Antonym: Best Books of 2023 Edition
If you were to ask, these are the ones I’d bang on about.
Dear Reader
A virus (not that one) took me completely out of the game Christmas Eve through Boxing Day, meaning I couldn’t join family for celebrations or write long newsletters about everything. I have, piece by piece, been working on a list of my best reads for 2023, however, and here it is for you now.
I hope your holidays have been or continue to be as healthy and carefree as possible. Here’s a lovely list of things that might be worth a read while you have some quality sofa-time available.
It’s divided into three sections:
Best fiction books
1. Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
Best fiction book of the year also had my favourite quote about writing:
But a thing grows teeth once it’s put into words.
The wonder of Demon Copperhead is that it takes a Dickensian plot shape (David Copperfield), brings it into the beginning of the opioid epidemic of America’s Appalachia, puts its characters to such intense trauma and suffering, and yet it is beautiful, full of life and leaves you feeling invigorated (if a little angry). I’ve recommended it to just about everyone I’ve met since August when I read. It’s the kind of book that makes you a little evangelical.
2. Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
Prophet Song won the 2023 Booker Prize and it’s stunning. The story follows Eilish, a scientist and mother of four, in Dublin as a populist government in Ireland follows the familiar dictatorship playbook. The authorities threaten and then detain her husband, a trade unionist and then we are pulled down and under with Eilish as the darkness takes hold.
The prose is beautiful, poetic without ever getting in the way of the relentless pull of the story. I read it intensively over a couple of days and it was like living partly in that world. It’s written as a warning that this is a thing that happens everywhere and can come and happen to you before you know. I wish it wasn’t as timely as it feels.
...the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore...
3. Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas
A very special book. It plays with conventions and perceptions and the reader’s sympathies throughout. A campus novel, the main character is a fifty-something English professor who becomes enamoured with with a younger colleague, the Vladimir of the title. Her husband meanwhile is being accused of having multiple affairs with students over the years, so the sexual politics and power dynamics of modern universities between students and faculty provide a discomforting backdrop.
Have a try of its heady prose:
Vladimir snores lightly, a soft, soothing purr of a snore. It's a sweet, even sound. If I lived with him, if I were his little wife, I would wrap myself around him and let that snore lull me to sleep, like the sound of a rushing ocean.
I could tidy the cabin-the limes from our drinks are squashed on the counter, our shoes in the mudroom point every which way. I could write more, work on my book, but instead I want to sit and stare at the light as it moves across him. I am aware of this moment as a perfect example of liminality. I am living in the reality before Vladimir wakes. I wish some of my students, who have a postadolescent passion for literary terms, were here. I am sure if they were, they could feel it. The no-place-ness and no-time-ness of now. The pulsing presence of this moment between moments.
4. The Future, by Naomi Alderman
The story is a near future apocalypse thriller about mega-rich tech CEOs who build bunkers for themselves to live on beyond the end of the world. Alderman’s last novel, The Power was so good that I bought and started reading The Future on sight. No questions, no hesitation.
This plot is based on fact. Douglas Rushkoff has written about the bug-out plans of the Silicon Valley elite in Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires and Alderman was inspired by a 2017 article in The New Yorker, “Doomsday Prep For The Super Rich”.
Where The Power reminded me of the best of Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction, this book is much closer to Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE and Termination Shock with its jetsetting elites and nearly-real technology. Alderman’s style is more my cup of tea, though.
Best non-fiction books
1. A Thousand Brains, by Jeff Hawkins
In the foreword, Richard Dawkins favourably compares Hawkins’s theory of how intelligence arises in the human brain to Darwin’s Origin of Species. As endorsements go, it’s hard to beat. The book manages to explain how the mind works, how theories that aren’t proven yet are useful, and how we make knowledge and how this might apply to making thinking machines one day. I’ve quoted and used this book again and again this year. I cannot recommend it enough.
2. The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin
Rick Rubin, one of the greatest music producers in the world, is expert in bringing out the best performances from the most creative musicians in the world. The simple and most marketable way of writing this book would have been the “10 rules of X” or a name-drop-a-thon of studio sessions that helped make Jay-Z’s “The Black Album”, “Licence to Ill” by The Beastie Boys or Adele’s “25”.
The Creative Act will be a more enduring book than any of those versions. It’s a finely tuned, personal work whose chapters are shaped like meditations but speak clearly and directly to the challenges of creating things. Rubin takes on the theme of AI without sounding like a reactionary – reflecting on the feat of AlphaGo inventing new ways of playing Go that dismayed masters of the game, he takes it as an example of beginner’s mind, the Zen Buddhist concept that opens you to new possibilities.
3. The Neuroscience of You, by Chantal Prat
The key insight of this book is that neuroscience studies the typical human brain, and there is no such thing as a typical human brain. They are all very different. Prat is very readable, direct and entertaining.
I loved the little experiments she gives to test different aspects of your brain. Did you know left and right handedness is a spectrum not a binary? I’m 0.25 right-handed where +2 is the maximum.
I learned so much from this book. Most important, understanding the workings of the brain can help us understand ourselves and others better.
4. Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What To Fear, by Patrick Boucheron
Machiavelli is a blind spot for most of us. We see all that is evil, conspiracy and manipulation. I got raised eyebrows from some when I mentioned I was reading about him. All of this is a most effective piece of propaganda and censorship in history. A book-ban from the Vatican not long after he died and a thorough smear campaign meant that we see him as an evil figure. Patrick Boucheron shows how he was explaining how power worked.
Machiavelli was a comedy writer as well. I picture him as the Jesse Armstrong of his say. Got some good reviews for his play The Mandrake which you could go and see a show in Florence of at the time with a personal guarantee from Machiavelli that he would buy you a jug of wine if it failed to make you laugh.
Best business books
1. Right Kind of Wrong, by Amy Edmondson
A younger, snarkier version of me had a disgust reflex whenever I heard the axiom: “failure is not an option”. Well of course it’s not, I would mutter, it’s an outcome.
The Right Kind of Wrong won the FT Business Book of the Year against a strong field and is the first general business book to take the prize. It works with a very simple but difficult problem: why is it so hard for us to admit and learn from failure? Edmondson offers an alternative to the blind flailing of “move fast and break things”, by creating useful definitions of failure types and advising on how to have intelligent failures.
Edmondson is a force for good in the workplace. She developed the concept of psychological safety in teams and proved that those that had it outperformed those that didn’t. It shouldn’t be a surprise that without the fear and paranoia of narcissists and idiot leaders pumped up on ideas of “Alpha-ness” and Jordan Peterson-adjacent podcasts, people are happier, and they do better work.
This is a straightforward and essential read.
2. Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson
This book delivered returns on the reader’s interest in several ways. First, Musk-the-early-years is a rollicking yarn, and Isaacson is a good storyteller. That gets you about halfway through the 600+ pages.
Second, we get business book insights into Musk and his team’s approach to industrial design and scaling production that are valuable and inspiring. Musk’s “The Algorithm” set of rules roots out assumptions and redundancies that creep in via the inherent bureaucracy of large engineering projects (giant space rockets, fast mass production of cars etc.).
Last, we get the Gothic tragedy of Musk’s spiralling mental health. This is disturbing, but does give context to the frequent annoying background screeches that are news stories about new ways in which he has been an awful human being. That context can be calming: it takes the sting of shock out. Having read the book, you’re up to speed. This is the trajectory he is on, he’s done and may do some amazing things, but he may just not be very nice.
3. Writing For Busy Readers, by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink
This is the first of two books about writing more concisely on this list. And as soon as I start writing this sentence I’m away of why these books are so useful to me. Because I am NOT very concise. Advice to be concise and think of the reader’s attention is not news, but Writing For Busy Readers wins and holds your attention by giving you extensive and often surprising data to support the idea that less is a lot, lot more.
It’s also the first book whose message has been near-perfectly adapted into a generative AI app. On its website you can paste a bunch of text (I think it’s designed for emails) and it will convert it using the books advice (and ChatGPT 4).
4. Smart Brevity, by Roy Schwartz, Mike Allen, and Jim VandeHei
“Never in the history of humanity have we vomited more words in more places with more velocity.”
Top marks for a killer first line.
This is basically the style guide and manifesto for a group of newsletters called Axios in the US. The set of rules is about reducing stories down to the bare minimum the reader needs and then expanding slightly from there. With emojis. I enjoyed it as another reminder about the importance of writing for the reader and not yourself (does not apply to this newsletter, as we have discussed previously).
The authors or their company must have annoyed a lot of other journalists, because the reviews were utterly scathing. I include them here, because I enjoyed them possibly more than the book (which was merely very useful):
Clare Molone in the New Yorker said:
“Smart Brevity” is essentially a book about how to write a good e-mail. (And honestly it probably could have been a long e-mail.) It’s the sort of book you might give to a recent college graduate headed into corporate America, along with a pair of pearl earrings and a silk hankie for stairwell crying.
Colin Dickey in The New Republic said:
Smart Brevity is a bad book. And... VandeHei, Allen, and Schwartz have given us a book that, like weight loss books, presents an age-old problem as though no one’s ever thought to confront it before, then offers a series of clichéd solutions as some sort of novel life hack.
Barton Swaim in the Wall Street Journal dropped a couple of zingers in his review:
Maybe the Axios style is the future of written communication. If so, please kill me.
And...
It’s a fine way to read if you want to go insane.
Well, that seems like a good note with which to sign off on a year of reading.
I hope there’s a book or two on this list that appealed to you.
Normal(ish) Antonym will return soon.
Antony