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Biblioracle: My Favorite Nonfiction Of 2023 Includes Some Old Friends And My Pick For Best Book Of The Year

Hannah Pittard's "We Are Too Many: A Memoir (Kind Of)," "World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music" by Jeff Tweedy and "The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight" by Andrew Leland were among my favorite nonfiction books of 2023. (Henry Holt and Co. / Dutton / Penguin Press)

Somehow, we have reached (almost) the end of another year, which means it's time for my annual Biblioracle Book Awards, an entirely idiosyncratic exercise meant to highlight some of the most interesting and memorable books I read this year that were published 2023.

Are these the "best" books of the year? Let me put it this way, they were the best for me in the award categories I assign to each book. If those categories sound good, they may be the best for you too.

This week, I'll tackle nonfiction. Next week, fiction. After that, it's on to 2024.

Best Blend of Memoir, History, and Cultural Commentary Book of the Year: "The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight" by Andrew Leland is centered on the story of Leland's progressive loss of his eyesight to a degenerative disease, but Leland uses his experience as a jumping-off point for ranging explorations of what it means to be both sighted and blind in the world. You'll never see things quite the same way after reading this book. (Pun intended.)

Hello Old Friend Book of the Year: OK, Jeff Tweedy and I are not friends, but having now read his third work of nonfiction, "World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music" following reading his previous two books (a memoir and 2020′s "How to Write One Song") I feel like we are, because as usual he writes with a winning casualness and intimacy, and it feels like hanging out with a friend. In this book, he walks us through the most meaningful songs in his life. Make sure to read with headphones and your streaming service handy.

Hello Older Friends Book of the Year: I was not friends with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert either, but growing up in Chicago and seeing them on my screen every week since my childhood always made me feel like they were my guys, even as they became international sensations. Matt Singer's "Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever" is an enjoyable romp through the shared history and influence of two legendary Chicagoans.

Huh, I Hadn't Thought of it That Way Book of the Year: I like to think that I'm something of a comedy aficionado, but I've got nothing on Jesse David Fox, author of "Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture — and the Magic That Makes It Work." The book works as both a chronicle, moving from Seinfeld forward through time, and a critical study of comedy that reveals the way comedy is a reflection of its times, and what we see when we look closely at that reflection.

Indulging my Education Nerd Side Book of the Year: I don't teach regularly anymore, but I still keep abreast of what's going on for the sake of my own writing on education, and this year, the most intriguing book was "Off the Mark: How Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don't Have To)" by Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt. I knew firsthand that the system of grades wasn't doing my students any favors if the goal was maximizing learning. Schneider and Hutt, two professors of education, go deep on the history and practice of grading to try to find a way through that helps students without being too disruptive.

Just Read This Already Book of the Year: At my free newsletter, The Biblioracle Recommends (biblioracle.Substack.Com) I went ahead and called Hannah Pittard's "We Are Too Many: A Memoir (Kind Of)" the best book of the year. I won't repeat myself other than to say I meant it.

John Warner is the author of "Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities."

Twitter @biblioracle

Book recommendations from the Biblioracle

John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read.

1. "Grief Is the Thing with Feathers" by Max Porter

2. "Tender Is the Flesh" by Agustina Bazterrica

3. "Lust & Wonder" Augusten Burroughs

4. "A Calling for Charlie Barnes" by Joshua Ferris

5. "I Suck at Girls" by Justin Halpern

— Rich Trout, Hobbs, New Mexico

Since Rich is a fan of the humorous personal narrative, I'm recommending a writer whose work I recently reconnected with who I'm not going to forget again, "Foreskin's Lament" by Shalom Auslander.

1. "The Running Grave" by Robert Galbraith

2. "The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig

3. "Romantic Comedy" by Curtis Sittenfeld

4. "Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing" by Matthew Perry

5. "All the Dangerous Things" by Stacy Willingham

— Bob L., Cape Cod, Massachusetts

For Bob, I'm feeling a nice Anne Tyler breath of air. Let's go with "A Spool of Blue Thread."

1. "The Covenant of Water" by Abraham Verghese

2. "The Marriage Portrait" by Maggie O'Farrell

3. "Ordinary Grace" by William Kent Krueger

4. "Bitter Orange" by Claire Fuller

5. "The Salt Path" by Raynor Winn

— Kathleen F., Michiana Shores, Indiana

I think Ruth Ozeki's "A Tale for the Time Being" has both the scope and intimacy that works well for Kathleen.

Get a reading from the Biblioracle

Send a list of the last five books you've read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.Com.

7 Inspiring Books For Kids This Summer, Chosen By Kids Aged 11-12

Kids aged five to 14 read less in their spare time than they did four years ago, according to a recent study – but a healthy 72.4% still like to read.

How can we encourage children to keep reading?

Supporting kids to choose what they read is crucial to reading motivation. My research explores how reading books they feel personally connected to, with characters they can empathise with and relate to, can help them become more motivated readers.

And there are some simple things you can do to encourage and support your kids' reading choices.

You can make time to visit a local library or bookshop (which might be a secondhand bookshop, or the books section of your local op-shop).

You can provide your kids with websites or catalogues they can browse and let them choose from them.

And you can stay open to books in accessible formats, like graphic texts, digital books and audiobooks – available for free from most libraries – which are crucial in supporting diverse reading needs.

In the spirit of celebrating choice, here are some summer reading recommendations from kids aged 11 and 12, who belong to a book club I run. I asked them each to review an inspiring book they'd chosen for themselves – whether they borrowed it from a library or a friend, or asked someone to buy it for them.

Their recommendations reflect their interest in diverse representations, inspirational role models and accessible reading formats.

Read more: 6 non-fiction reads for kids this summer, recommended by kids aged 9 to 11

1. Not Here to Make You Comfortable: 50 Women Who Stand Up, Speak Out, Inspire Change

Not Here to Make You Comfortable (Penguin Random House) is an awesome book that tells the stories of 50 incredible women who have fought for what they believe in.

It is full of inspiring stories about women who have made a difference in the world, including fighting for equal rights and showing people that your body isn't gross at all. I learned so much about these amazing women and their accomplishments.

I was especially inspired by the stories of Taylor Swift, who wasn't afraid to claim what was hers, Celeste Barber, who shows women how to be proud of their bodies, and neurodivergent actor, author, and podcaster Chloe Hayden, who wrote a book about how being different is a superpower.

I highly recommend this book to any girl or boy who wants to make a difference in the world.

– Chloe, 12

2. My Journey to the World Cup by Sam Kerr

My Journey to the World Cup is about Sam's achievements and how she got into the amazing sport of soccer. This non-fiction book has different parts: Sam's stories, lots of photos, interviews with Sam and teammates, fact sheets and statistics.

Sam talks about playing for local, national, and international clubs and for Australia – and how she felt when she played. The book aims to inspire readers and motivate them to do the things they love and to always try their best. It motivates me to know other people feel the way I do about the value of teamwork.

This book would appeal to many readers, including people who play a sport, who like watching the Matildas, or who are interested in Sam Kerr. The book is written for readers of my age and older.

– Darcy, 12

3. The Amazing Edie Eckhart by Rosie Jones

Edie Eckhart is an 11-year-old girl who has cerebral palsy. The Amazing Edie Eckhart, written by Rosie Jones, a comedian with cerebral palsy, is about Edie starting high school.

She has a best friend named Oscar, who has been with her since day one. Everything is exciting until Edie is put in a different class to Oscar. Now she cannot rely on him to help her all the time. She has to figure out how to be independent on her own. Edie thinks she is not good enough and will never be like the others. But the moral of the story is that her slower talking and different way of walking does not stop her from achieving success.

This book is funny, warm, and heartfelt. This book is aimed at young readers, to teach them that even disabilities cannot stop you from reaching your dreams.

– Arly, 11

4. The Boy From Boomerang Crescent by Eddie Betts

The Boy from Boomerang Crescent (Eddie Betts, Simon & Schuster) is about Eddie's life before, during and after football.

Eddie grew up in Kalgoorlie and Port Lincoln. He shares stories about his large family and playing with his brothers and cousins. Throughout his whole career, he was raising his own children, which shows how important family is to him.

Eddie talks about starting and ending his football career at Carlton, as well as his time at the Crows and their infamous camp. He talks about his coaches and how they influenced him, and the impact of the death of former Crows coach Phil Walsh.

I was inspired by Eddie Betts, as he wasn't drafted in the first draft and joined mid-year, when he was very unfit. He could have given up, but he put a lot of work in. He didn't come from the richest family, so had to work harder than most. The book would appeal to AFL fans, sport fans, people interested in stories of overcoming challenges and people who like reading biographies.

– Asher, 12

5. Dragon Skin by Karen Foxlee

Dragon Skin is about a girl called Pip who finds a baby dragon. She finds it at a waterhole and takes it home to save it. The dragon scratches her and she knows it has given her access to something special. Two other people help her save the dragon, and the cut on her hand opens a portal the dragon flies into.

Meanwhile, her mother has met a guy, and they are dating and living together. He verbally abuses them, but eventually they can get away from him.

This book intrigued me because it had more mature themes and an essence of magic to it. The main character, Pip, inspired me because although she was being verbally abused, she still had the strength and bravery to save a dragon. She also convinced her mum to escape her abusive partner Matt, and she made new friends.

I recommend this book for ages 9-13 years old.

– Sienna, 12

6. We are Wolves by Katrina Nannestead

We Are Wolves is set in the second world war and told from the perspective of a German family. The father must go to war and the rest of the family is forced to evacuate. However, as they are evacuating, the three children get separated from their mother and grandparents. These three children are named Leisl, Otto and Mia. This book is about their survival on their own in a war-struck country.

I found this book interesting because when we learn about wars, we are only ever taught about what happens on the battlefield. We are never taught about what is happening to people who live in these places and are affected and suffer from the consequences of war. I found the main characters very inspiring.

Overall, I found this book amazing. It had a beautiful storyline that kept me hooked.

– Molly, 12

7. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Big Shot by Jeff Kinney

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Big Shot is about a boy named Greg, who is trying out for a basketball team because his mum said he had to try. Greg had already tried out for soccer before, in kindergarten, but he quit – knowing he was terrible!

Greg makes a team and when they start playing, they learn a lot about being a team and being the underdog. Playing is very hard for them and the book is very funny. Greg's mum wants to teach him playing sports is good for you, no matter if you lose.

This book would appeal to young children who enjoy stories about young people's lives and who like reading funny books. I found this book easy to read because of the illustrations.

– Daisy, 11

The 10 Best Books Of 2023

This was a year in which the writers I loved most not only helped me escape the everyday but explored escape as a theme. Though I read wonderful books this year about family, about cults, and even about parking, my favorite books of 2023 thought deeply about what it means to set your sights on finding a new future for yourself—or what happens when you discover that a new future has, unexpectedly, opened itself up to you.

Pet by Catherine Chidgey

It's 1984 in Wellington, New Zealand, and 12-year-old Justine has a glamorous new teacher, Mrs. Price. Mrs. Price is beautiful. She drives a Corvette with the steering wheel on the American side. Her family is tragically dead. And she rules over the children of Justine's middle-school classroom, picking favorites and unveiling the secrets of the adult world to them. "We would have done anything for her," Justine remembers, 30 years later, and this sharp-edged, deliciously dark novel explores just what a group of besotted 12-year-olds might do for a teacher they love—and what Justine does when she learns Mrs. Price isn't everything she thought she was.

By Catherine Chidgey. Europa Editions.

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The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

A survival story that's also a cosmic adventure and a corrective to colonial "captivity narratives," The Vaster Wilds has a lot on its mind, which is what makes it so astonishing that it's also ceaselessly entertaining. A young woman steals out from Colonial Jamestown in the "starving time" of winter 1610, fleeing the horror inside the settlement for the teeming wilderness outside. Surviving on squirrels, duck eggs, and her own determination, the girl gives us a lens into an entirely different way of viewing the world, and Groff's relentless narrative voice is as interested in the state of her heroine's soul as the fate of her earthly body. In this magnificent novel, Groff sets herself a nearly impossible writing challenge, then clears the bar with ease and élan. Read an interview with Groff in Slate.

By Lauren Groff. Riverhead.

Laura Miller The 10 Best Books of 2023, According Slate's Book Critic Read More

Mobility by Lydia Kiesling

An ingenious answer to the oft-asked question, How do you write about these dire times? Kiesling, an occasional Slate contributor, answers simply: You write about the people who, like all of us, are responsible in large and small ways for our dimming, sputtering futures. Mobility travels from the 1990s to the middle of the 21st century, following one woman's life and career in the fossil fuel industry. Kiesling, one of our sharpest commentators on modern family life, is acutely aware of the ways in which readers will be eager to judge her likeable, unusual heroine, and it's impossible to read this novel of an average person doing averagely terrible things without thinking about your own impact on your parents, your lovers, and your world. This darkly funny novel reset my thinking on art in the Anthropocene.

By Lydia Kiesling. Crooked Media Reads.

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

When Ester is 13, she witnesses her family, everything she knows and loves, torn apart by a manticore, one of the vicious monsters that stalk the far reaches of the Kingdom of Dartha. This short, propulsive fantasy fable is driven by Ester's thirst for revenge, as she joins the kingdom's cadre of ruhkers, the men and women who train enormous soaring birds called rocs to hunt and kill manticores. Will Ester bond with her fledgling roc, Zahra? Will she find love with a fellow ruhker? Exciting, bloody, and sneakily profound, Untethered Sky is a winning, single-serving adventure perfect for an afternoon's escape.

Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter

In 2021, Hilary Leichter won a National Magazine Award for a clever story in Harper's magazine about a young couple, trapped in a tiny city apartment, who discover a magical terrace hidden in their closet. The terrace only appears when their friend Stephanie visits, and so the couple—and their baby—become enmeshed in Stephanie's life, so desperate are they for the bucolic space the mysterious terrace offers, and the different path it represents. In Terrace Story, Leichter expands on that short story, opening new vistas as unexpected and magical as the sunset-lit terrace off Annie and Edward's living room. The result is a novel that explores longing and frustration like no other book I read this year, mapping emotional and physical worlds that readers will find heartbreakingly familiar yet thrillingly unusual.

By Hilary Leichter. Ecco.

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

A collection of reconceived fairy tales that hums with dark energy, invention, and love, White Cat, Black Dog dazzles with every story. As you read about cats who run a marijuana farm or a man rescuing his husband from the Queen of Hell, you will think, There is no way the next story can top this one, but Link wisely saves the most unsettling, wondrous story for last. In "Skinder's Veil," a graduate student gets a great housesitting gig in the nick of time, in a lovely cottage nestled deep in the Vermont woods. The only hitch, his host tells him, is that he must never, ever, admit any guest through the house's front door. I won't reveal what happens, but will only say that no one and nothing in this story are exactly what we think they are—they're far, far more interesting. Read a review in Slate.

By Kelly Link. Random House.

The Picnic by Matthew Longo

On Aug. 19, 1989, a group of idealistic Hungarian dissidents organized a picnic in a field in Sopronpuszta, near the country's border with Austria. Hungary's government was making the tiniest of gestures toward breaking with Moscow and the other Warsaw Pact countries, and these young people wanted to push farther. Much to everyone's surprise, hundreds, maybe thousands, of East Germans showed up and rushed the border, tearing the first hole in the Iron Curtain and setting off the chain of events that would lead to the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Historian Longo's well-reported book focuses on the summer when everything changed in Europe, but finds the suspense and humanity in his world-shaking story—after all, the families who camped out in Hungarian fields, yearning for escape, didn't know how their tales would end. A terrific work of history that also becomes a meditation on what freedom means and how tyrannies fall, The Picnic adopts and explicates a wry Hungarian proverb: "The future is certain. It's the past that keeps changing."

By Matthew Longo. Norton.

Quantum Criminals by Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay

Yes, unless you already really like the music of Steely Dan, you are unlikely to get the most out of this book, in which artist LeMay paints glorious portraits of the drunks, creeps, weirdos, and misguided romantics populating Steely Dan songs, and music writer Pappademas tells the tale of a band that was popular but misunderstood in their time, widely despised by the critical establishment for decades, and then reborn as the patron saints of cool, neurotic perfection. But Quantum Criminals is such an unusual, funny, and creative work of criticism that it should inspire anyone who loves pop music but feels tired of the forms into which the market hems writers who want to tell its stories. "We are all Steely Dan characters now," Pappademas writes, "longing for the unrecapturable past and mourning for bright sci-fi futures we won't ever get to see." Read an excerpt in Slate.

By Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay. University of Texas Press.

Lost Places by Sarah Pinker

How to explain what's so graceful about this collection of fantasy stories by the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning Pinsker? She finds unusual new forms to tell tales about our modern world and its interactions with the uncanny, from a story told entirely through the comments on a Wiki about a traditional English folk song to a story whose drama builds through a series of status updates in a sinister senior-living center's management system. In one story, explorations into a cable-access children's show from the early 1980s open a window onto family grief and a town's decades-old secrets. In another, a painter experiencing cognitive decline must puzzle out the mystery of the retrospective exhibition she didn't know she was planning. Every story is surprising, delightful, and very human, and left me excited to read more from this writer, who is both finely attuned to the language and rituals of modern life and in touch with some real deep-magic weirdness.

By Sarah Pinsker. Small Beer Press.

By Lore Segal. Melville House.

Ladies' Lunch by Lore Segal

This slim collection of stories by the 95-year-old writer Lore Segal is sly, dry, and very funny on its chosen subject, the ultimate escape. The ladies have been lunching for four decades now, rotating from apartment to apartment in New York City, discussing books and music and life, but these days each visit and gossip session seems touched by the ghosts of the past and the specter of the future. Segal writes with welcome clarity about life's final years, and if her characters are not always as wise as they think they are, Segal eyes them all with the unsentimental wisdom of a life spent writing wondrous stories and essays, a career spent telling the truth.

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