened to) this year.

10: Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other

I’ve only seen the first season of Outlander, but I did rather enjoy it. And while I’ve never been to Scotland, I’ve been fascinated by it for years, and hope to visit someday.

I can’t remember how I heard about this book by two of Outlander’s prominent actors (Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish), but I immediately fell in love with it. The banter between the two – often riotously funny – combined with the lovingly described history and culture of the titular country, made this short book a decidedly warm and humorous addition to my reading list this year.

9: The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies

This book and the following are uniquely compelling to me as a public servant. Mariana Mazzucato, a coauthor of this book, also wrote The Value of Everything, a book I’ve mentioned in a previous post. That book, like this one, offers a powerful defense of public servants and institutions and describes the co-optation and appropriation of publicly funded innovations and services for private gain.

This book masterfully describes how the consulting industry has cleverly and selfishly taken advantage of public agencies for the purposes of further weakening them, leading to increasing and perpetual reliance on said industry. This might be okay if the services provided by these consultancies were cost-effective and even moderately successful, but they’re often neither. I see this happen around my work every day, and it’s among the most frustrating aspects of public service.

8: Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

Like the former, this book presents a fierce apology of public servants, but this time centered on tech and service delivery. Author Jen Pahlka has long been a leader in civic tech, founding Code for America among other organizations, and having helped found the United States Digital Service.

Notably, this book focuses less on government’s lack of digital prowess, and more on the gap between policy and execution. The premise of much of the book is that policy and legislation are often crafted agnostic of their practical application, leaving the technical details of policy implementation to public servants and agencies. This gap, often an unbridgeable chasm, places public servants and agencies in an untenable position, while simultaneously eroding the public’s trust in government.

The book offers apt praise for the good-faith efforts of both legislators and public servants, while emphatically calling for government to focus on crafting and executing policy that provides tangible, digitally mature service delivery to the public.

7: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

This book is tricky to talk about, not least because I’ve included in two previous top-ten lists books by Kate Manne, who coined the term “himpathy”, which she describes as “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior.”

For this reason and others (including problematic gender essentialism), talking about the struggling modern male is inherently awkward and potentially dangerous (see Jordan Peterson, et al.).

That said, I think this book offers a compelling thesis. I won’t cite here the voluminous statistical evidence author Richard V. Reeves supplies to support his argument, but I suspect most of us have experienced or observed how dangerous modern males can be when they’re struggling (whether they know they’re struggling or not). Reeves also repeatedly acknowledges that many of our institutions, particularly those that exert disproportionate power in society, are still dominated by white men.

The author points out that, while young men are rapidly falling behind in modern society, initiatives to support young men should not (and need not) come at the expense of societal and economic gains by women in recent decades (along with a recognition that women still suffer from inequities in several areas of society).

Although it isn’t necessarily posited in this book (the book is largely focused on the divergent pace of educational and intellectual development between the sexes, and the failure of educational institutions to adjust appropriately), I’ve long thought young men need an outlet that productively orients potentially flammable characteristics of young men. Again, there’s danger of gender essentialism here, but I do think there are societal indications that young men currently lack positive channels for characteristics that are relatively common among young males. I’ve previously written about one option (compulsory service) that might be useful to contemplate here (although I don’t think such service should be exclusive to young men).

This is a difficult subject to talk about, and I appreciate Reeves for taking it up.

6: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

With the announcement of the Scorsese film, I decided to finally read this disturbing true account of the systematic murder of several members of the Osage Nation for the purposes of appropriating their oil rights. I’ve since watched the film, which is as difficult to watch as the book was to read.

I really don’t know what to say about this book, other than it is deeply upsetting. It is among the many historical accounts of the oppression, greed, and racism upon which much of this country was founded, and with which we continue to struggle to this day.

5: Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution

The single work of fiction on my list this year, Babel is a wonderfully inventive book. It reminded me of The Kingkiller Chronicle with elements of the Broken Earth series, but it’s also uniquely its own. It’s a meticulous allegorical work with an unmistakable subtext.

“‘Babel’ is a novel about the magic of translation, the illusion and allure of the academy and the violence of anticolonial resistance. I think it is the perfect novel for people who enjoyed ‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt or ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’ by Susanna Clarke,” Kuang said to Hearst Connecticut Media when the book was published in August 2022. “I started writing it while I was at Oxford and it is deeply influenced by the beauty of the place and the dark beauty that underwrites it. ‘Babel’ is my love letter and breakup letter with Oxford and academia.” — Yale University

4: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

Both humorous and revelatory, Eve is a deeply engaging account of the evolution of the female body, and the coevolutionary forces of society. The author points out how the complexity of the female body – combined with the historically male-dominated medical field – has for most of human history resulted in an infuriating dearth of medical research specific to females, the consequences of which include unserved or underserved medical needs.

The author doesn’t shy away from controversy, including as she does a possible evolutionary justification for sexism (especially sexism directed at women by other women), contending that childbirth is so dangerous for the female body, that evolution has manifested social mechanisms to keep a check on female sexuality. But even when the author describes controversy, violence, or the aforementioned, rage-inducing lack of medical research, she maintains a delightfully light-hearted tone overall.

For a sample of the author’s humor, check out this amazing interview with Sarah Silverman on The Daily Show.

3: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

Anchored in a specific example, that of the author (Naomi Klein) being frequently mistaken over the years for another author (Naomi Wolf), the book is really about how confusing, disorienting, and downright baffling the last several years have been.

Klein describes how the two Naomis were confused not only on account of their shared forename, but because both were perceived as “feminist” authors early in their careers (although Klein points out she wrote largely about capitalism, climate, and politics). The confusion was so ubiquitous that Klein would be mistakenly identified as Wolf even at in-person events.

Wolf’s later emphatic turn to rightwing politics – appearing as a regular on Steve Bannon’s podcast – further disrupted the very notion of identity, with the doppelgänger phenomenon turning in on itself, from that of a case of mistaken identity between two different Naomis to the dissonance of a single Naomi (Wolf) seemingly becoming a completely different person within just a few years.

I’ve experienced a version of this myself, with people I’ve known for years suddenly and seemingly irrevocably becoming unrecognizable, usually by adopting political or cultural associations that would have been absurd and impossible to conceive just a decade ago.

For this reason and others, I profoundly resonated with this book. Its grounding in Klein’s own experience provides an unlikely refuge in the brain-breaking tumult of our times.

2: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

This was a last-minute addition to the list, as I finished it only a few days ago.

I’ve heard several interviews about this book with author Tim Alberta over the past several weeks, and each time I experienced for myself the inner rage, confusion, and sadness about the state of “evangelical” (rightwing) political forces in our country. Alberta, a journalist currently with The Atlantic, is himself the son of a deceased evangelical pastor, and describes in both the book and in interviews how rightwing attacks on his book about Trump resulted in angry condemnations directed at Alberta from members of his father’s congregation — at his father’s own funeral.

This book describes what I have seen many times as an “exvangelical” myself. The evangelical church has long been more concerned with white nationalist politics and business interests than it has with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Alberta surveys the deep hypocrisy and disturbing history of the evangelical movement, nakedly embodied in the figure of Jerry Falwell, Jr.

Frankly, I consider the evangelical movement in the United States to be among the most malignant forces in our country, and this book explains why.

1: Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

This is without question the most unrelentingly harrowing book I’ve ever read.

For one, author John Vaillant is an exceptionally gifted writer, weaving an edge-of-your-seat page-turner from the true story of the catastrophic 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire.

For another, there perhaps isn’t a more apt (and ironically inevitable) wildfire story than this one, taking place as it does in and around the city whose existence is owed to the presence of bitumen (tar sands) in Alberta, Canada, among the dirtiest fossil fuels on the planet. This account furnishes the appropriate fuel for examining a world on fire.

I read this book while Canada was experiencing its worst year of wildfires on record, with suffocating smoke descending across the North American continent. The immediacy and relevance to 2023, combined with our own evacuation from wildfires in 2020, made this an obvious read for me.

That said, there are many, many books about climate change generally and wildfires specifically. But there’s a reason this book is on several top-ten lists this year, including The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2023.

This book describes the dynamics of fire – and how those dynamics are being supercharged by climate change – in ways that are both illuminating and terrifying. The book is so skillfully written that I couldn’t put it down. It has heart and empathy for its human subjects, victims of a catastrophic emergency and disprortionate perpetrators of climate impacts at the same time.

The subtitle of this book spells out the unsettling reality: these are tales from a hotter world, and it is going to continue to get hotter. Sadly, this will not be the last book like this one, but I hope the skill and craft of how this and other climate stories are told will help us move toward a more survivable future.

After all, there are no books on a scorched planet.