Reading My Way through 2023
Idiosyncratic reflections on some of last year's favorites
Perhaps my favorite living writer wrote a short set of instructions in 2016 on “How to be a Writer: 10 Tips from Rebecca Solnit.” It is invaluably sage. Number 3 is, “Read. And don’t read.” I do my best to follow this wisdom, and that means the books add up. The Wild Card’s first appearance in 2024 reflects on a handful of books I completed in 2023.
Last year, I completed 101 books. They ranged across categories and genres, but, unsurprisingly, books related to this newsletter’s themes—place, history, writing—filled the majority of those slots. One of the best parts of finding books you like is sharing them. Read on!
Place
Place may be the theme that has most captivated me this year, gradually nudging aside history for prime of place. (Intended pun.)
Many of my favorite novels evoke a strong sense of place. Burying myself in a fictional landscape, often modeled on a real one, is one of my greatest pleasures with fiction. Last year, I read three novels by Laura Pritchett: Sky Bridge, Red Lightning, and The Blue Hour. These join other books of hers I’d already completed. Pritchett’s novels are marked, always, by exquisite writing and characters who come to feel familiar, if not familial. But they are also embedded in place, in the landscape that embraces the people living out their vital, struggling existences. In Pritchett’s hands, Colorado itself breathes life into the characters. (I’m especially happy, because Pritchett has two new novels coming this year.)
On the nonfiction side, I enjoyed (although that word seems misplaced given the subject) Ted Conover’s Cheap Land Colorado. Conover is someone I have consistently seen recommended as an trailblazing nonfiction author, so I finally dug into one of his books. Cheap Land Colorado tells of tragic, tenacious people eking out lives in a harsh environment. Conover, as he is famous for, embeds himself in the community and creates a lasting portrait where the place at once shapes and reflects the inhabitants, a harshness and persistence that is confusing or inspiring or both. Although the book will not make you want to visit this stretch of Colorado, you do leave it feeling like you know it well.
History
A pleasure of leaving my academic post in 2022 has been minimizing the academic history I read and finding inspiration in other renderings of the past.
Lyndsie Bourgon’s Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods managed to grab and hold my attention for a subject that hovers close to things I know much about. That’s a feat, because often familiarity can breed boredom. Bourgon, though, takes timber economics and policy and humanizes them in terrific ways. She had me thinking deeply about what I (thought I already) knew. Using crime—poaching wood—as the draw, she hews the West Coast landscape and her sources into a sensitive portrait of conservation and poverty and how timber communities sit in the intersection environmental and class politics.
Perhaps my favorite novel of 2023 was Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees. No novel fits perfectly in my “history” category, and I don’t expect most readers find The Island of Missing Trees delightful for its history. The war and divisions in Cyprus in the 1970s offers much of the background context, though; history’s aliveness propels the book. The wonderful interweaving of past and present and characters that makes this book outstanding. Even so, maybe my favorite part of the book are the sections narrated in the voice of a fig tree, something that sounds fanciful but is executed believably and beautifully.
Writing
When I launched this newsletter, I expected the “writing” theme to be more pronounced and self-conscious. That is, I expected to write about writing. Instead, I mostly just write—I think this is the right choice! Nevertheless, I have a longstanding habit of reading about writing.
This year I discovered a book—Artful Journalism by Walt Harrington—to be quite inspiring. I’m not sure I have ever seen it recommended, but I found it full of insights about writing what he called alternately artful or intimate journalism. “Truth is a documentary, physical reality—as well as the meaning we make of that reality, the perceptions we have of it. It’s not one or the other. It’s both, entwined,” he wrote.”We can’t know the ‘essence of truth’ if we are cavalier about ‘literal truth.’" I’m trying to keep this in mind as I keep stretching my writing, keeping always the integrity of facts at the center with the meaning of those facts.
Beyond “how-to” books, a writer is also served by reading master writers, like Barry Lopez. A collection of his essays, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World appeared in 2022 after Lopez died on Christmas 2020. Few writers have ever captured place as precisely and artfully as Lopez, and reading him, I cannot help but consider the writing craft. The essays collected here, holding the weight of his recent death, exemplify his astounding mind and spirit. In an essay memorializing Wallace Stegner, Lopez offered a human portrait, revealing his own humble humanity: “I have no doubt but that he was human, that he stumbled and fell with the rest of us,” Lopez wrote about Stegner. “And I feel no shred of a need to know the particulars of such things. What I want to know, what I look for as a writer, is what good was a person capable of, how did love flourish around him or her? How did what they do help?” As an academic, I was trained to be critical, first and last, but I want to be generous like this Lopez notion—and have that seen in the writing I do.
Context of Reading
The context of my own life in 2023 shaped this short list. I know Laura Pritchett and have visited her in Colorado (most recently in late 2022); that shapes how I read her work. I am transitioning from a historian at home in the archives to a writer who interviews people regularly; that influences why Bourgon’s mixture of archival history and oral history appeals. I read Lopez’s book a few miles upstream from where he lived and wrote those essays; that (as well as his recent death) weighed on me as I turned page after page breathing the same cedar- and fir-scented air.
All of this is merely a nod to the fact that writing and reading occur in a real world as well as an intellectual and imaginative one; they occur in places of real physical things and real personal relationships and at different stages of life. “Best of” lists attempt to capture things that might transcend time, which is what classics are. But we ought to always remember that we encounter words amid great particularities.
Closing Words
Relevant Reruns
A couple old newsletters are relevant with this week’s newsletter—one that included a conversation between Laura Pritchett and me and another that had me categorizing types of history that I wrote about a year ago (another reflection on books I read the previous year).
New Writing
I have been writing a lot about agriculture, and when you do that, eventually, you get to food. A short profile of a local food bank and its volunteers appeared in a local weekly.
As always, you can find my books, and books where some of my work is included, at my Bookshop affiliate page (where, if you order, I get a small benefit).
Taking Bearings Next Week
Before next week’s regular newsletter, an interview will appear for paid subscribers. I don’t think you’ll want to miss it! To read it in full, please subscribe. Next week, I’m back to The Classroom, the topic of discussion remains a mystery to us both. Stay tuned!
Thank you for this wonderful post (and I'm so delighted to be included!)