The 5 Best Books I Read in 2023
From undiscovered greatness to widely read classics, 2023 was a year to remember.
2023 was a crazy year for me, filled with some of my life’s highest highs and lowest lows. I got laid off twice, started a business, traveled to 7 countries, published my best short story yet, and finally started this newsletter and YouTube channel.
Throughout all of this, I discovered some incredible new writers, read great books by world-famous authors, and had the chance to revisit some of my old favorites. Here are the five best books I read in 2024, plus one honorable mention I didn’t love but is well worth reading:
1. “The Drunkard” — Liu Yichang
Chances are you’ve never heard of Liu Yichang. If you have already, you’ve got excellent taste and are probably more well-read than I am. Reach out and give me some recommendations, please.
Liu Yichang is the undisputed king of Hong Kong letters. In my opinion, he’s the greatest writer of all time (though if I read as much as I hope to over my life this will hopefully change). The only problem is that his books are incredibly difficult to find, especially in English for a reasonable price.
Born in Shanghai but made on the island of Hong Kong, Yichang’s work combined the core ethos of traditional Chinese literature with the style and sensibilities of Western stream-of-conscious writers such as Jack Kerouac and Virginia Woolf. From this, his masterwork The Drunkard was birthed.
Reading The Drunkard — or anything by Yichang, really — is akin to the act of falling into a trance. You find yourself transported to gritty 50s Hong Kong and the life of an aspiring novelist, an intellectual drifter and high-brow low-life who doesn’t write and wastes his talent on pointless kung fu stories.
2. “Tristessa” — Jack Kerouac
As a French-Canadian writer myself, worshipping Kerouac is obligatory. He’s our best export and it’s not close. His trademark long-winded, excitable, romantic yet forceful prose is the single biggest influence on my own work. Without him, I wouldn’t write.
Each year, I try and read something new by Kerouac. This year, it was Tristessa, his punchy novella on falling in love with a drug-addicted indigenous woman in the slums of Mexico City.
I chose this specific book this year for a simple reason: I was going to Mexico City for the first time. When possible, I like to pair the books I’m reading with the places I’m experiencing.
This allows me to not only connect with the text on a deeper level, but with the place itself. It layers a unique sense of time and space and history onto the work and bridges the new and old through art, an idea I find both deeply beautiful and inspiring.
If you’re a reader and traveler like myself, I strongly encourage you to think about what you’re reading, where you’re reading it, and why. Some of my greatest insights have come from this.
3. “Norwegian Wood” — Haruki Murakami
After months of effort, I finally got my girlfriend to give Norwegian Wood a try and ended up reading the “least Murakami” book the Japanese genius has ever written.
Despite deviating from many of the more typical Murakami themes — namely magical realism — Norwegian Wood is a great read. This is the novel that catapulted the former jazz club owner to international fame and made him the most recognizable face in Japanese letters.
It’s a character study on male loneliness told alongside a simple yet hard-hitting story of love that doesn’t quite work out. The prose is simple and dreamlike and you finish sad yet satisfied, exactly what you want from a Murakami novel.
I’m a huge fan of Murakami and Japanese I-novels in general, and this is among the best. If you’re looking for a beautifully written, slightly melancholic contemporary masterwork, check out Norwegian Wood this year. You won’t regret it.
4. “The Gambler” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
One of my literary highlights of this past year was rediscovering the genius of Fyodor Dostoevsky. I read Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground a few years back and, while fully understanding their merit, didn’t love them as much as I felt like I should have.
This all changed with a recent reading of The Gambler. Dostoevsky’s thorough exploration of the human psyche was a joy to read each night before I went to sleep in Hanoi’s Old Quarter.
Each character in the novel explores and characterizes the notion of addiction in their own way. It’d be masterful for any time period, but to think that Dostoevsky was able to pull this off hundreds of years ago is borderline impossible to believe.
The Gambler lingered in my head long after I finished reading. It was easily the most thought-provoking novel I read this year, but it wasn’t the most enjoyable. The joy of reading Dostoevsky comes through his ideas and unparalleled understanding of humanity, not the beauty of his translated prose.
5. “Life for Sale” — Yukio Mishima
Another Japanese I-novel rounds out my top five list, with Yukio Mishima’s little-known pulp novel Life for Sale providing perhaps the biggest shocker of them all.
This is the book for someone looking for a quick and easy read that will make them think at times but not too hard. Commonly dismissed as nonsense and one of Mishima’s “lesser works”, I found Life for Sale to be one of the most fun novels I read all year.
The premise is inherently absurd: a young Japanese copywriter, jaded with life in Tokyo, puts his life up for sale to the highest bidder. Of course, chaos soon ensues and we go on a wild adventure through the city as Mishima provides subtle yet sometimes masterfully poignant criticisms about the Japan of his era.
It doesn’t grapple with big ideas the way Dostoevsky or even Mishima himself does in later works, but I don’t think it’s fair to hold books to a life-altering-or-bust standard. Some books are just meant to be fun and quick and that’s okay.
Honorable Mention: “My Struggle Book 1” — Karl Ove Knausgård
Another great read. Knausgård is the closest thing to Proust we have in the modern era. The six-book My Struggle series details every aspect of the Norwegian author’s life with incredible accuracy.
Everything he’s done, every thought he’s ever had, it’s all here forever preserved in his dreamlike, masterful prose. It’s just not for me, at least not right now. I’ll come back to this series at some point, but probably not in 2024.
Looking ahead to 2024
Book-wise, I’ve got big plans for 2024. One of my biggest goals is to read more texts written in the last century and strengthen my modern sensibilities. I plan on doing this by reading a wide range of works from writers of all statures.
Widely read, world-renowned modern geniuses like Houellebecq next to underground legends and rising stars such as Arthur Nersesian and Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, rounded out by unknown indie writers. I can’t pick just one. Reading wide is the only way I can hope to have even the most elementary of understandings of modern fiction.
It’s easy to sit back and say that nothing good is coming out anymore, but if you’re not actually putting in the legwork your opinion is useless and you’re doing more harm than good by sharing it.
