This has been quite the year! Despite the intensity of life, the SRB editorial team managed to find time to read and celebrate many fantastic books in 2023. Here are the top books (and TV shows) our editors enjoyed over the last year.
Amy Martin
This year I discovered the joy of thrillers and audiobooks, but especially thrilling audiobooks! As I walked my dog or drove from D.C. to Charleston, South Carolina to visit my sister, I delighted in listening to offerings by Tana French, Ruth Ware, and Lucy Foley. But I have to give a shout-out to Gillian McAllister and to her pulse-pounding masterpiece with a backwards time-traveling twist, Wrong Place Wrong Time. McAllister’s thriller makes an effort to answer the question, “Can you stop a murder after it’s already happened?” If you liked the movie Groundhog Day and love domestic noir, this one’s for you.
I watched Season 1 of Deadloch twice, start to finish, and I never miss an opportunity to recommend this Amazon Prime television series to friends and family. An Australian feminist noir comedy conceived by “The Kates” (see the creators below) as FunnyBroadchurch? Yes, please! I couldn’t get enough of female detectives Dulcie Collins and Eddie Redcliffe as they investigated a series of grisly murders and butted heads in the process. The show, set in a fictional Tasmanian coastal town, is quirky, snarky, and addictive. It has a lot of heart in addition to a twisty mystery that boasts so many red herrings you’re kept guessing “Whodunit?” until the finale.
Deadloch
Created by: Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan
Amazon Prime
Chaney Hill
KB Brookins’ Freedom House is an unapologetic forward-dreaming manifesto for a better, shared future. Based out of Austin, Texas, Brookins writes about growing up queer, Black, and trans in Texas — a state that has long housed anti-trans, anti-queer, and anti-Black legislature and ideologies. Despite this opposition, Texans like Brookins have long since been engaged in a fight for a future beyond these boundaries. Organized as a tour through the ‘freedom house’ Brookins imagines, their poems take up issues of race, transness, gender, family, gentrification, climate change, Afrofuturism, sexual violence, body politics, and home. Using poetry as a tool of exploration and future dreaming, Brookins builds a freedom house, brick by brick by poem.
Latoya Watkins follows up her 2022 debut novel, Perish, with a stunning collection of short stories that address issues of class, race, motherhood, marriage, infidelity, familial tensions, and human/animal relationships. Each short story in Holler, Child is deeply anchored to home and place. Set across the state of Texas — from small West Texas towns to Dallas to Houston, to places unnamed but still distinctly Texas — Watkins draws readers into a world that is all dirt, sweat, love, angst, bittersweet relationships, despair, and hope.
After two years of doctors’ appointments but no relief for her chronic pain, Elissa Bassist tried acupuncture. When her female physician asked, “Are you angry?” Bassist didn’t hesitate: “Yes.” And so her healing began, as did the framing of her memoir, Hysterical, which fuses personal narrative with cultural history. It’s an important read about the history of silencing women’s voices.
You don’t have to work in the food and beverage industry in order to enjoy this book — part memoir, part business guidebook. Guidara, former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park in NYC, shares his extreme but effective approach to customer service. The anecdotes are endearing; the philosophy behind them, inspiring. As I listened to Guidara narrate his audiobook, I found myself smiling often and considering how I might apply unreasonable hospitality to my own workplace.
After surviving the Crisis that cost her livelihood, her parents and nearly her life, Margaret is content to burrow into a traditional role of wife, mother and homemaker, ignoring the government’s tightening grip on freedoms and the country’s rising suspicion of those like herself because of their Chinese heritage. It’s a problem for other people. But her poetry becomes the tagline of anti-government protests, her existence threatening her family’s safety, and she is forced to abandon her husband and son, eventually taking the greatest stand against the government to date. This grueling tale of mothering in a declining society is a rallying cry for Millennial mothers, like myself, tempted in our fatigue from a lifetime of unrest to seek shelter in the familiar, at great cost.
The hurricane into which Wanda was born and from which she received her name was only the first of many storms she would encounter, both literal and figurative. As she grows up in a South Florida being reclaimed by the water that surrounds it, swallowing one love of Wanda’s after another, she learns to tame the grief that continually visits her as well as the instinct to survive in order to create a life with deep meaning.
Tess Gunty’s debut and National Book Award-winner instantly topped my permanent Top 10 list. From the dynamite first line to the shocking end, every line totally knocked my socks off. Her lush prose and deft braiding of myriad perspectives into a single narrative about a small town’s broken people was so tender, I realized I wasn’t so much reading a book as taking a masterclass in craft. I’ll never look at baby goats, nuns, apartment complexes, the “honeycomb of a chain link fence,” or C-4 the same way.
We only learned the final season of Succession was its last just before the season aired, so I tuned in every Sunday night with high expectations. Luckily, the Roy family knew how to deliver. When an epic turn of events due to patriarch Logan’s death early in the season upended everything I thought was coming, I stayed tuned to watch his unruly brood as they cranked up the shenanigans to full throttle and went hard in the paint till the bitter end. Phenomenal performances across the board and stand-out episodes kept me on the edge of my seat till the final credits rolled.
Succession, Season 4
HBO
Co-created by Jesse Armstrong
Directed by Mark Mylod, Becky Martin, Lorene Scafaria, Andrij Parekh,
Shari Springer Berman, & Robert Pulcini
Chelsea Risley
Halle Hill’s short story collection, set in the Appalachian South, is filled with compelling, honest, vibrant Black women. Hill is from East Tennessee, so some stories are set in places I’m very familiar with, and the settings and characters all felt very alive. The stories are funny and raw, and the characters are allowed to make both good and bad decisions without judgment. I really like how one of our reviewers, Don Rath, described it: “These stories show how sometimes being a ‘good woman’ is about adapting and enduring. It isn’t always about achieving something admirable and fulfilling, but rather, surviving long enough so perhaps, someday, she will.”
I still can’t stop talking about Good Grief, the Ground since I first read it in March. It’s intimate, brave, intense, and vividly captures the uncertainty of girlhood and adolescence (“be very careful / not to let your body stain the world”). Margaret Ray is willing to engage with everything from invasive insects to whiteness to ShamWows to placenta with a sharp wit and dedication to detail.
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