2023: Year in Review
Throughout 2023, I was in flux. In March, I started a new job, which has proven to be a very rewarding change but not without its challenges. My partner and I settled into our new home, learning where in our new neighborhood (and beyond) we enjoy spending our time and how to get from A to B. Mostly, I’ve been very, very busy, which is a good thing! While exciting, though, adjusting to a new schedule and routine has left me with less time for reading and writing.
And yet! I managed to achieve two major goals/resolutions for 2023. First and foremost, three stories of mine were published last year:
I am so fortunate to have found three editors who believed in my stories enough to give them a platform and share them with their readers.
I also accomplished my goal to read 20 books in 2023! Every year, I’ve increased my pace ever-so-slightly, strengthening my comprehension and attention span. I didn’t quite reach my goal in 2022, so to meet it in 2023 — a year during which I was significantly more pressed for time and often found myself with a lot more to worry about — felt really good.
I’m choosing to do my year-end wrap-up a little differently this time. Whereas before I separated out novels and short stories to highlight the best of both, for 2023 I present instead a curated, tandem list — a prix fixe menu, if you will. I’ve listed each book in the order I read it, complete with brief description and a rating (out of 5 ★s).
Each novel is paired with a short story. Why? Because short stories don’t get enough love! Think of them as palate cleansers, digestifs to follow the main course. Some of these pairings are based on similarities between concepts or characters. Sometimes they approach similar themes from divergent angles. Whatever the reason may be, if you choose to read them, I hope they take you on rewarding journeys to emotional places you don’t expect.
With that, my published stories and curated reading list for 2023. (And if you want to skip to the end to see a simple list without commentary, it’s there for you!)
Novels and Short Story Pairings
Foxhunt | Rem Wigmore (★★½)
This far-future climate fiction tale follows Orfeus, a musician who falls in with the Order of the Vengeful Wild, a mysterious group of bounty hunters. The book’s beginning is promising — Wigmore’s world is fascinating — but the narration infuses Orfeus with a bravado that I found unconvincing and somewhat unearned.
Pairing: “In the Shelter of Ghosts” | Risa Wolf | Diabolical Plots
There’s a moment early in Foxhunt where Orfeus realizes she will never go home again. Wolf’s story, set in a far less hopeful future than Foxhunt, also explores how memories of home can eclipse home itself.
The Obelisk Gate | N.K. Jemisin (★★★★)
The first installment of Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (The Fifth Season) was my favorite book from last year. Book two does not disappoint, introducing new characters and dimensions that broaden the physical scope of Jemisin’s and but deepen the emotional one. A specific reveal at the book’s midpoint left me with a particularly powerful melancholy and dread. There is far less action in The Obelisk Gate, but the narrative and the characters’ journeys are just as compelling.
Pairing: “What We Hold On To” | Hannah Greer | The Dread Machine
The (dis)connection of mother and daughter colors the entirety of The Obelisk Gate — as does Greer’s excellent war-torn story.
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking | T. Kingfisher (★★★★)
T. Kingfisher’s solid young-adult fantasy novel follows Mona, a baker’s apprentice skilled in crafting magical golems out of baked goods, whose life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the floor of her bakery. Hijinks, both harrowing and heartwarming, ensue.
Pairing: “There’s Magic in Bread” | Effie Seiberg | Fantasy Magazine
Seiberg’s story about magical bread is more grounded to this plane, though sneaks in some grain-based golems for good measure.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead | Olga Tokarczuk (★★★★)
Tokarczuk’s foreboding novel features one of the most bizarrely entrancing protagonists I’ve ever come across. Janina, a loner who prefers the company of animals to most humans, claims that the mysterious deaths of several neighbors can be explained by astrology. As seasons change, the mystery darkens, secrets are revealed, and Janina’s intriguing meditations — on solitude, our relationship to the natural world, and the human temptation for violence — take on new, darker meaning.
Pairing: “The Sea Hare” | Wailana Kalama | Apparition Lit
I found these protagonists to be similar in their disgust for the world and contempt for people who do wrong. However, Janina keeps a chilly distance between herself and her actions, while Kalama’s narrator embraces their own sticky, grotesque warmth.
Daisy Jones and the Six | Taylor Jenkins Reid (★★★★)
If you’ve seen the TV show, you know this fictional oral history of a band bearing more than a passing resemblance to Fleetwood Mac is filled with great characters, great vibes, and a late-game plot twist that strengthens the story’s emotional foundation. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook, which features a full cast, including Judy Greer of Arrested Development, Archer, and many other shows.
Pairing: “You Are a Rock God” | Joelle Killian | Mythaxis
For a far more troubled sort of rock fantasy, check out Killian’s excellent, white-knuckled tale of escapism.
The Employees | Olga Ravn (★★★)
This sublimely weird novella is told in snippets from fictional investigative interviews with crew members of the Six-Thousand Ship, a generation ship of sorts. Throughout their travels, the ship’s crew finds strange, alien, and often flat-out disgusting objects. These objects both enrapture and revile the crew members, sowing dissension throughout the ship. I struggled at times to understand the narrative thrust of this one, but the language Ravn employs mystifies and terrifies in equal measure.
Pairing: “The Cello in the Cell” | David Janisch | Nightmare Magazine
My second favorite story of the year. Ravn’s titular employees’ obsession with objects they don’t understand pairs nicely with Janisch’s harrowing portrait of a prisoner whose punishment is to learn and perform a complex piece on the cello, which he’s never touched before.
The Stone Sky | N.K. Jemisin (★★★★½)
Jemisin’s finale does what every finale should: leave you satisfied, but leave you wanting more. It is clear how every action, every character choice, every bit of lore and relevant thematic strand in the first two books leads to the ultimate conclusion at the heart of the story. Jemisin draws such a rich, devastated world that it’s a shame it ends at all — but, of course, it must.
Pairing: “All the Things I Could’ve Done That Wouldn’t Have Been So Devastating” | Phoebe Barton | Baffling
The Stone Sky cracks open the world while simultaneously never losing focus on mother Essun’s relationship with her daughter, Nassun. Barton’s short piece explores a similar juxtaposition between two ex-lovers, with consequences that are a bit more one-sided.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things | Iain Reid (★★★½)
This unnerving novel about a deeply weird visit to meet a significant other’s family is written in a marvelously kinetic style that constantly keeps you guessing about the true nature of the reality reflected on the page. I felt like the twist was somewhat obvious, but who can complain when the journey to get there is so fun?
Pairing: “Maladaptive Camouflage” | Ann Leblanc | Strange Horizons
Similar in both theme and prose, Leblanc’s story takes Ending Things’s themes of mistrust and unrecognition, of not being secure in one’s own skin, and makes them literal.
The Golden Compass (★★★★★) and The Subtle Knife (★★★★½) | Philip Pullman
I’ve been meaning to re-read Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy for a long time — essentially, ever since the HBO series first came out years ago. My revelation this year was that this trilogy might be my favorite series ever. The way Pullman develops Lyra’s and Will’s characters (not to mention the entire supporting cast as well) while introducing the reader to new worlds and timelines is masterful. Lyra and Will are the binary star at the heart of the story, around which everything else revolves. Meanwhile, Pullman manipulates the other elements of the story like chess pieces at war around them. Truly marvelous.
Pairing: “Glass Moon Water” | Linda Niehoff | Diabolical Plots
I chose one story to pair with both books, as Niehoff’s story shares both physical and thematic similarities with Pullman’s series. On the surface, there are specters and a youthful sense of adventure. More profoundly, the unnamed characters in “Glass Moon Water” reckon with their lost youth, tethered to a symbol from childhood whose significance only they can understand — just like Lyra and Will.
The Echo Wife | Sarah Gailey (★★★★★)
I really doubted the beginning of this book, as I strongly disliked every character I met. Dr. Evelyn Caldwell is harsh, impatient, and brusque. Her husband is an absolute ass. Her husband’s mistress, Martine — who happens to be a clone of Evelyn herself — is reserved, tentative, an impressionable blank slate. It is an incredibly tense premise, one that I eventually eased into and then relished, especially after a late-game twist revealed new depths of depravity by the main antagonist. A very good, taut, sci-fi thriller.
Pairing: “To Call My Own” | Jessica Cho | Haven Speculative
I can’t write too much about the connection between these two stories without giving away The Echo Wife’s excellent twist, but this story is similarly haunting.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage | Haruki Murakami (★★★★½)
Tsukuru Tazaki doesn’t understand how his life could be so dull that his childhood friends all cut him off with no explanation. In typical Murakami style, his journey to find out what happened, to add color to his life, is melancholy and perfectly strange. Honestly, I found myself relating to Tsukuru’s isolation more than I would have liked. That the book ends without resolution only captures the spirit of our colorless hero’s listlessness further, and adds a nice touch of ambiguity to a tight coming-of-middle-age story. I did knock half a star off of this one because of a pretty tired and needless plot contrivance that arrives about halfway through.
Pairing: “The Infinite Endings of Elsie Chen” | Kylie Lee Baker | Uncanny Magazine
My #1 story in 2023. Tsukuru and Elsie are both notable protagonists in that they’re “negatively special,” forgotten or ignored by those around them — or, in Elsie’s case, by Death itself. They each wonder why, and by the end, they’ve gotten answers — but who’s to blame?
Arbitrary Lines | M. Nolan Gray (★★★★)
This was my only non-fiction read of the year, which details how zoning — once a useful policy for regulating land uses within urban settings — has become distorted and produced negative consequences for housing, economics, environmental stewardship, and more. Overall, I found Gray’s arguments about the problem convincing, but he falls prey to a common issue facing urban planning books: disappointing solutions.
Since this is non-fiction, I don’t have a specific story pairing for this book. However, Speculative City publishes really cool genre fiction, all in an urban setting.
Strange Beasts of China | Yan Ge (★★★★★)
I’ve never read anything quite like Strange Beasts of China, a detective story about beasts that share more in common with humans than anyone in the fictional city of Yong’an would like to admit. Each chapter begins with an encyclopedic description of a specific kind of beast, their likes and dislikes, and their behavior patterns. By the end, the protagonist’s search for each type of beast completely changes the narrative about each one — and eventually challenges the nature of “beastliness” at large.
Pairing: “The Monster Fucker Club” | A.V. Greene | Apex Magazine
For a very different monstrous menagerie, check out A.V. Greene’s excellent short exploring how far we push ourselves to feel.
Babel | R.F. Kuang (★★★★½)
Babel follows Robin Swift, a bright-eyed aspiring translation student, as he reckons with the majesty and power of the Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford University. In Kuang’s alternate history, the act of translation itself can be leveraged into power. Carriages and trains run faster. Crop yields are more plentiful. Weapons aim truer, kill more cleanly, destroy more fully. Robin, a Chinese boy who is taken in by a stern and emotionally manipulative professor, grapples with what it means to participate in empire, and how much of yourself you can give to a machine that is indifferent to you.
Pairing: “The Sound of Children Screaming” | Rachael K. Jones | Nightmare Magazine
Babel is all about empire — its need to extract resources, including talent from the exceptional. Jones’s bleak and honest story of “The Gun” and its victims explores the flip side: when empire decides what (and who) is expendable.
Cat’s Cradle | Kurt Vonnegut (★★★★)
I never ended up reading any Vonnegut in school, and I’ve always felt like it was a missed opportunity! Cat’s Cradle didn’t disappoint, especially in 2023, the year that gave us great films about mass destruction like Oppenheimer and Godzilla Minus One. Vonnegut channels the anxiety of the 1960s and ’70s into humor, letting characters reach the highest, most absurd heights before letting them fall by their own hubristic follies. It still doesn’t melt the chilliness that is Vonnegut’s weapon of choice — “Ice-9” — hanging over the world like a sword of Damocles. When doom is ultimately unleashed, you have to laugh to avoid the inevitable despair.
Pairing: “The Air Will Catch Us” | Rajiv Moté | Reckoning
Vonnegut’s wry sarcasm provides one type of shield against environmental doom; Moté’s story contemplates the caution of living through a new, worse world. The setting of “The Air Will Catch Us” also offers a stiflingly warm contrast to the frozen suffocation of Vonnegut’s “Ice-9.”
The Mezzanine | Nicholson Baker (★★★★)
This book was pitched to me as “Infinite Jest but a tenth as long.” Having never labored through the former, I decided to give it a try and was rewarded with some of the most lucid, eccentric, and dare I say poetic ruminations on corporate mundanity and office culture. Our everyman hero reflects on these things as he rides up an escalator — and that’s pretty much the whole plot. But who needs plot when you have phrases like “cream cheese is a unitary scrim” or “the mind is refrigerated by interruption” or a seven-page footnote about the steady, hypnotic cycle of an escalator’s handrail? I’m not selling it very well, but trust me when I say these 100 pages are worth it.
Pairing: “Trial Run” | Zach Williams | The Paris Review
The protagonist of Williams’s short story also approaches office interactions like he’s reading tea leaves. In contrast to The Mezzanine, Williams’s analysis of the little details results in a much more anxiety-riddled conclusion. (Unfortunately, this one isn’t free to read online anymore; however, The Paris Review is widely regarded as a fantastic literary magazine, if you’re looking for new material.)
The House in the Cerulean Sea | TJ Klune (★★★)
I confess to being charmed by the magical youth at the center of this tale about found family. It is a gentle, thoughtful, warm story that gradually melts the heart of protagonist Linus Baker, a bureaucrat whose duty to his job as a social worker in charge of inspecting “orphanages” for magical children is clad in iron-strong principles. While the book’s themes are light, the writing is pretty heavy-handed, especially later on. (The plot is predictable, too, but that didn’t really bother me.) However, Klune’s characters shine brightly and the scenes in which they’re together make this a delightful read.
Pairing: “It’s What’s Inside That Counts” | Warren Benedetto | Fantasy Magazine
The gentleness of Cerulean Sea finds a nice match in Benedetto’s flash-fiction piece about making the most of the time you have.
Sea of Tranquility | Emily St. John Mandel (★★★★★)
I am a self-professed St. John Mandel enthusiast and this book didn’t disappoint. It starts off listlessly, as if unsure of its own footing, but the characters are compelling and the writing flows. Then, something clicks after all the major players are introduced and the true depth of the story reveals itself.
Much of it, which features lots of time travel, has to do with the nature of reality. Sounds par for the course, but St. John Mandel poses each question about reality in ways I didn’t expect. Characters ponder the seeming unreality of living through a pandemic. Memories that seemed straightforward reveal themselves to be more complicated years later (or earlier). Even the book itself questions the reality of its own fiction, especially if you’ve read her other books — there’s a meta-fiction present connecting a multiverse of her own stories, including some tongue-in-cheek references to herself? The effect is uncanny, almost making the reader, as the story’s “observer,” a central piece of it.
It’s a carefully curated yet somehow still soulful experience, one that doesn’t bother with trying to hide its own meticulously built scaffolding. So much of fiction is examining how multiple lives intersect seemingly at random to produce meaning for those lives. Sea of Tranquility wonders, what if all of it truly was by design, and would that matter?
Pairing: “The Moon Rabbi” | David Ebenbach | Clarkesworld
Ebenbach’s story matches Sea of Tranquility in tone, setting, and stakes, but contemplates space instead of (or along with?) time.
This Is How You Lose the Time War | Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (★★★★★)
Pure poetry. That’s the most potent distillation of this truly unique sci-fi love story. Two agents on opposite sides of constant war to manipulate time in each side’s favor start as adversaries, trading letters as they traverse time’s braid back and forth, ad infinitum. A lot of criticism has been levied at this book for being hard to follow, and that’s fair. Moment to moment, though, it doesn’t really matter. Once I began to understand the flow of the language and the call-and-response rhythm of the story, the details revealed their meaning and it all felt so natural and indispensable — much like the relationship between Red and Blue.
Pairing: “The Giants Among Us” | Megan Chee | Clarkesworld
While it’s in the background, Time War’s titular conflict propels Red and Blue to constantly outdo each other. Chee’s story greets Time War’s unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object concept head on and offers an alternative: an escape route.
Rankings, Top to Bottom:
★★★★★
The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey
The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel
Strange Beasts of China, Yan Ge
This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
★★★★½
Babel, R.F. Kuang
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Haruki Murakami
The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin
The Subtle Knife, Philip Pullman
★★★★
Arbitrary Lines, Nolan Gray
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Daisy Jones and the Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, T. Kingfisher
★★★½
I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Iain Reid
★★★ and below:
The Employees, Olga Ravn
Foxhunt, Rem Wigmore
The House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune