A confession: I am, for no clear reason, less enthusiastic about writing this post than I usually am. I’ve done this every year that this blog has been in operation, and it’s a post that I look forward to all year long. For most of this year, that has been true! And right now I’m looking at a mostly-blank screen and God, I’m so tired.
The really weird thing: the quality of these books, and my enthusiasm for them, is as high as it usually is and frankly the differential between book #1 and book #11 is lower than it has ever been; most of these books could have been top three, at least, in any other year, and more than ever this is a “don’t pay too much attention to the specific rankings” type of year. I went to 11 this year because I couldn’t leave either of those two books off of the list, and as always there’s an Honorable Mention at the end.
Also, as always, that asterisk up there means “new to me,” a lot of these books did come out in 2023 but not all of them and coming out this year was not a criteria for making the list.
In case you’re curious, previous years:
- The Top 10 New(*) Books I Read in 2022
- The Top 15 New(*) Books I Read in 2021
- The Top 15 New(*) Books I Read in 2020
- The Top 15 New(*) Books I Read in 2019
- The Top 10 New(*) Books I Read in 2018
- The Top 10 New(*) Books I Read in 2017
- The Top 10 New(*) Books I Read in 2016
- The Top 10 New(*) Books I Read in 2015
- The Top 10 New(*) Books I Read in 2014
- The Top 10 New(*) Books I Read in 2013
Let’s do this.
11. Shadows of the Short Days, by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson. You’re going to see a little bit of a theme with several of these books, which is spectacular worldbuilding and really cool magic set in places and/or times that I typically don’t see people using for fantasy books. In this case, Shadows of the Short Days is set in Iceland– Reykjavik, specifically– but not remotely an Iceland that matches the real world’s. The book sets you up nicely with a six-page glossary of terms that you cannot pronounce with letters you’ve never seen before, and it is not going to be nice to you with the vocabulary, but the end result– a dark urban fantasy with sorcerers and fascist governments and what looks like a bog-standard “brilliant wizard gets kicked out of school because he’s reckless” subplot that upends itself when the scholarly authorities turn out to have been one hundred percent correct— is just an absolute joy to read. This has a sequel sitting on my TBR shelf right now but I think it’s one of those sequels set in the same world but with unrelated characters; one way or another Shadows stands on its own very well. There are 11 books on this list because it came down to this book and the next one and I couldn’t leave either of them off.
10. The Witch and the Tsar, by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore. Here’s another mini-theme: books that are sort of historical fiction, or at least feel that way, but aren’t. Also, books where I have to double- and triple-check the spelling of the author’s name. In this case, the titular witch is Baba Yaga, and the tsar is Ivan the Terrible. This can’t be historical fiction, because Baba Yaga rather inconveniently isn’t real, but it does its damnedest to feel like it; there’s a lot of Madeline Miller’s DNA in here, if that comparison helps any. At any rate, the book is from Baba Yaga’s perspective, but there’s a lot of real or at least real-feeling Russian history in here, and Russia during the sixteenth century is something I’m happy to read about to begin with, and once you throw in magic and the slow waning of Russian pagan gods in favor of Christianity (and, oh, those pagan gods are real, and they’re pissed) it ends up becoming a really interesting story. It does sort of fill the same niche as Shadows of the Short Days, but again, I just couldn’t convince myself it was okay to leave either of them off of the list.
9. The Spear Cuts Through Water, by Simon Jimenez. Did I mention pagan gods? Well, okay, maybe not pagan, because this is a second-world fantasy and Christianity isn’t a thing, but this is probably the weirdest book on the list, and I absolutely mean that as a compliment. I didn’t mean pagan, I meant edible. Sorry about that.
What?
No, seriously, there are multiple places in this book where gods are eaten, and the book veers between first person, third person, and second person narrative, and apparently it’s all a play? Until it’s not? And the story is at least outwardly about a pair of warriors escorting the body of a goddess to her final burial place while alternately dodging and defeating her sons, who are known as the Three Terrors, only I’m pretty sure it’s about a few dozen things the than that. It’s inventive as hell and I loved it, and the interesting thing about it is you twist it a little bit and I’m talking about my least favorite book of the year, because this book makes a lot of choices that most of the time will kill my interest in reading something, but man, this was amazing.
8. Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, by Stephen Puleo. There’s always a couple of nonfiction pieces on the list, and this is the first of two and a half (you’ll see when I get there) and I think perhaps the most broadly interesting of the three, if not specifically the most interesting to me. I only learned that Boston had had a molasses flood this year, and ordered this book within about ten minutes of making that discovery, because how can you not want to know more about that? It can be very tricky to write a micro-history like this of a very specific event, because if you just write about the event the book is ten pages long, and it’s really important to pick starting and ending points that make sense and stay interesting to the reader. This book does an exceptional job of that, and ends up being a history not only of the flood itself but of capitalism and manufacturing in New England, as well as being a half-decent courtroom drama as well. It also managed to add a brand new way that I really don’t want to die to what was already a long list; there are probably less pleasant ways to die than drowning in a literal tidal wave of molasses, but I could do without the bit where once the flood is over it hardens and everyone has to be literally chipped out of the sea of frozen sugar left behind. No thank you. Read the book, though.
7. Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, by Robert M. Sapolsky. I said when I first wrote about this book that I really wanted someone else I knew to read it so that I would. have someone to discuss it with, and thus far, unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet, although I convinced one friend to pick it up and bought it for my brother as a Christmas present, so hopefully it’ll happen soon enough.
At any rate: Sapolsky is a neuroscientist, or maybe a neurobiologist, or maybe both; I have to admit I’m not a hundred percent clear on the distinction between the two, and he’s convinced there is no such thing as free will. Entertainingly, he’s not happy about this conclusion, and his hangdog insistence that everyone is going to hate him for the arguments he’s making echo through every page of this book, which wouldn’t be half as much fun to read were it not for Sapolsky’s sense of humor. Now, I am no kind of neuro-anything, and have no especially relevant expertise to this book, so all I can say is that I read the first half without ever going “Wait, what about …” at any point and without spotting anything that felt like an obvious hole in his reasoning, and he’s exceptionally talented at making complex scientific concepts feel understandable. The second half of the book, about the societal implications of free will’s nonexistence, are not as airtight but that’s why I want to talk to somebody about the book. Please go read it and get back to me?
6. The Warden, by Daniel M. Ford. I always feel the need whenever I talk about Dan’s books to mention that I know him in the sort of parasocial “he let me into his Discord and knows my real name but we’ve never met” way that the Internet allows, but it’s also fair to point out that this is the sixth of his books that I’ve read and the first time one of them has shown up on my end-of-year list.
One way or another, though, The Warden is delightful, one of only two books on this list I’d apply that word to, and it is strongest in its worldbuilding and its characters. Aelis de Lenti, the titular Warden, is an absolute slam dunk of a character and one of the best arrogant assholes I’ve encountered in print in a long time. A Warden is a sort of combination of a cop, a governor, and an ombudsman, and Aelis graduates fresh from her training and gets more or less banished to a little village in the middle of nowhere with a crumbling tower to live in and a very persistent goat as a roommate. The book has a very old-school D&D feel to it without feeling like an adaptation of someone’s campaign, and there are at least two more in the series coming. I will also say that if you’re going to read one book from this list, I actually want you to pick this one up, as Tor kinda fumbled the rollout of the book and I feel like it needs more attention. Another reviewer called it “the most underrated book of the year,” and I really feel like it deserves a look.
5. My Government Means to Kill Me, by Rasheed Newson. Another book from the “sorta historical fiction, I guess,” genre, Government has the words “a novel” right there on the cover in big letters and I still had to look into the author to confirm that he wasn’t old enough to have lived through the AIDS epidemic in New York in the 1980s. I get into more details in my initial write-up for the book, but this really feels like a personal memoir, and the inclusion of a number of actual historical figures as characters does nothing at all to diminish that feeling. The main character, Trey, moves to New York from Indiana and more or less immerses himself in gay bathhouse culture for the first half of the book, doing what he can to get by from day to day and filling his nights with anonymous sex, and then the epidemic hits and he begins working in an unlicensed AIDS hospice, caring for men who have fallen victim to the disease. It’s a hard book to read on a lot of levels, and there are trigger warnings galore for it, but it feels important in a way that a lot of other books I read this year didn’t, and Newson is an author I’m going to be keeping a close eye on in the future. Honestly, this book is perhaps the best example of “don’t let the rankings matter too much,” as it and basically everything that comes afterward could easily have been #1 on a different day. I’d particularly recommend it if you’re in your mid- to late forties or older and remember at least some of what was going on during that time.
4. Siren Queen, by Nghi Vo. Third of the “Historical fiction, but …” genre, this is the second year in a row that a book by Nghi Vo has made the top 10, and in a lot of ways Siren Queen feels like it could be a loose sequel to The Chosen and the Beautiful. It’s set in the Golden Age of Hollywood, during the transition between silent films and “talkies,” and the main character is a Chinese-American actress named Luli Wei, who is willing to do nearly anything in order to break into acting, and this is a book where selling your soul for fame and fortune is literal. Much like The Chosen and the Beautiful, Siren Queen puts you into a world absolutely pregnant with magic without going to any real lengths to explain any of it– at one point in Wei’s youth a ticket-teller lets her and her sister in to a movie without paying for tickets in exchange for an inch of her hair, and the book gives you nothing to help you figure out why that might be important– and, again, much like TC&TB, the big selling point of this book is Vo’s incredibly atmospheric and immersive writing. She can do a million of these books and I’ll read all of them. I loved it.
This is where it got really, really hard to rank the books, by the way, and if you want to just call all three of them #1, I won’t bet mad about it.
3. Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang. Speaking of selling your soul to the devil, R.F. Kuang has now written five books across three very different genres, all five of which were absolutely fucking spectacular, and she is somehow still only eight years old. Yellowface might be my least favorite of her books and it’s the third-best book I read this year! How the fuck is that even possible? I don’t know. She’s clearly a deity of some sort, and as soon as I finish this post I’m going to start working on getting the cult started.
At any rate, after writing a three-book fantasy reimagining of the war between China and Japan and a work of dark academia set at Oxford, Kuang has now written a brutal work of satire about the publishing industry, set in the modern world, with not a trace of magic or fantasy to be found, because that’s fair and one author should definitely be talented enough to be magnificently fucking good at all three of those things. It’s about a white woman who literally steals a manuscript from a dead friend and publishes it under her own name to immense acclaim and success, and even as someone who doesn’t really have a dog in this particular fight I was wincing at some of the events in this book. It’s so, so good, and Kuang is so, so good, and the notion that she’s still in her 20s and has decades of work still to come actually gives me a little bit of hope for the future.
2. Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree. Okay, I’ll be honest: on a technical level and even on a lot of non technical levels, Legends & Lattes isn’t necessarily as good as a lot of the other books on this list, particularly after the amount of praise I just directed toward Yellowface. But for a large chunk of the year I was thinking of this as the best book I’ve read all year, or at the very least my favorite book of the year, and the reason for that is how I felt while I was reading this. Remember a thousand words ago when I said that The Warden was one of two books I’d apply the word “delightful” to on this list? This is the other one. This book is delightful. It delights. And if you’re reading that and thinking “Didn’t he say that about TJ Klune at some point?” you’re right, and yes, I mean it as that high level of praise.
Legends & Lattes is about an orc named Viv who puts down her sword and opens up a coffee shop. She hires a succubus as her barista and some sort of nonverbal rat-thing bakes scones and cinnamon rolls for her. And I loved it. The sequel is on my shelf right now and I haven’t read it yet because it’s set before Viv opened the shop and I’m not sure I’m nearly as interested in her as an adventurer. I want more of the coffee shop. I will read about Viv and Tandri making delicious coffee and being quietly and happily in love for a hundred years, and I will love every second of it. I mean, stuff happens, there’s some conflict, it gets resolved, blah blah blah. This book’s strength is in evoking emotion, and it does so magnificently, and I loved it.
1. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose. I really wasn’t sure, when I wrote my initial review of this book, if it was going to hold up against the initial high I was on after I read it. I used the phrase “book-drunk” in the review, and I’ll stand by that; this book is intoxicating in the best way and it is the best book I read this year. It also fits into a few of the sub-themes I had going on this list; it feels like historical fiction, as it’s set in Canada during the … 1700s, I’ll say? Colonial era? Only the English are the Ainglish, and while it doesn’t get into a ton of detail that I hope is coming later in the series, because I love nothing more than I love thorough worldbuilding, but it feels like the real world, only the Norsemen took over the world instead of the English, and also there are dragons. And dragon school. The main character is Anequs, a young First Nations girl who more-or-less accidentally bonds herself to a dragon egg early in the book, and then gets swept off to an Ainglish dragon school to legitimize her connection to her dragon in the eyes of the government.
Did you read Fourth Wing and Iron Flame? I did, and I liked them both. In a lot of ways To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is a very similar book to both of those, and if you read and liked them you absolutely need to read this book, as it’s better in nearly every imaginable way, from the characters (I compared Anequs to Rey Skywalker, and now that I’m thinking about it she has a lot of Aelis in her as well) to the nature of the school to the actual writing itself. Oh, and there’s chemistry. No, not between the main characters– actual chemistry, only magic-tinged, and at the end of the book the author manages to connect magic and chemistry and dancing in a way that is absolutely inventive as hell and when does the sequel come out again because I want it right now.
This was a great year for reading, and To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is the best book I read this year. Go buy it.
HONORABLE MENTION, in NO PARTICULAR ORDER: Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell, Hell Followed With Them by Andrew Joseph White, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee, The Daughters of Izdihar by Hadeer Elsbai, In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune, Into the Light by Mark Oshiro, the entire The Faithful and the Fallen series by John Gwynne, Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Dead Take The A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey, and Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT AWARD: Hospital, by Han Song.