2023: The Year In Books

Another year-end, another look back at the books I’ve read this year. For old time’s sake, I will use my five-star rating system, but having grown increasingly sceptical of ratings of late, here’s the key, which is entirely subjective: five stars mean I enthusiastically recommend this book to all; four stars mean I recommend it, subject to your genre preferences; three stars means I did like it, but just check the blurb and the reviews to see if it piques your interest! And less than that…

A few notes about this list. I don’t count books that I’ve read strictly for academic purposes, or for my academic work (the list would be quite unmanageable if so!). I’ve also not counted books that I re-read this year, mainly for our Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle, such as Iain M. Banks’ Look to Windward. (this is not based on any principle, only that I didn’t log re-reads into Goodreads, and so have lost track).

I haven’t been able to find the time to write on this blog the past year, but I haven’t given up my critical non-fiction writing. I’ve put my 2023 critical essays on this twitter thread, for anyone who might be interested.

I write more frequently (in fact fortnightly) about what I’m reading, on my Substack newsletter, Words for Worlds. So if you want something more frequent than an annual update, that’s the place to go to! It’s also where I’ll be sharing information about my third SF novel – due out in July/August 2024 (!) – so head on over there if you want to keep up with that.

Now, to the list…

A. SF/Fantasy

1. Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (*****): Finally got around to reading this because of our Delhi Science Fiction Book Club, and I’d waited too long. Tchaikovsky’s evolutionary-SF-crossed-with-space-opera is wonderful, and I’d never thought I’d love reading about spiders in space!
2. The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler (*****): A candidate for my book of the year. Evolutionary-SF-meets-climate-change, and a beautiful, moving depiction of first contact between humans and a race of sentient octopi. The communication parts of this were particularly brilliant.
3. House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds (*****): This is probably my favourite Reynolds, and I love almost all of his work. That sense of awe inspired by deep time – spanning a million years or more – and the deepest of space. This really put the “opera” in space opera.
4. Victory City, by Salman Rushdie (****): Somewhere between historical fiction and historical fantasy, Rushdie’s story of the founding of the Vijaynagara Empire is a reminder that when he eschews the temptation to be didactic, he still very much has it.
5. Vagabonds, by Hao Jingfang (***): Another book club choice. A Dispossessed-style premise (with Mars being that egalitarian ambiguous utopia, but let down a bit by what seemed a somewhat stodgy translation.
6. The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera (****): A fabulous secondary-world fantasy set in a near-Sri Lanka, with themes of Empire and State power at the forefront. For a longer review, see my piece in Himal Mag.
7. Meru, by S.B. Divya (***): Another interesting post-scarcity utopian SF novel, with a terraforming theme complicating matters.
8. Worlds of Exile and Illusion, by Ursula Le Guin (***): This is a collection of Ursula Le Guin’s first three novels, and it’s just so interesting to see that unique style – SF, but with the prose and feel of fantasy – that she would go on to perfect in later years, having its beginnings here.
9. Caged Ocean Dub, by Dare Segun Falowo (****): An enjoyable collection of weird fiction, which is not always my thing; reviewed in Interzone.
10. The Salvage Crew, by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (****): I read this for my Himal review piece on Sri Lankan SF (see above); a first-contact story with Solaris echoes, a lot of intertextuality, and some AI poetry!
11. Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao (****): From the metcha fantasy genre: superbly paced and gripping (finished it in a single setting), but a little too on the nose on occasion.
12. Translation State, by Ann Leckie (****): Ancillary Justice was genre-changing, and Translation State reflects some of the same radical imagination that makes every Leckie book a unique genre experience.
13. The Red Scholar’s Wake, by Aliette De Bodard (****): I read this for my review of the Clarke Award finalists (see here). Featuring your classic Bodardian themes of sentient spaceships and queer love, in the context of far-future space pirates.
14. Plutoshine, by Lucy Kissick (****): Also a Clarke Award finalist. Terraforming on near-future Pluto, gripping till the end, but the ending was a bit of a let-down.
15. The Anomaly, by Herve Le Tellier (****): Another Clarke Award finalist, and the Clarke’s annual left-field pick – a mainstream literary fiction novel from France! The premise – that a time-loop creates two sets of people who were on board a certain flight – is simply brilliant, and the execution matches up, albeit a little unevenly.
16. Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beuman (****): The deserved Clarke Award winner, in my view. One of the most grimly humorous and accurate genre takes on the climate crisis and the extinction of species.
17. Metronome, by Tom Watson (***): This blend of post-apocalyptic destruction and personal violence (also a Clarke Award finalist) didn’t really do it for me.
18. Coral Bones, by E.J. Swift (***): The last of the Clarke Award finalists, and another one that I couldn’t really get into.
19. Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh (**): This was a book club pick, and you can bet we regretted it. I don’t know what Cherryh thought she was doing here, but 700 pages of intricate political maneuvering on a far-future planet was … hard going.
20. Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds (*****): The first of the Revelation Space novels. Five stars, no notes.
21. The Algebraist, by Iain M. Banks (***): I decided to try a non-Culture novel by Banks. It had its moments – and the premise was fantastic – but it didn’t quite come together for me, at the end.
22. Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M. Banks (***): See above.
23. Blindsight, by Peter Watt (****): You read this, and you understand why its canon. A story of First Contact, but the things Watt does with concepts of bodily modifications, artificial intelligence, telepathy, and so on, reminds you of that quote you often read on the blurb of a Philip K. Dick novel: he makes the “avante garde” look like navel gazers in a cul-de-sac.
24. Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett (****): Another one of those forever-on-the-TBR books that I finally cleared this year. I’ve loved Bennett’s City of Stairs series, and Foundryside was excellent too: perhaps the best work that takes an SF concept (AI), and deals with it in a fantasy setting: this is darn hard to do.

B. Crime Fiction

1. Malice, by Keigo Higashino (*****): I discovered Higashino in late-2022 with The Devotion of Suspect X, and that made every other Higashino novel an insta-buy. Malice brings literary rivalry and artistic insecurities into the crime fiction context (think Amadeus, but crime fiction). In some ways, as good as The Devotion of Suspect X.
2. Salvation of a Saint, by Keigo Higashino (****): Japanese crime fiction is less about the “who” and more about the “how” and the “why”, and in terms of the “how”, this was one of the most intricately and brilliantly plotted stories I’ve read.
3. A Death in Tokyo, by Keigo Higashino (****): This was a little bit about the “who”; perhaps the Higashino novel with the most emotional depth.
4. Newcomer, by Keigo Higashino (***): A rare forgettable one by the Master; I don’t think the mosaic novel format plays to Higashino’s main strength of building up tension to an absolute breaking point!
5. The Devil’s Flute Murders, by Seishi Yokomizo (****): A non-Higashino crime fiction novel! I really enjoyed this – I think it’s my favourite by Yokomizo, and better than his other more well-known novels. This was a who-dunnit, where the who was a genuinely terrifying and brilliant reveal.
6. The Inugami Curse, by Seishi Yokomizo (***): Much like The Honjin Murders and The Village of Eight Graves, while I enjoyed this, I felt that some of the resolutions were a little too quick; and there’s a vein of misogyny underlying a lot of Yokomizo’s work that makes it a little difficult to enjoy.

C. Continent: Latin America

1. The Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut (*****): I loved the wildness of Labatut’s previous novel, When We Cease to Understand the World, and this one was just as good. A thinly fictionalised account of the life and times of John von Neumann, warts and all. Parts of it will have you wiping your eyes.

D. Continent: Africa

1. When We Were Fireflies, by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (****): I really enjoyed Season of Crimson Blossoms by this writer, and his second book repeated some similar themes around love, betrayal, and social expectations in contemporary Nigeria, with the same degree of emotional intensity.
2. Sanya, by Oyin Olugbile (***): One of the Masobe Books publications I read this year, a fun fantasy/historical fiction cross about a girl whose hair gives her magical powers, which enables her to navigate a patriarchal secondary-world.
3. Measuring Time, by Helon Habila (****): Another classic that I came a little late to, but glad that I finally did; eternal themes of memory and love intersect in this coming-of-age novel.
4. River Spirit, by Leila Aboulela (****): I picked up this highly-rated book in a bookshop in Nairobi. This is historical fiction done very well: Sudan during the time of the Mahdi rebellion and at the cusp of colonialism. The use of portraiture as a form of racial power reminded me a lot of Yvonne Owuor’s Dust, and Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King.

E. Continent: Asia

1. The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa (***): A world-famous book, and one that I should have loved, given how brilliant the premise is: a Professor whose memory stops at a particular date, and every day is a new day. Something about the story, though, just felt a little flat.
2. Manaschi, by Hamid Ismailov (****): Read this one in Uzbekistan, by the writer who is banned in Uzbekistan! I love all of Ismailov’s work, and this one was reminiscent of Ismail Kadare in its intersection of myth, poetry, nationalism, and borders.

F. The Middle-East

1. Enter Ghost, by Isabella Hammad (****): I loved Hammad’s first novel, The Parisian, set in Palestine on the turn of the 20th century. Enter Ghost – which is about performing Hamlet in the Occupied West Bank – is just as good, although considerably bleaker and darker. And a particularly relevant read, given the times we are in.

G. Indian Fiction

1. Marquez, EMS, Gulam and Others, by Benyamin (****): Possibly my favourite Indian writer. This book of short stories is a treat, and the eponymous story – about a man who wakes up convinced he is Gabriel Garcia Marquez – is deliciously intertextual, and quite Borgesian.
2. The Light at the End of the World, by Siddhartha Deb (***): Alt-historical fiction, flipping different eras, from 1857 to the present, and in between.
3. The Sickle and the Scalpel, by Volga (****): A novel about the Telangana revolutionary movement, told through the eyes of Dr Komarraju Acchamamba, one of the first women doctors of independent India; a story of both the revolutionary movement, and gender in the revolution. Like all work by Volga, deeply moving.

H. Travel Writing/Memoir

1. The White Mosque, by Sofia Samatar (*****): It turns out that Sofia Samatar writing prose is just as good as Sofia Samatar writing fiction. I got particularly lucky in that The White Mosque – in which Samatar traces her Mennonite ancestors’ journey from Russia into Uzbekistan – came out a few months before my own trip to Uzbekistan; reading Samatar’s descriptions of Khiva, Samarkand, and Bukhara, while in those cities, was a privilege.
2. The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, by Pico Iyer (****): I’m only going to say, if you’re ever in Kyoto, it would be criminal to walk the streets and not read this book.
3. Not Yet Uhuru, by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (****): The autobiography of one Kenya’s most prominent Independence leaders, and later, its most prominent opposition leader. Paints a really vivid picture of the struggle, and then of the momentous decisions immediately after Independence that sent Kenya down a certain path. It was published in 1969, and so much of it feels prescient.

I. History

1. God’s Chinese Son, by Jonathan D. Spence (****): A gripping account of the mid-19th century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in human history. Narratively tight, the only struggle was a few moments where it was bogged down by excessive names and dates (inevitable for a history book!). A really good read about a not-frequently-discussed historical era.
2. The Quest for a Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, c. 1960-1974 (****): I got interested in contemporary Ethiopian history after reading Hiwot Teffera’s The Tower in the Sky, and this was a really informative account of the attempt to build socialism in Ethiopia after the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie, and how those attempts ended in bloodshed and a one-party dictatorship. Read it just for the ideals and the dreams that, at one point, genuinely appeared to herald the coming of another world.
3. A History of Modern Ethiopia, by Bahru Zewde (****): See above – thorough and well-written. A solid primer.
4. Anarchy or Chaos: MPT Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom, by Ole Birk Laursen (****): Indian anarchist history is so underwritten, and this is a welcome change. A riveting account of a truly rich personality, and best read alongside some of the descriptions of the life and times of “Chatto.”
5. The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, by Robert Darnton (*****): If you’ve read the riotous The Great Cat Massacre, you know what Darnton is about. Here, he traces the history of ideas that coelesced together into what he calls a “revolutionary temper” on the eve of the French Revolution. There is a lot of fascinating stuff in here, but the one I loved was how, when the Finance Minister Necker first made the budget public, it was a revolutionary act; until then, it was not even imaginable that matters of state finance could be discussed and scrutinised by the public. But once he did, the genie was out of the bottle, and could not be put back in: what happens next is history.
6. Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions, by Maurizio Isabella (****): Just about got this in before the close of the year. A fascinating – if somewhat dense – account of the constitutional revolutions that took place in southern Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, in the early 1820s. It was so interesting to see some of those classic ideas around federalism and limited government, play out in such a proto-form.

J. Politics

1. Radius: History of a Feminist Revolution, by Yasmin El-Rifae (*****): A really challenging and difficult book about sexual violence in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, and how a group of protesters in Tahrir Square tried to combat it in an organised way. Essential, if depressing.

K. Miscellaneous Non-Fiction

1. Five Women Who Loved Love: Amorous Tales from 17th-Century Japan (****): The title says it all. I read this during my summer visit to Japan.
2. The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura (****): I’m not even a tea-drinker, but this was a delightful excursion through the history of the tea ceremony in China, Japan, and Korea, with some wisdomous life-lessons to boot.
3. In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology (****): A good representative collection of the writings of one of the most enigmatic and tragic figures of the 20th century. I didn’t know Pasolini wrote poetry!
4. All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison (****): A great snapshot of the last ten years of the SFF genre, by one of its foremost critics. If you’re interested in how science fiction and fantasy have evolved in the last ten years, within the longer arc of genre history, this book is for you.