Turtleneck Round-Up Season: 10 books that I actually remember reading in 2023
What stuck with me during a year of hormonal fog
I sent out my last year-end literary round-up on December 1, 2022—two days before I learned I was pregnant, and approximately two weeks before I began throwing up. Throwing up would come to dominate the next 38 weeks of my life—38 weeks that were probably the most challenging weeks of my life, except for a couple of miserable sleepaway field hockey camps as a teenager. As I previously wrote about here, those first few months of pregnancy were especially brutal not just because I couldn’t keep food down, but because I felt like I couldn’t think or focus on anything aside from surviving the discomfort of my own body. Reading was unusually slow and arduous for me. But looking back, I see that I actually did read during my first trimester. In fact, some of my favorite books of the year were the ones I read in January and February. These have stuck with me, I think, because they each provided me with a precious respite from my own bodily misery. In one way or another, they engaged my mind, and by allowing me to take a brief pleasure cruise through elsewhere, made me feel like myself.
It turns out that having a baby feels like a breeze compared with being unable to enjoy food for ten months, and now that I am adequately fed, I have been blessed with the ability to be in touch with my own mind in motherhood. Once I realized that I could read in the Kindle app on my phone while breastfeeding or savoring a contact nap, I tore through books on maternity leave. There were even weeks when I looked forward to being woken up to feed my daughter in the middle of the night because I knew I would get to return to a good book for thirty minutes. On the literal eve of starting sleep training, I finding myself as reluctant to say goodbye to sweet and cozy night feedings as I am to this guaranteed reading time.
I am aware that this is a really obnoxious humblebrag,
but I actually read more books in 2023 than I have since I began keeping track of books read—67 to be precise.1 I share this not because I’m an asshole (AITA???), but because I hope that it is inspiring. Having a baby does not need to mean you will never read a book again! (We all have those coworkers who will say they have been working their way through Sapiens since their son was born six years ago (despite being au courant with March Madness and/or True Detective).) But it’s not like reading didn’t come at the expense of other things. I exercised exactly twice during my pregnancy. Since our daughter was born, my husband and I rarely watch TV in the evenings together anymore. The shift-like nature of caring for our daughter means that leisure time is more often spent alone. Having a baby has just made it more obvious that reading and writing are what I want to do with my limited free time, and when given the opportunity, I read with a furious urgency. I also had a whopping 25 weeks of parental leave. Three of those weeks were before my daughter was born, and I read nearly a book a day to distract myself from Braxton-Hicks and to make the time pass faster.
Much of the past year is a blur. I can’t believe that in 2023 I spent weeks on medical leave throwing up buttered noodles and in that same year that I flew to Chile with a sturdy, giggling baby and shoveled ceviche into my mouth. Combing through my reading list is, in a sense, like a week-by-week diary of the last year; I’m able to remember where I was and how I felt when I read certain books, even when I can’t remember what I did last Saturday.
Without further ado, I’m excited to share ten of the books that I remember the most clearly2 from this blur of a year.
Books I Couldn’t Stop Talking About At The Dinner Table
Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi (memoir) (2021) - This was the first book I read in January after being prescribed Reglan! I took a memoir class a couple of years ago with a woman who had been a childhood classmate of Ypi’s in Albania—I can only imagine the strange cocktail of pride and bitter envy I would feel if someone wrote the memoir I wanted to write, to great critical acclaim, before I had a chance to write it. Ypi traces Albania’s transition from communist totalitarianism to a nominally liberal and democratic state during the 1990s, a decade that dovetails with her own coming-of-age. Free is concerned with Ypi’s intellectual and moral awakening during this period, as she realizes that much of what she was taught as a child was a lie, and experiences the subsequent cognitive earthquake that is sudden freedom of thought, and the economic rupture of capitalism. Now a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, Ypi questions the false promises of both political systems and is concerned with the question of what is freedom. Despite the looming philosophical questions that motivate Ypi’s storytelling, the memoir is an easy and enjoyable read, one that shone a light on my own ignorance about the relatively recent political history of a nation that I was only 95% sure was located in the Balkans until picking up this book.
The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin by Kirsty Bell (memoir/nonfiction) (2022) - I read this in February after I was FINALLY prescribed Zofran, in the period of my pregnancy that my husband and I call the chicken tikka masala phase, for obvious reasons. A writer buys a top-floor apartment in a historic building in Berlin and becomes obsessed with tracing the genealogy of the building, using the building’s and neighborhood’s previous inhabitants as a launching pad to tell a history of Berlin. This is my favorite kind of book—a lyrically-presented scholarly inquiry infused with personal reflection and a critical lens. I could read a history of every city written in this style. And, as I wrote on Instagram in a mini-review after reading this book last January, this is the kind of book that reminds me how badly I want to write a book.
Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin (memoir) (2023) - Beyond cursory awareness of the Chinese Exclusion Act and anti-Chinese sentiment in the American West in the nineteenth century, I was embarrassingly ignorant as to the United States’ shameful systematic discrimination against Chinese American residents well into the twentieth century. Through the lens of her own family history, Chin explores the history of this discrimination alongside the story of her own ancestors’ experience in New York’s Chinatown—foregrounding this resilience and their participation in the organized opposition to this discrimination. In a historical accident that lends itself beautifully to Chin’s literary project, many of her ancestors—on both sides of her family—would live in the same building on Mott Street. Like Bell in The Undercurrents, Chin centers the genealogy of the Mott Street building as a tool for unraveling the history of the Chinese-American experience in New York. Again, this is my favorite kind of nonfiction—a well-researched project that blends the personal and the critical! I’ve long dreamed of writing a similar history of my Italian-American family’s experience a few blocks away, on Thompson Street, centering the building where three generations of my family have lived for over a hundred years.
Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us by Evan Mandery (nonfiction) (2022) - As an alumna of a prestigious liberal arts college that prides itself on need-blind admissions and all-grant financial aid—and to whom I have given regular, albeit modest, donations for the last 12 years—Poison Ivy forever challenged my belief that schools like mine are a tool for upward mobility. A Harvard Law alum who now teaches at CUNY, Mandery argues that the Williams and Princetons of the world do far more to perpetuate income inequality than they would have you believe, while the under-resourced public CUNY and CSU systems are responsible for the vast majority of socio-economic mobility in this country. I have been telling everyone I know who attended an elite college or who is interested in higher education to read this book, though I must confess I haven’t yet started diverting my checks to Williams to CSU East Bay. A timely read during this year’s first college admission cycle since the Supreme Court prohibited race-based affirmative action, Mandery explains how elite institutions have always effectively utilized affirmative action admission strategies that give preference to white students.
The Naked Don’t Fear The Water: An Underground Journey With Afghan Refugees by Matthieu Aikens (memoir) (2022) - Aikins, a Western journalist based in Kabul, decides to leave behind his passport and go undercover as an Afghan refugee fleeing for Europe alongside his Afghani friend and fixer. Scenes from Aikin’s account of the treacherous migration are seared in my memory: the Aegean crossing on a rubber raft, the Greek refugee camp, the desperate attempts to escape Greece. To be honest, I read this book shortly after watching the incredible movie The Swimmers, and their respective portrayals of the treacherous migration routes to Europe have blurred in my memory. But what is distinctive about The Naked Don’t Fear The Water is Aiken’s unique lens of the humanitarian crisis on the shores of Europe—his stubborn bravery and loyalty to his Afghani friend as he pursues this self-imposed assignment, and his exploration of the delicate ethics of his role as an undercover storyteller who can make a phone call and be extracted from migration camp purgatory at any moment. A must read for anyone interested in migration.
Novels I Sunk My Teeth Into And Mourned When They Were Over
I Have Some Questions For You by
(fiction) (2023) - I rushed to put IHSQFY as soon as I encountered a review that dropped “prep school,” “true crime,” “podcast,” “#MeToo” and “ethics.” I’m embarrassingly late to join the fan club of Rebecca Makkai, a masterful world builder and storyteller (as well as a generous steward of craft, over at .) Both a page-turner and a thought-provoker, IHSQFY is the rare novel that is as engrossing for its plot as for the questions it raises. Bodie is a critically-acclaimed podcaster asked to return to her alma mater, a strikingly familiar (to me) New England prep school, to teach a January term course on podcasting. Back on campus, at the prompting of her young students, Bodie reluctantly agrees to supervise their production of a podcast revisiting and reconsidering the circumstances surrounding the murder of a classmate during Bodie’s senior year of high school. As Bodie (and the reader) find themselves engrossed in the true crime whodunit, Makkai and Bodie question the ethics of the #deadgirl genre, and reflect on how different things look in 2023 than they did at the time of the murder. I don’t want to give more away, but will go so far as to call this a PERFECT NOVEL. I read it in about two hot summer days while I was waiting for my daughter to come.Old Flame by
(fiction) (2023) - Many years ago, I somehow ended up with an advanced reader copy of Prentiss’s first novel, Tuesday Nights in 1980. I had forgotten how much I loved Tuesday Nights until I saw Prentiss’s name reappear in connection with her sophomore novel, Old Flame. Drawn to anything featuring a mid-20s woman in New York, I picked up Old Flame in my final weeks of pregnancy half expecting an escapist romcom. Though I certainly could have been charmed by a romcom set in Old Flame’s New York (which, I was delighted to find, feels so much like my own—early 2010s gentrifying Williamsburg!), I was pleasantly surprised to discover in Old Flame a literary bildungsroman that explores friendship and career as much as it explores love and, ultimately, motherhood. In other words, it offers a multi-dimensional and thoughtful depiction of various stages of young womanhood. But unlike many of the other motherhood novels that I read this year, Old Flame doesn’t skimp on plot. Nevertheless I dog-eared page after page; Prentiss writes beautifully about youth, place, relationships, creativity, and motherhood. Though the title suggests lighter fare, don’t be fooled: this is a Smart and Beautiful piece of literature.Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel and translated by Rosalind Harvey (fiction) (first published in the U.S. in 2023) - Not for the faint of heart (or the pregnant), Still Born was perhaps the most impactful book I read this year. I read it not long after giving birth and wept through most of it. I don’t want to say too much because I’m working on a longer piece about the distressing state of reproductive rights in the United States that draws on the scenario that Nettel’s narrator’s friends find themselves in. For those who are willing to shed a tear, Still Born is affecting and provocative without crossing the line to sentimental. It centers the question of what happens to female friends who make different reproductive decisions, as well as questions about what means to care and to love. And it falls squarely into two of my favorite genres: contemporary Latin American literature in translation + maternal ambivalence novels.
Assembly by Natasha Brown (fiction) (2021) and Love Marriage by Monica Ali (fiction) (2022) - While different in form and style, I read these two back-to-back early last year and couldn’t help but envision their characters navigating the same version of modern London and brushing past each other on the Tube. Both Assembly and Love Marriage are stories featuring high-achieving British women of color: Brown’s narrator is the Black daughter of immigrants working in finance, and Ali’s protagonist is a daughter of Indian immigrants training as a doctor. Despite being born in England and reaching impressive levels of professional success, neither woman can take for granted that she will be perceived as British, and both novels explore the racist and sexist micro (and macro) aggressions of the workplace. Interestingly, both women are in somewhat doomed relationships with white Englishmen, men with big ancestral homes and domineering English mothers. These relationships are a vehicle for exploring British racism and classism, which I’m always interested to find are so distinct from American racism and classism. But in terms of form, the novels could not be more different. Love Marriage is sprawling and polyphonic in the tradition of the classic British novels about class and marriage (like Middlemarch but with a touch of Zadie Smith and Bernardine Evaristo), while Assembly unfurls urgently and unconventionally. It reminded me of the work of Claudia Rankine.
On the horizon are many more books about motherhood. I’m eagerly awaiting Leslie Jamison’s new memoir, Splinters, and am slowly savoring Olga Ravn’s My Work. Pandora Sykes at
has me bracing myself for Soldier Sailor when it comes out in the U.S. in June.At least the most since I was eight years old and checking twelve to fourteen Boxcar Children and Babysitters Club books out of the library at a time.
I could (and should) write an entirely separate post on things I read and digested on motherhood and pregnancy this year. I basically did a self-study course on matresence in literature. These additions to my Motherhood Canon shaped and validated and informed my experiences in the last year, and I feel an indelible bond with these writers who put their own experiences of pregnancy and motherhood into words. For anyone interested in this self-study course, some of my favorites included the following: The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar, Like A Mother and Essential Labor by
, Linea Nigra by Jazmina Barrera, A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk, Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, Touched Out by , The Light Room by , Afterbirth by Elissa Alpert, and Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood by Joanna Novak.
I love this Motherhood Cannon! I am also savoring My Work (grateful to be reading it and Dayswork, a prose novel that takes you into the rooms and subtexts of literary marriages and the cost of the pursuit of art by way of its married authors and a Melville obsession). I’ve got Little Labors to add to this list, too, along with finally reading Cusk. Thanks for additions to my own self-assigned syllabus!