Books of 2023
Some notes on my favourite books of the year
Hi friends. Sorry it’s been a couple of months since the last Nine Circles post. Regular weekly service will resume in the new year. It turns out that moving house to a new city with a one year old while trying to keep up with your job leaves little spare time for anything except lying face down on the floor whimpering to your partner about how tired you are.
The idea for 2024 is to post a weekly ‘diary’ with a few shorter items in the classic Nine Circles format each Sunday, plus an additional longer essay once per month.
Rather than a normal post to close out the year, below is a selection of my favourite books from 2023. Not all are new, but I read them all for the first time this year. These are not necessarily the ‘best’ books I read, but you don’t need me to tell you that Evelyn Waugh is a good writer. Instead these are books that I enjoyed where I hope a recommendation may provide you with some extra value, or at least a suggestion for your Christmas shopping.
Companion Piece by Ali Smith
What does a struggling artist with a sick father during the COVID lockdowns have to do with a female blacksmith from five hundred years ago?
In her Seasonal Quartet of post-Brexit state-of-Britain novels to which this is a coda (each can be read separately), Ali Smith held history and modernity up to the light to see what could be found in their translucence.
I read each of the quartet and found them interesting and frustrating in equal measure: Wonderful, funny portrayals of the daily frustrations of modern Britain, forgotten fragments of history brought to life (for instance Britain’s internment of Anglo-Germans, including Jews, during the war), language and myth smashed up against the quotidian, but also an element of political certainty (is one sympathetic conservative too much to ask for?), an element of preachiness, maybe one too many puns?
But for me Companion Piece worked perfectly. Each note, the historical mystery, the medieval gender politics, the modern immigration system, the lament for the NHS, the postcard-like flashbacks, the contemporary mystery and the blacksmithing are pulled by Smith along with the themes from the previous four novels into harmony.
Are we talking to ghosts? It doesn’t matter. History echos.
Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford
This is a story of two men watching one another closely. In a strange way it made me think of John le Carré’s Smiley novels, in which British and Soviet spies observe one another minutely, looking for the telling detail.
The Spectator’s former art critic sat for a portrait by Lucian Freud. What results is a book that is not just a wonderful view into Freud’s methods and personality, but a look into the nature of portraiture more broadly. If that sounds pretentious, I promise it’s not - Gayford isn’t didactic, he shows rather than tells, letting truths about art and one of its great practitioners reveal themselves corporeally.
Chosen: Lost and Found between Christianity and Judaism by Giles Fraser
Chosen is many things at once, and one suspects earlier drafts were both very different from and probably much angrier than the final book. It is a memoir of a priest caught in an impossible situation, a story of personal reinvention, a history of Judaism in England, a reflection on the ‘Occupy St. Paul’s’ anti-capitalist protests, an explanation of why Christians are not seen as a sect of Judaism (as they clearly were at their founding), and an argument for the duel Christian-Jewish religious identity of Rev. Fraser’s sons. How to be both.
Crossroads and How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen
Crossroads is the first in a projected trilogy of novels by Franzen, who continues to annoy and frustrate people not only by being one of America’s greatest living novelists, but by having the temerity to publicly want to be one of America’s great novelists.
Christmas 1971, Chicago. A lesson in perfectly executed interwoven perspectives, in which each member of the Hildebrandt family yearns for a freedom which is complicated and thwarted by every other member.
Franzen is the master of the classical form of the novel: Chapters from multiple third-person narrators, where being inside each head feels powerfully different. Before coming into his prime, he spent years and his first several books trying to compete with his hero Gaddis and his frenemy David Foster Wallace to write the great ‘systems novel’. This resulted in The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, which are much more about zoning law and geology than you really ever need in a work of fiction. It wasn’t until Freedom and The Corrections that it became clear that the family is Franzen’s system.
Or so I thought until I read his first essay collection, How to Be Alone. The central essays here, mainly written in the nineties for the New Yorker, on a supermax prison and its humans, on his obsession with Gaddis and most of all on the Chicago Post Office, are brilliant, riveting works portraying mankind within political, social, cultural and economic systems. Absolutely tremendous literature in their own right.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
An eccentric semi-retired woman in a Polish village recounts the events around the murders of several members of the local hunting society. She tries to alert the police to her theory that it may be the deer taking revenge, and it’s a testament to the power and skill of Tokarczuk’s writing that I caught myself several times thinking this was a pretty reasonable explanation. Lots to say about madness, the marginalised, animal rights, predestination and William Blake.
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
World War One veteran Tom Birkin is employed to uncover a whitewashed medieval mural in a church in rural Yorkshire. Another veteran, an archaeologist, is tasked with finding an unmarked grave in the churchyard.
Tom looks back on the summer month he spent in Oxgodby, at the very end of a time in which village life (and maybe even some village faces) would still have been recognisable to its inhabitants from centuries ago. In many ways it is an elegy.
Worth it purely for the phonetic writing of the beautiful Yorkshire accent. I will certainly re-read this in my life.
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom by John Gray
John Gray was Professor of European Thought at LSE until he retired early in 2008, wanting to write outside the bounds of conventional philosophy papers. I can see why.
He writes not quite like anyone else: Short chapters engaging with fiction, poetry, history, philosophy, cinema, theology and much else, circling around his central themes, in this case the illusion of free will, the futile hope for meaning in life and the construction of knowledge into an idol by modern society.
Splendidly pessimistic, and you’ll finish it with a very healthy list of books and films you now desperately want to see and read.