2023 was a whirlwind of a year. While I waited and worried for my book, The Loneliness Files, to make its debut I had a lot of nerves to calm. Writing about your own internal and external loneliness and then handing it over to the world is kind of a big leap to take. It was easy to slip a little bit deeper into those feelings of isolation and disconnection as a remedy of sorts for those fears. Between my day job, the book, and all of the other moving parts of my life there were lots of shadows to hide in. Lots of silence, too. So, I made a decision to lean into the two places I’ve found the most comfort—music and books. I wanted to recapture the feelings I had when I used to wander the stacks of Rodman Public Library in my hometown and the giddy feeling of disappearing into a world with no expectation of analysis or weight. I decided to make my year of reading much more focused on the fun, escapism, and curiosity I’d been missing in prior years. I turned my attention to books that spoke to genres I’d been neglecting or ignored—horror, celebrity memoir, urban fiction, and Black romance—and combined them with my reading bread and butter of essay collections and poetry.
Nonfiction, Essays, and Memoir
My year has been bookended by nonfiction audiobooks. I started 2023 with Black Women Writers at Work edited by Claudia Tate and Finding Me by Viola Davis. The former was a treasure trove of ideas I plucked out to turn over as I tried to find my footing and define what I wanted my own writing legacy to be. These ideas, relevant decades after the book’s 1984 debut, still had something valuable to give me and helped me see my own place in the literary landscape a bit differently. Just as the first book spoke to my very intellectual fears, Viola Davis’s autobiography helped calm some of my heart-based worries. For me, the focus was not the absolute struggles she overcame, but was more about her creative path. It helped assuage the fears that I was moving a little too slowly along my own creative journey and that each step forward was placing me right where I needed to be. As the year is coming to a close, I’m capping it off with the audiobook of The Woman in Me by Britney Spears. This book was something I came to by pure internet influence. I hadn’t planned on reading it, but after coming across so many glowing reviews of the narration I had to give it a listen. I’m glad I did. I wasn’t interested in gawking at her life experiences, rather I found myself more interested in how a person’s passion can pull them into everything they’d ever wanted and away from it at the same time.
As 2023 moved along, I also started mulling over the next manuscript I wanted to write and finally settled on the general theme—pleasure. Hurts So Good: The Science & Culture of Pain on Purpose by Leigh Cowart caught me in the first five pages when she wrote, “human: the deliberate act of choosing to feel bad to then feel better.” Perfectly on theme. This book’s exploration of pain and the human condition was fascinating and eye-opening because it expanded upon parts of my own experiences and memories that I’d never really thought had deeper meaning or origins. It was a perfect jumping off point for the new ideas I’ve begun puzzling through.
The later half of 2023 also brought me some of my favorite nonfiction books of the year. I came across Jiordan Castle’s Disappearing Act after hearing her read in New York in November. The book, written in beautifully rich verse, built a bridge between my love of poetry and memoir. The vessel of the story is like floating above the surface of memory and then being plunged down into something heartbreaking and beautiful. Another writer I had the pleasure of reading with this year was Sean Enfield. His book, Holy American Burnout, is worthy of the good buzz for its December release. Enfield’s writing is probing and electric. It doesn’t shy away from its subject matter and its stylistic approach, really a multi-media type experience, is a worthy framework for the collection. A Calendar is a Snakeskin by Kristine Langley Mahler is a small but mighty thing. Clocking in at just over 100 pages, it’s a beautiful meditation on paying attention to the world around you and where it is leading you. In the same vein, Irregulars by Kerry Trautman is tiny too at just 66 pages, but it is packed full of prose that slips between the POVs of waitresses at a diner and the diner’s patrons. The format worked well and I felt as if I was in the rush of a shift sitting in a booth listening to the din of the crowd around me.
Fiction and Short Stories
When summer rolled around, I made another decision. I was going to spend the remainder of 2023 reading Black Romance and Urban Fiction almost exclusively. I got heavily into BookTok and filled up my eReader with the recommendations I found there. Some standouts in Black Romance were Only for the Week by Natasha Bishop, Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan, and Revive Me and Restore Me by JL Seegers. Rome, the main male character in Bishop’s book, is my book boyfriend of the year and I spent a feverish few hours devouring the book and falling in love with him. The book was a perfect escape. A tropical setting. Spicy sex scenes. Drama and family tension. Lots of romance. Ryan’s book, now in development at Peacock, is a second-chance romance full of much of the same, but features a middle-aged, estranged couple co-parenting their children while being pulled back into each other’s orbits. Most of the romance novels I read this year featured younger characters, so Yasmen and Josiah being so close to my age group was a breath of fresh air. The book is a testament that love, romance, and sensuality don’t have an age. Seeger’s books exist in the same universe among the same group of friends and offer the kinds of second chance romance and enemies to lovers tropes, but the books spread the slow burn over many years. It was lovely to get to see the worlds of the characters unfurl and to escape into it with them. I spent lots of day reading nearly the entire catalogs of Grey Huffington (in particular The Eisenberg Effect series and its expanded universe), Asia Monique (her Sinful series about Black Mafia families), and Christina C. Jones’s Alexandria House series. Each of these books were pure escapism and fun to read and brought a bit of joy back to the year.
Reading Out There Screaming edited by Jordan Peele in a bustling train station and then a long train ride in October was like looking over my shoulder waiting for something about the world to be a little off kilter. I’m not the biggest fan of horror, but this collection stuck with me. It felt as if I wasn’t being told to be afraid of what was in the pages, but rather the stories let my mind do all the work—looking between the lines and overanalyzing and worrying myself silly.
Poetry
I didn’t read too much poetry in 2023, but Year of the Unicorn Kids by Jason B. Crawford, Slack Tongue City by Mackenzie Berry, and In Stories We Thunder by V. Ruiz were all early year pickups that lingered throughout the remainder of the months. All three collections were published by Sundress Publications and I loved that each of them leaned into rhythm and culture and bright language.
More from A Year in Reading 2023
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