For the last few years, I’ve slowly stacked each book I’ve finished on the nightstand next to my bed.
I’ve always loved reading. My mom was a librarian, I studied English and History in college, and my family exchanges a couple dozen books every Christmas. While I always fall short of my lofty annual reading goals, I still find time for it. My precarious bedside tower of books grows as the months pass by.
There are contemporary novels and short stories, literary classics, and different kinds of nonfiction, including memoirs and cultural criticism. Reading lists reflect personalities, interests, and curiosities — and I try to read as broadly as I can. Together, these books say something about me, and they trace the passage of time in my life.
Each one has associated memories, especially the experiences of reading them: curled up on the living room couch, on my side with a booklight in bed, under the shade of the broad tree in the middle of my backyard, on sunny days at the beach in Holland, in a small plane flying over the coast of Lake Erie, hunkered down during snowstorms or bouts of illness, passing time during many ordinary days. When I think back to a book, especially a memorable one, it's more than just the plot, the characters, and the prose. It’s how I felt when I encountered those carefully wrought ideas and stories.
At the start of each year, I take down my nightstand stack and shelve the books somewhere else. Over the last few weeks, I wrote a little bit — 100 words or fewer — about each of the 21 books I read in the past year. They’re somewhere between journal entries and those handwritten endorsement notes on bookstore shelves. I find something to like about almost everything I read, and I truly loved many of these books.
Hopefully you’ll be inspired to pick up one of them.
An Immense World
Ed Yong, 2022
I began with a fascinating book about animal sensory experience by an Atlantic staffer. It’s a meticulous survey of how creatures perceive their environments and interviews with scientists who have researched them. Yong writes about the entire animal kingdom and marvels at its evolutionary gifts: hummingbirds and manatees, scorpions and elephants, bats and whales. He explores the inherent limits of human perception but celebrates it. Concluding with warnings about ecological destruction gives the book a tragic aftertaste. After reading the first chapter about dogs and their sense of smell, I let my Pyrenees follow her nose on walks.
Upstream
Mary Oliver, 2016
My sister lent me this collection of essays from a poet. Oliver writes about her sources of inspiration, the beauty of the natural world, and some of her favorite writers — Whitman, Emerson, Poe, Wordsworth. She connects deeply with nature and writes with devotion and reverence. Her refreshing perspective felt like an exhortation to live outside, see the world with a sense of awe, and articulate the glory you find and experience. She writes wonderfully about eating sea turtle eggs, preserving a spider’s domain, watching herons and owls, and building a ramshackle dwelling with her bare hands. I loved this book.
All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr, 2014
This novel had been recommended to me by multiple people, and it was fantastic. The story is set during the WWII Battle of Saint Malo and centers two teenagers on opposite sides (a blind French girl and a German soldier). Doerr is a masterful storyteller. Marie-Laure and Werner are quite compelling — her ability to sense the world without sight, and his infatuation with radio technology. Suspense grows as the narratives converge around the battle and a Nazi hunt for a magical stone. The short chapters have a kinetic energy, and the characters have beauty, depth, and complexity.
Have You Eaten Yet?
Cheok Kwan, 2022
A documentarian traveled the world to interview Chinese restaurateurs and later wrote this book about their diasporic culture and mankind’s collective appetite for their food. Kwan visits each corner of the globe, spending a lot of time in Africa and Latin America. The stories eventually started to run together a bit, and there wasn’t as much of a focus on the food as I expected (chefs adjusted to local ingredients and tastes). I started reading it over a plate of Kung Po Beef at Chopstick House on 28th Street.
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote, 1965
I borrowed my girlfriend’s copy of this book, a nonfiction novel and forerunner to modern True Crime. It’s about the brutal quadruple murder of the Clutter family in rural Kansas, as well as the perpetrators, Dick and Perry. A significant portion of the well-written, engaging narrative features their perspectives before, during, and after the crime. Capote researched and interviewed them extensively, and he tells the story in vivid detail (though surely with some embellishments). Two generations ago, this story touched the same nerve as crime reporting today, building in a slow burn relative to more sensationalist contemporary media.
Dubliners
James Joyce, 1914
I read this book for the first time as I finished college in 2015, a thin volume that didn’t resonate much with me back then. I gave it another chance, and it made more of an impression this time. Joyce’s collection of discrete, brief stories are character sketches with dark set-pieces, a clear depiction of Irish society. Death, failure, and disappointment follow the protagonists, some of whom experience a significant change at the end of their respective stories. These stories are discussed endlessly in college English classes and for good reason — their prose, symbolism, and subtlety.
Middlemarch
George Eliot, 1872
Another literary classic, this behemoth was published in eight volumes by a female author who used a pseudonym. Eliot primarily focuses on the domestic affairs of a few unhappy couples in a fictional, rural town. It’s an incredibly deep story. I don’t think I’ve ever been more impressed by an author’s ability to carefully render personalities and circumstances in such brilliant detail. Middlemarch is a masterpiece of Victorian literature, and it feels glacial by today’s standards — a difficult but rewarding read. A heaping plate of Shepherd’s Pie with marbled lamb, delicate herbs, and a million calories.
Consider the Lobster
David Foster Wallace, 2005
These eclectic essays include gonzo journalism and literary criticism; DFW writes about shock jocks and adult video award shows, as well as Updike, Kafka, and prescriptivism. He follows John McCain’s 2000 campaign and asks us to consider the ethics of eating crustaceans — creatures that scream when boiled — while writing on assignment at the Maine Lobster Festival. I enjoyed DFW’s sharp, idiosyncratic style (he included plenty of footnotes and long digressions). In an oblique way, this book taught me about what America was like when I was a kid, capturing the zeitgeist of the nineties and early aughts.
Tokyo Ueno Station
Miri Yu, 2014
This is a strong contender for the most depressing book I have ever read. It’s a short novel about a homeless man, Kazu, who leaps in front of a train and cannot find peace in death. (Summarizing it that way somehow undersells just how bleak it is.) A book written with black bile for ink.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Kate Beaton, 2022
Written by a Canadian artist who spent two years working in the Albertan oil industry, this is an autobiographical, black-and-white graphic novel. It's a heavy book. Beaton is a gifted cartoonist, and she depicts life in a lucrative but exploitative and isolating place, drawn in brilliant tableaus — the scarred land of the oil sands and coastal landscapes in her native Nova Scotia. She moves there economic opportunity, but experiences profound alienation and relentless sexual harassment and abuse. Once she earns enough money to pay off her student loans, she returns home.
The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
Marilynne Robinson, 1998
I started this book a couple years ago and finished it after a long break. Robinson is a religious novelist with a left-wing, Protestant perspective. I’d read a few of her novels, and I found this collection of history and critical theory to be insightful but challenging to process. She’s a contrarian and heterodox thinker who relies on primary texts. Her critiques of common narratives and secular perspectives regarding Darwinism, Puritanism, and other topics have some salience. I suppose I’m one of the few people who would read multiple essays about John Calvin for fun.
Trust
Hernan Diaz, 2022
This novel was a deserving 2023 Pulitzer winner. It’s a four-part metafiction about a Depression-era financier, his wife, and the story of her life. The book evolves as each section tells a version of the same events to slowly reveal Mildred Bevel — an elusive, compelling character. Ida Partenza, the couple’s biographer, adds a powerful dimension, and her hilarious, anarchist father is a great contrast to the oligarchic Andrew Bevel (who was admittedly a little flat). It’s the type of literary novel that self-consciously engages with the concept of storytelling in higher-order narratives. The MFA part of my brain loved it.
A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth
Daniel Mason, 2020
This collection of short stories is set across the world over a few centuries, and Mason gravitates toward the distant past, especially in England or far-flung outposts on the global frontier. Many are excellent: balloonists, boxers, a therapeutic urban greenhouse in London, and rainforest telegraph operators. They are grand, ornate, literary stories, and the MFA part of my brain sometimes smirked at the overly florid prose. They explore a space when the world was rapidly expanding but still retained some old magic.
Arthur Vandenberg
Hank Meijer, 2017
Before reading his biography, I wasn’t familiar with Vandenberg. He was a Grand Rapids Republican with a long career in the U.S. Senate from 1928 to 1951. Meijer, who runs the grocery chain, is a good historian. Vandenberg was the voice of a marginalized, anti-New Deal, isolationist minority. He later helped forge the postwar, bipartisan foreign policy consensus, supported the Marshall Plan, and took a hard line against the Soviets. Vandenberg was a powerful Senator but never ran for president (he had a public affair with a British spy). I enjoyed learning about him and that era of history.
Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Taylor Jenkins Reid, 2017
I bought this popular novel while shopping at Target with my girlfriend. An aging Hollywood starlet hires a young writer to tell her life story, particularly about the seven men she married throughout her life. Hugo reveals that she had been in love with another actress, Celia St. James, but opportunistically used her relationships with men to advance her career. Jenkins Reid intersperses the narrative with tabloid clippings about Hugo’s life. I devoured this book in less than a week — a quick, easy read — like fast food in the front seat of a car.
The Braindead Megaphone
George Saunders, 2007
Saunders is one of my favorite writers — he has a unique voice and wit. It had been a while since I read these wide-ranging essays, though some felt familiar. He criticizes the Iraq War in abstract, hyperbolic terms; he captures the ambiguities and small details of Tibet and Abu Dhabi; he writes professorially about Twain, Vonnegut, and Barthelme. The first essay, which has the same title as the book, was why I revisited it. The Braindead Megaphone conceptualizes how extreme, ludicrous voices tend to dominate our collective discourse over time, a dynamic that has grown more powerful in the last twenty years.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, 1884
Inspired by an essay in the previous book, I picked up this great classic of American literature. Huck Finn escapes his abusive father and flees down the Mississippi with a runaway slave named Jim. As they float past the path to freedom and descend further into the South, they encounter rogues and escape dire situations, protecting and caring for each other. Eventually, Jim’s captured and held for ransom, but Tom Sawyer reveals that he’d been freed upon his master’s death. A book that earns its prominent place in our canon with Huck’s narrative voice, and desire to free Jim.
The Candy House
Jennifer Egan, 2022
I read A Visit From the Goon Squad in 2019 and was excited for this loosely-related sequel. Each chapter of Egan’s novel follows a different character, often in a specific scene or point in time. They’re part of a vast web of interconnected people in a world with Own Your Unconscious, which lets people store memories online — if they allow other people to see them. It feels more like postmodern, experimental science fiction than a traditional novel. The characters are deep, memorable, and often strange; the dystopian technology affects interpersonal relationships and individual destinies. It was a great book.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl, 1946
This book is written in two parts. In the first, Frankl recounts the horrors he experienced and witnessed in camps during the Holocaust. In the second, the Jewish Austrian psychotherapist details his theory of logotherapy — a philosophy of meaning or purpose. He identifies three main sources: fulfilling a task, loving another person, and enduring suffering. In the face of depraved, inhumane conditions, Frankl found meaning in his life and survived to tell his story. My therapist recommended the book and gave me a copy. Some parts felt familiar, given some of the conversations we’ve had over the last four years.
Rabbit, Run
John Updike, 1960
Part of me despised this novel. Rabbit Angstrom, the protagonist, is a former basketball star who leaves his pregnant wife, lives with a prostitute, and returns when his child is born. Rabbit has a relentless libido, he’s incredibly selfish, and his misbehavior propels the plot. Rabbit’s sexual obsessions are balanced by religious neuroses, mediated through his friendship with an Episcopalian minister. Updike has long-winded, exacting prose and describes minor details in great depth. His vivid depiction of postwar suburbia is technically impressive, and I was engrossed by the time the story reached its horrific climax. Rabbit’s an asshole, though.
Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Grand Rapids
Anthology, 2007
My grandpa lent me this book a few months before he passed away. There are about thirty memoirs, ranging from the first white settlers in West Michigan to people who grew up in the eighties. They trace the history of Grand Rapids — immigrant experiences and strident religious backgrounds — with the nostalgia of childlike exploration and self-discovery. I enjoyed quite a few of the writers, especially Charles Belknap, who wrote a hundred years ago and has a neighborhood named after him. I wonder what stories my generation will tell about our childhoods. This book was published when I was 14.
The Best Book I Read in 2023
If you’re part of the small but might percentage of readers who actually read through this whole post, congratulations! I appreciate your diligence, and I’d like to reward your efforts by answering a fundamental question: Which one of these books was the best? After much thought and deliberation, I decided that the book I enjoyed and appreciated the most was All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr.