Elizabeth Cobbe

This year was a compost year for me. Not everything was a win, but I hope I can grow good things from the failures.

As a reader, books carried me through a brutally hot and interminable summer and offered a much-needed escape. Here are my favorites from those released in 2023.

Reproduction by Louisa Hall. A riff on Frankenstein, motherhood, childbirth, and the creative act, this novel brings together multiple strands in an unnerving and original climax.

Congratulations, the Best Is Over! by R. Eric Thomas. A collection of essays that literally made me laugh as I was crying over my own problems, this book is hilarious yet tender in its observations of the challenges of adult life.

Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark. I don’t know if this memoir is fiction or nonfiction, and it doesn’t matter. The chapters, each based on fairy tales, carry truth enough.

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez. An offbeat, delightfully meandering story – maybe autofiction – of an older writer finding community during lockdown with a directionless Gen-Z kid and parrot on the verge of insanity.

All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley. A memoir of a former guard at the Met, full of love for art and the community he found among those who are often unseen.

The Chinese Groove by Kathryn Ma. An young man’s unusual immigrant story that would be tragic if not for the Candide-like optimism that drives him forward at every turn.

An Assassin in Utopia by Susan Wels. A nonfiction history of a presidential assassin, but also a snapshot of a strange era of dreamers and misfits.

From Before 2023

Women Talking by Miriam Toews, 2019. A novel about a group of illiterate Mennonite women who have survived abuse at the hands of their husbands and fathers. They debate whether to leave their community or to punish the men who have injured them. (Also a movie, haven’t seen it.)

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, 2020. Still in the middle of the audio book, but I deeply appreciate the collection of short essays on moments worth joy that Gay, a poet, composed over the course of one year.

The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels by India Holton, 2021. I’m not often a reader of genre romance, but this wacky, hilarious tale of Victorian lady pirates who fly their houses all over Britain won me over.

Most Looking Forward to…

• Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
• The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
• Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult by Maria Bamford
• Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman
• The Fraud by Zadie Smith
• Finishing my current book, about a group of traveling players called upon to save the world, with a caper of a plot and some dialogue in verse. This was a project I expected to be straightforward, only to discover halfway through that it is far more ambitious than I had understood. Which is perhaps for the best, as I would never have gotten started had I known!