Books I read in 2023

Granta Magazine asked its contributors this year for their lists

I have cut and pasted below what I offered Granta a few weeks ago. But you should read what others have to say: the titles mentioned by the contributors is much more varied, and often more surprising, than what one is likely to find on this side of the Atlantic.

Like Sheila Heti, who kindly mentions reading my own The Blue Book in her note for Granta, I remember little of what I read before the summer. Actually, now that I think of it, I remember I read Sheila’s Pure Colour. I know this because I talked about it with her when we were teaching at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Colorado last June. We discussed the loss we had experienced following the death of our fathers. Oh, and I read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies. (I had read my friend Teju Cole’s Tremor in manuscript but wasn’t that last year in the Fall? Same with another friend, Emmanuel Iduma’s I Am Still With You. Everything is a blur and I’d need to consult my journals to be certain about anything.) For a class I was teaching this past Spring, I’m sure I read Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. During my recent travels in India I read Vivek Shanbhag’s Sakina’s Kiss and Devika Rege’s Quarterlife. On my must-read list for the near-future are my fellow Cullman Fellows books, in particular, Caoilinn Hughes’s The Wild Laughter and Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. (Also, also, I understand that the galley of Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History has arrived at my home in Poughkeepsie where, alas, I’m not. Look forward to reading Claire’s book!) In the meantime, here is what Granta published of mine today on their website:

This summer I was traveling along the Ganges and I got stuck high in the Himalayan region due to a landslide. Buses, trucks, cars on the highway at a standstill for sixteen hours. On Audible, I listened to Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. It made everything I was experiencing both real and fantastically funny. A few months earlier I had cremated my father on the banks of the Ganges and this trip had been a way to return to my grief. In the time since I have been reading more about writers and the death of fathers. Martin Amis, Experience; Sharon Olds, The Father; Louise Glück, Ararat; Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark; V.S. Naipaul, Letters Between a Father and Son; Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place. This week, however, I have been reading Tessa Hadley’s Clever Girl. The narrator has been told that her father is dead and then she finds out that he is still alive. I have reached the place in the novel where the father, unaware of his connection to our narrator, has been hired to give her a driving lesson. The reason I’m reading this novel is that Geoff Dyer said on the LRB podcast that Hadley’s novel is ‘the rosetta stone of fiction’. I saw Geoff last week in New York and he told me that he particularly remembers the first seventy or so pages that he read as if in a trance. I was on a train when I read those pages and I had the same experience.