Matt's Books and Music

An annual ‘best of’ my reading year post has become a tradition for me since 2017. (Last year’s list can be found here.) I read some unbelievably great books in 2023, so without further ado. let’s get to the books!

15. Talking at Night, by Claire Daverley (2023)

Two teenagers with nothing in common bond one Summer evening and their lives become indelibly linked, even as a devastating tragedy drives them apart and changes both of them for ever. I absolutely loved this book. The first third evoked a powerful sense of nostalgia, not for a point in time, but for a point in life, those end of highschool years when grown up conversations are new and exciting, when everything feels possible, and vulnerability and connection feel easy. While the final two thirds have a very different tone, they are all the more powerful for their realism and depth; even when the characters make poor decisions, they are exactly the decisions those characters would make. This is a brilliant debut and one of my favourite reads of the year, and I’m excited to see what Daverley does next. The fact that it’s sitting here at number 15 is an indication of just how amazing a reading year I had, because this is a beautiful, beautiful book and I’m shocked I couldn’t put it in my top ten!

14. Starter Villain, by John Scalzi (2023)

In this madcap comedy that packs a surprisingly meaningful punch, an out-of-work Chicago-area journalist gets the surprise of his life when he inherits his estranged uncle’s unconventional business empire. I had high hopes for this since Scalzi also wrote The Kaiju Preservation Society, which I loved, but this blew my every expectation out of the water. It’s creative, smart, hilarious, charming, and offers some pretty spot-on critiques of the global economy in the process. It also has sentient cats and labour-organizing dolphins. What more could a reader want!

13. The Gospel according to Lazarus, by Richard Zimler (2019, published in North America as The Lost Gospel of Lazarus in 2023)

In this stunning Jewish retelling of the story of Jesus, the biblical character Lazarus writes a long letter to his grandson telling the story of the last days of his dear childhood friend Yeshua. I really can’t express how much I loved this book. Richard Zimler is a multi-award-winning author of fiction in which Jewish mysticism plays a central role, so I was very excited to find out he had written a book about Jesus. And what he accomplished is breathtaking. More than any other book I’ve read, fiction or non-, Zimler places Jesus within a realistic first-century Jewish context (rather than just relying on stereotypes, Semiticisms, or anachronistic imports from later Judaism to do the work). This is a world filled with superstition, magic, and mysticism as much as it is with conspiracy, politics, and violence. A simply glorious book.

12. Beartown, by Fredrik Backman (2016)

Beartown is a remote and depressed village in Sweden that cares a bit too much about its youth hockey team. When their star player is removed from the team bus in handcuffs, the tight-knit community is torn apart by questions of justice, loyalty, right and wrong, and good and evil — which as one character points out, are not always the same thing. As someone who grew up in hockey-crazed communities, all sides of this story felt very real and all-too familiar. This is small-town culture and hockey-culture (we might say ‘locker-room culture’, since you could easily translate this story into a Texas football town, or an English soccer town) at their best and worst, and it’s pure brilliance. To offer something that is simultaneously a celebration and scathing critique of the same culture is nearly impossible, yet Backman managed to walk this line perfectly.

11. The Berry Pickers, by Amanda Peters (2023 🇨🇦)

One day in the early 1960s, a white woman picks up a Mi’kmaq girl from the side of the road and raises her as her own daughter. Over the next half century, the consequences of this shocking act reverberate in tragic ways for both families. In my initial review of this, I called this a “drop everything and read this right now” kind of book, and my enthusiasm has not waned. It’s not an easy read, based as it is in one of the worst imaginable crimes and betrayals. And yet, there is also so much heart, empathy, and grace here. I simply loved this.

10. In Memoriam, by Alice Winn (2023)

At an elite boarding school in the early 1910s, a generation of young men are raised on a diet of Romantic poetry and big ideals of truth, beauty, and glory, only to face unimaginable horrors in the trenches of the Great War weeks later. We see this play out specifically in the lives of two boys, who share a love kept secret even from each other, but are separated, and then united by their war-time experiences, experiences which change them, and their relationship, for ever. This is a thoroughly-researched and well-written novel that precisely hits the mark. I’ve read a lot of WWI novels, but never have I encountered one that captured the realities of the transition from school-boys to soldiers to cannon-fodder so well. It also does a wonderful job of portraying the naivete of the British ruling classes, from their Classics-heavy educational curriculum designed to instill their sons with beautiful visions of glory and honour, to their utter ignorance about the realities of colonial life. These big issues of class, race, and imperialism are never heavy-handed here, but never far from the book’s story. Aside from some minor quibbles here about the book’s tone, coincidence-heavy plotting, and the evergreen problem of writing teenagers who are a little too articulate, this is a brilliant piece of fiction. It is filled with incredible pathos and empathy, and is a rich, impactful novel that tore my heart to pieces many times over.

9. Day, by Michael Cunningham (2023)

In this gorgeous novel, snapshots from April 5 in each of 2019 (day), 2020 (afternoon), and 2021 (evening), portray how the seven members of one New York City family struggle to find their way at their different ages and stages of life. I had no idea where this was going to go when I picked it up, but knew from the first page I was in the safest of hands. And, while it was a difficult journey, it was a beautiful and meaningful one which I won’t soon forget. Each character is well-rounded and specific, and each is developed with such incredible empathy. While the two child characters are wonderful, this is definitely a book about middle age and the process of how we come to accept and love the life we’ve chosen — or don’t. I genuinely loved this book.

8. Hotline, by Dimitri Nasrallah (2022 🇨🇦)

Loosely inspired by the author’s mother’s own story, this novel follows a Lebanese widow’s difficult first year in Canada, as she desperately tries to make a new life for herself and her young son while battling the ghosts of the Civil War she left behind. This was a 2023 Canada Reads finalist and was longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize, and these accolades are more than deserved. This is such a special book. The protagonist, Muna is a fantastic narrative voice, equal parts strong, vulnerable, sharp, and self-doubting. And her story captures the hopes, harsh realities and disappointed dreams so common in the immigrant experience so beautifully. I’m also a big lover of books with a strong sense of place, and this is without a doubt the best Montreal book I’ve read.

7. Wellness, by Nathan Hill (2023)

In this incisive satire of contemporary life, a Chicago couple reconsider their pasts, presents, and futures as they work through the dissatisfaction of midlife. This is the kind of satire that takes the world we know and twists it five degrees toward the absurd to reveal the disturbing realities and possibilities we try not to think about. This is not a kind of humour that normally works for me because not only is it discomforting, but usually it has a nihilistic bent that tears down without building up anything in its place. And this is what sets Wellness apart. Amidst its send-up of contemporary life, there is still so much heart here. Within the unanswerable questions it asks and all the philosophical puzzles its set up, there is still an insistence that somehow, there’s still a way for Love to be the solution to them all. There are definitely places where I thought Hill meandered a bit too far off-course (most notably, a lengthy (informative and chilling, but lengthy!) excursus on social media algorithms), but overall, I’m left gobsmacked at what he accomplished here. A brilliant, helpful, and important book.

6. Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett (2023)

While her grown daughters are back home during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Michigan cherry farmer tells them story of the Summer of 1988, when she worked as an actress and dated a future Hollywood megastar. I’ve long admired Ann Patchett’s writing but had never connected with any of her novels until I read this one. This is a quiet story, but Patchett’s gentle yet powerful writing suits it perfectly. Lara is a great main character and narrative voice; her love for her life and children, and lack of regret over how things turned out at that hinge point in her life, come through on every page. I adore this book.

5. Only This Beautiful Moment, by Abdi Nazemian (2023)

In 2019 Los Angeles, Moud is living a good life as an out gay teen, even if he lives with his cold Iranian-born father and in the shadow of his loud-and-proud White boyfriend who has strong opinions about everything. But when Moud goes to Iran to say goodbye to his dying grandfather, three generations of family stories and secrets spill out, and he discovers there is more to Iran than its government, and more to his Persian culture — and to his family — than he had ever imagined. This is one the most powerful and important YA books I’ve ever read. So much that’s wrong in our current cultural moment comes down to a need for narratives to be simple, with everything cast in black and white, with no shades of grey allowed. This is a book that not only allows, but celebrates the fact that life is complex and multi-coloured. It is unabashedly gay and unabashedly Persian and even when it’s hard, it is a celebration of love, joy, and the power of family.

4. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin (2022)

Childhood friends Sam and Sadie bonded over their shared love for video games. When they bump into each other again years later as college students, they decide to create a game together, thus starting a prolific and successful partnership that binds them together for life, even as it eats away at their friendship. This is a stunning book about friendship and the realities of human — and therefore profoundly flawed — relationships. This is a difficult book to describe, and an even more difficult one to describe well. There is nothing about the premise of this book that would interest me on the surface, and it isn’t really all that groundbreaking in its characterizations, plots, or messages. And yet, it left me completely gobsmacked. It was an unexpected all-time, Hall-of-Fame book for me.

3. The New Life, by Tom Crewe (2023)

In Victorian England, two men — one medical doctor and one historian — try to bring ‘sexual inversion’ (what we call homosexuality) out of the realm of taboo and into the realm of science. But when the salacious details of the Oscar Wilde trial become front page news, they fear their hard work may come to nothing and they must figure out just how far they are willing to go to advance their study. This was the first 2023 release I read and what a start it was! While the the book revolves around the topic of homosexuality, it is really about academic freedom and scientific progress, about personal integrity, about the politics of morality, and about the very real tensions that exist within every change movement: risk versus reward, boldness versus caution, revolution versus incremental change, and so on. This is no simple story of good guys and bad guys; it tackles important questions of significant moral complexity with great care. The characters are wonderfully wrought — the character of Catherine, the wife of one of the protagonists, stands out for being particularly well-realized, but really they are all fantastic in their humanity, strengths, passions, and failings.

2. Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies (1970 🇨🇦)

“This is the revenge of the unlived life, Ramsay. Suddenly it makes a fool of you.” It’s impossible to summarize Robertson Davies’s all-time Canadian classic Fifth Business, but these words, spoken to our protagonist Dunstan Ramsay, a middle-aged school teacher, perhaps offer at least an entry into into it. The novel takes the form of a memoir, or perhaps better, an apology (in the Greek sense), by a newly retired Ramsay after reading a glowing but ultimately dismissive account of his life. Starting from his childhood in a small town in Southwestern Ontario around the turn of the last century, he traces the intersections of his life with various remarkable men and women, including the famous, the rich, the beautiful, the monstrous, the ostracized and forgotten, sinners and saints. He makes the case that, not only did he live his life fully, but that much depended upon it. I first read this close to a decade ago, and while I remember thinking it was masterful, it didn’t leave much of an impression. What a difference a decade can make! The second time around, it became an all-time favourite, and motivated me to read all of Davies’ extensive oeuvre this year.

1. A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara (2015)

After a childhood filled with multiple traumas and a long history of abuse, a man struggles to silence the ghosts of the past and build a life for himself, with the help of those who come to love him and are increasingly desperate for him to learn to love himself. This had been sitting on my shelf for years, unopened because I’d heard about just how difficult its subject matter is. But, I’m so, so glad I finally read this. This is a stunning work of art, a tragic masterpiece more than worthy of all the critical praise it has received. In the hands of a lesser author, this would have quickly descended into ‘trauma porn’, but somehow, despite all the real pain and suffering on these pages, Yanagihara made this beautiful.