All the books I read in 2023

your quite useless wrapped

Hello friends,

We’re going with books again this year rather than bathrobes, given my last two posts were about fashion and I read a decent amount. And I have thoughts! Thoughts I do not want to hold back amidst the saccharine sea of regurgitated listicles and puffy “reviews.”

The reality of our current literary landscape, however, is such candor is often considered authorial malpractice, akin to talking shit about your co-workers to their faces. We have a tendency to conflate the subjective appraisal of a work of art with an ad hominem attack on its creator. That I fiercely disagree with this conflation does not mean I’m insensitive to it. It’s hard being an author these days! I do not want to make it harder for anyone.

Therein lies my own authorial conundrum: how to be integrious without being an asshole? While I yearn to support a normative shift, I am still subject to the extant literary etiquette—and wary of its transgression.

Which is why, in a rare occurrence, while the raw list of (available) titles I read in 2023 is here on Bookshop, the bulk of today’s missive will be for paid subscribers.

This approach allows me to provide my unvarnished personal opinions to those most likely to benefit from them while minimizing the broader salt spray.

(As always, if you cannot afford a paid subscription, email me at natashauthor at gmail dot com and I’ll comp you without question.)

The wrap

The year got off to an excellent start with Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms, a wry and subtle portrait of familial dysfunction, and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus, an electric one—hilarious but also devastatingly more relevant than ever. I intercut these novels with essays from perennial favorite Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, a titanic achievement of independent scholarship that had me agog.

A new literary enchantment with the great Max Beerbohm followed, from the beguiling Zuleika Dobson—which I maintain is the comic campus novel’s platonic form—to The Poet’s Corner, to my discovery of his Beardsley connection.

Four and a half more novels rounded out January: