curled up's top ten books of 2023 🏆
The fourth-annual top ten! These are the 10 best books I read this year.
Welcome to the inaugural edition of the curled up newsletter! We’re kicking it off with a reflection on 2023.
2023 was the busiest and best year of my life.
I had many big, momentous experiences this year, and amongst it all, reading remained a constant. I read 80 books in 2023, and below are my favorite ten.
Thank you for being here. Let the countdown begin!
10. Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan
The family saga is an elite subgenre. When done well, they’re immersive tales that give you rich, well-rounded characters and varied perspectives. There’s drama, there’s trauma, there’s redemption, there’s sacrifice.
Saints for All Occasions had all of the above. Two Irish sisters sit at the core of this saga. We follow their divergent paths after immigrating to the States during their teenage years: one becomes the matriarch of a big Catholic family, the other, a nun. At the fork in the road that led them away from one another lies a big secret, as a good family saga is wont to do.
One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.
Also, what a great title—I was hooked before cracking it open.
9. Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
That’s right, John Green of The Fault in Our Stars fame. The young adult author whose hopeless romantic novels took the teenage world, of which I was certainly a part of, by storm in the late 2000s, early 2010s. His books are the definition of “coming-of-age” stories: innocent, earnest, saccharine—I loved them for that then, and it turns out I still love them for that now.
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.
Turtles All the Way Down is his last and latest YA novel—he’s written this book of essays since, which is also phenomenal. It’s about a girl in high school named Aza who deals with some pretty severe mental health struggles, namely OCD. Against the backdrop of her and her bestie’s attempt to solve the disappearance of a local billionaire, we see her grapple with conflict in love, in friendship, in herself, all with the dark, looming cloud of her OCD present at every turn.
What I loved most about this book was the author’s ability to drop you into the thought process of someone living with debilitating mental health issues. The inner monologue that is never left untouched by her battle—it riddles her relationships, her future, her concept of her own self.
I thought about him asking me if I’d ever been in love. It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—a friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be is in love. And I wanted to tell him that even though I’d never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere. When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it. And I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to something I couldn’t describe before, created a form for it, but I couldn’t figure out how to say any of that out loud.
Luckily, mental health is discussed, it’s in the public consciousness. But what this book taught me is that there’s still another layer left to crack in that conversation. That layer is the individual reality, the day-to-day, 360-degree impact that can be brought to life through stories. This is the power of books. This is the power of this book.
You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.
8. The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
Or maybe everyone was a prodigy if they worked hard enough and long enough and became, at a young age, competent at a thing. Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.
The description of this book says “a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery” and sometimes you just shouldn’t break what’s not broken. Brandon Taylor is such a beautiful writer and this book is observant, alluring, vexing. The characters are complex, flawed, not one blameless. One of my favorite devices is when characters circle around each other in distant ways, when you learn more about one character from the periphery of another, and this book does that so well. His way with language is stunning and what a gorgeous web of words he’s weaved in this novel.
7. Mother in the Dark by Kayla Maiuri
In Mother in the Dark, the main character, Anna, reflects on her childhood under the oppressive presence of her capricious mother and difficult father. Her mother wasn’t always this way—she has a fond sense of growing up in Boston, but when her father’s job relocates the family to the suburbs in the middle of nowhere, her mother loses it, becoming a volatile, empty shell. The story is told from a present-day Anna who so clearly wears the scars of those memories. It’s a powerful story of the entangled, inescapable impact of the mother-daughter relationship, where attention is given, or not, within it, and the author takes great care to get it right. The writing is engaging and haunting and tender. And this book is a debut, which makes it all the more impressive.
6. The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski
The author of this book has watched thousands of people die. Through his work as the founder of the Zen Hospice Project, which takes a respectful, compassionate approach to end-of-life care, he’s seen so much. He shares the valuable lessons he’s amassed in this book in the form of invitations to the reader. The five invitations, each with beautiful wisdom and touching examples, are:
Don’t wait
Welcome everything, push away nothing
Bring your whole self to the experience
Find a place of rest in the middle of things
Cultivate “don’t know mind”
It opened my eyes to how death is intrinsically a part of life, coming for us all—it’s what we do with that knowledge that can impact our experience while we’re here. We can ignore it, making it shocking when it inevitably happens around us, or we can embrace it, shaping our everyday life with more kindness and empathy. This is a profound, insightful book.
We can harness the awareness of death to appreciate the fact that we are alive, to encourage self-exploration, to clarify our values, to find meaning, and to generate positive action. It is the impermanence of life that gives us perspective. As we come in contact with life’s precarious nature, we also come to appreciate its preciousness. Then we don’t want to waste a minute. We want to enter our lives fully and use them in a responsible way. Death is a good companion on the road to living well and dying without regret.
5. Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth
I’ve got one word for you: spooooooky. Motherthing is a fascinating thriller about a mother-in-law that haunts the main character from beyond the grave. Abby and Ralph moved in to their mother’s house and shortly after, Ralph’s mother dies. Ralph sinks into a deep depression after the loss and Abby, who’s not emotionally stable herself to say the least, is left to pick up the pieces. She wants things to go back to normal with her husband at any cost, but the looming, sinister presence of her MIL is strong.
The writing is so unsettling and the plot is thick. Everyone is so flawed, and it’s exaggerated to epic, creepy, chilling proportions. I don’t often do thrillers, but enjoyed (in a masochistic way) every second of this one.
4. How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks
Illuminators are people who have a “compassionate awareness of human frailty because they know the ways we are all frail”, who are “gracious towards human folly because he knows all the ways we are foolish”. They experience people and the world “with the eyes of compassion and understanding, seeing complex souls suffering and soaring navigating life the best they can”. They are perceptive, they embrace others, they provide them a space to be themselves and give them a sense that they’re right there with them. They “maintain this capacious loving attention even as the callousness of the world rises around them”. I want to be an Illuminator.
This book perfectly captured and articulated what I love about the most important, special people in my life, and who I want to be for those people in return. It is a universal truth that each and every person just wants to be seen. The idea is lofty, but this book broke down what that can look and feel like in real life. It’s attention, which should be an on/off switch, not a dimmer—this is something I haven’t stopped thinking about. It’s listening without planning what you’re going to say next. It’s asking good questions like which of your five senses is strongest? or what has become clearer to you as you age? It’s empathy, which is made up of mirroring, mentalizing, and caring. It’s so much more.
I believe that everyone should read this book. If we all made even the smallest attempt to become Illuminators, the world would be a better place.
The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement of the other or of the self—it’s witness. It’s the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another. To have walked with them, to have believed in them, sometimes to have just accompanied them, for however brief a span, on this journey that’s impossible to accomplish alone.
3. Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
This novel was creepy and captivating. The story is centered around a serial killer named Ansel who, at the start of the book, is hours out from his scheduled execution. He maintains a desire to be understood for his actions; he’s not sorry, he’s delusional, he’s human, he’s a murderer. Throughout the book, his perspective, told in the second person, which I always find fascinating, is interspersed between that of several woman connected to his story in various ways.
The book is centered around Ansel, but the book is about the women. I was struck by the theme of women’s intuition—how it’s squashed, how it’s acted upon, how it’s lauded and feared. The way the author is able to hold multiple truths at once is so impressive: giving the women’s stories the weight, respect, nuance, justice they deserve while fairly providing context as to why Ansel is who he is and became what he became. The morality around the death penalty is a dicey dance, and she walks the line precisely and strikingly.
Full book review here.
2. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver
I am extremely late to arrive at the wonder and beauty that is Mary Oliver, but I’m so happy to be here. I’m not being dramatic when I say: this book of poetry genuinely changed the way I see the world. Her pure awe and profound respect for the natural world, for human connection, for each day we wake and step we take, for dogs (!) made me feel so lucky to be alive. She keenly observes both the most minute details and the sweeping emotions, and redirects her reader’s attention to the delight right under our noses. That might sound fluffy, like it’s all sunshines and rainbows, but arguably most impressively, she addresses the pain and suffering and lack that is inevitably part of being a human and STILL manages to leave you with the feeling that being a person in the world is an unbelievable gift. The light isn’t dimmed by the dark; the dark makes us able to appreciate that light and maybe even brightens it.
I plan to read this one next with Ham in my lap.
1. Couplets by Maggie Millner
I became myself.
I became myself.No, I always was myself.
There’s no such person as myself.
This book secured the top spot because I can’t remember a time where I put down a book so completely speechless, so stunned and astonished by what a book can do, can be.
Couplets is about a woman exiting a relationship with a man and entering one with a woman. She’s exhausted by the mundanity of her past relationship and is absolutely invigorated by the thrill of her new one. But it’s not without its own complications. When I think back on this book, I find myself less concerned with the plot—which is gripping—in favor of the form in which it’s told. It’s a work of fiction, told in poetry, in couplets more specifically. The duality of the character’s experience, of life as a whole, is present not only in the story she’s telling, but in the way she masterfully places each word on the page.
It’s one of those books that reminds me why I fell in love with reading, why books and literature and words are our greatest gifts. And that, my friends, is why it takes the cake this year.
For freedom, I have learned, I’d barter
virtue every time. For any fierce, untrammeled feeling,
now I know I’d give up almost anything.
Full book review here.
Because choosing only ten is hard, here are some honorable mentions:
The Gunners — a subtle story of a friend group fractured by one member’s death. Full book review here.
Mouth to Mouth — two old acquaintances meet in the airport lounge and one launches into a fascinating origin story.
Motherhood — a phenomenal writer invites us into her complex, intimate, prickly opinions about becoming a mother, or not.
Elsewhere — an imagined world where mothers disappear. Full book review here.
I Am, I Am, I Am — an author’s memoir told in the form of stories of 17 brushes with death she’s experienced.
Love, Pamela — my favorite celebrity memoir ever. Full book review here.
I put all the books mentioned in a list here. It’s through Bookshop, which supports independent bookstores, which we obviously love. And if you feel so inclined to buy those—or any others—you can shop through my affiliate page here.
What a year!
2024 is set to be a great one—feeling inspired by the fresh start, by my new city, and by all the books to come. I’m excited to give curled up more love and attention this year, specifically through this newsletter.
Thank you, again, for subscribing. It means the world. See you next time!