This was a hard year—so hard. It began with the sudden death of my dog, followed by my grandmother’s passing a couple weeks later. Friendships and relationships I’d once believed would last for life either ended altogether or changed so drastically that it feels sometimes as though they have ended.
2023 was my first full calendar year as an MFA student. On top of taking my own grad-level classes and creative writing workshops, each semester, I teach two sections of English 101 or 102—attempting to impart wisdom on jaded undergrads about the basics of writing college-level essays. Last semester, I began serving a number of highly-involved roles for my program’s rebranded literary journal, Hellbender Magazine. I’ve also been working on a novel for my thesis, which I’ll present when I graduate in 2025. The unfinished draft currently stands at almost 400 pages.
In other words, in 2023, I was so busy and stressed and grieving and trying my hardest not to fall apart, that I didn’t have much time for reading. I only managed 26 books—half of what I’ve read in previous years. I was disappointed when I realized how few I’d managed to read this year—and the fact that I’ll now have a year’s gap in my publishing credits, since submitting my own work took the backseat, too—but I’ve come to accept it. After all, 2023 was twice as hard as most years have been for me.
But this past year, as always, books were there for me when I needed them most. When my grandma died in January, a few weeks into the new semester, I couldn’t make it through even an hour the next day without crying. So, I skipped class and laid on the couch all day with my two cats, escaping into the cozy comfort of Elin Hilderbrand’s Winter Street. I managed—momentarily at least—to push my own loss and heartache to the back of my mind and inhabit a fictional character’s life for awhile.
Long story short, although I didn’t read as many books as I wanted to in 2023, I found solace and emotional connection in those that I did—which is the main reason I’ve always loved reading, anyway.
Below is the list of books I read in 2023, in the order in which I finished them.
Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.
E.B. WHITE
- Abigail Adams by Woody Holton (audiobook)
- Winter Street by Elin Hilderbrand
- Felon: Poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts
- A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
- How to Leave Hialeah by Jennine Capó Crucet
- The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
- The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai
- People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
- No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (audiobook)
- The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo (audiobook)
- Summer Darlings by Brooke Lea Foster
- Gwendy’s Button Box by Stephen King & Richard Chizmar (audiobook)
- The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
- A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca
- Prison Writings: My Life is My Sundance by Leonard Peltier
- Stay True by Hua Hsu (audiobook)
- Just Kids by Patti Smith
- We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart (audiobook)
- Summer of ‘69 by Elin Hilderbrand
- Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome
- You Never Get it Back by Cara Blue Adams
- Flash Fiction America: 73 Very Short Stories by James Thomas (editor)
- Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler
- Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary
- The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
E.V. Zukowski 