Books I Read (and Loved) in Winter 2023
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S.A.D. rears its ugly head again, but the holiday spirit and anticipation of a visit with a dear friend are making things much, much easier than they would be otherwise. I’ve been somewhat cocooned since the end of summer due to surgery, recovery, holiday planning, work, and sorting through some major life changes. More on some of that later, but for now, I want to focus on one of the things that’s brought me a ton of joy: books. Are you surprised?
I nearly always hit a winter reading slump, and 2023 was no different—but a handful of books kept me excited, engaged, and interested despite the sun going down so early. (So early. Daylight Savings Time is a fraud.)
These are my favorite reads from the last few months.
It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful
Read for The Nonbinarian Book Club, this exploration of the AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury and its relationship to ACT UP is stunning. I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author and came away feeling equal parts grateful, enraged, and full of grief. Each time I read about the AIDS crisis, I learn something new and I mourn. Here, Lowery does a masterful job describing the protest art made by Gran Fury, explaining its impact, and exploring how and why art is such an integral piece of any fight for justice. A tough, but necessary read that I’ll be thinking about for a long, long time.
Last Night At the Telegraph Club
High school senior Lily Hu is secretly obsessed with a local “male impersonator,” and when her classmate Kathleen Miller finds out, things go a much different direction than Lily expects. She starts sneaking out of her family’s Chinatown apartment at night to visit the lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club with Kathleen, where she discovers a whole new culture and—just for a while—can escape the fear of being a queer person of color whose father is at risk of deportation because of Red Scare paranoia.
Last Night At the Telegraph Club is queer, historical fiction at its finest. Author Malinda Lo writes at a breakneck speed but always takes time to invest in the characters and what they’re feeling and experiencing, creating an ultra-rich reading experience that’s both atmospheric and evocative. I completely understand the buzz surrounding this multi-award-winning book. It’s beautiful.
Lucky Red
Read for The Nonbinarian Book Club, this queer western is a sultry, adventurous little dream. After Bridget’s father dies during their pilgrimage west, she leaves behind his memory and takes up residence at the only woman-owned brothel in Dodge City, Kansas, where she draws the affection of both a sheriff’s deputy and a notorious lady bounty hunter. Bridget learns a lot about herself at the Buffalo Queen, then takes up her true calling as a vengeful gunslinger.
Claudia Cravens’s debut novel is fantastic. It’s a well-paced, high-stakes romp through the American West that upends many of the genre’s worst tropes and positions itself as one of the best fiction releases of 2023.
Roaming
Childhood friends Dani and Zoe take a spring break trip to New York City during their freshman year of college, and it goes spectacularly sideways when Dani brings along her friend Fiona, who spends the majority of the trip hooking up with Zoe. Their hostel room is cramped and their communication is terrible, forcing each of them to reckon with who they are right now.
I named Roaming the #2 graphic novel of 2023 for The Mary Sue because reading it felt like a full-scale return to my college years—if only I had sooner realized I was a lesbian. The Tamaki cousins work brilliantly together and their writing flows flawlessly with Jillian’s illustrations. This creative team has yet to lead me astray and I am continuously blown away by their work.
The Talk
When Darrin Bell was six years old, he asked his mom for a water gun and she said no. Then she explained that, for Black boys like him, existing is a risk. That conversation has impacted how Bell has moved through the world ever since.
I named The Talk the #1 graphic novel of 2023 for The Mary Sue because of how it examines anti-Blackness and police violence. It’s one of Bell’s sharpest and best works to date, and it should be on everyone’s shelves.
The Woman in Me
Britney Spears has been in the limelight since she was a child, and I’ve been a fan since I was just a child myself. Although she’s always been a subject of tabloid headlines, hearing her account of her life as read by Michelle Williams is brutal. This memoir not only examines how Spears became famous and the various relationships she formed through her role as an international pop superstar, but how her partners and family took advantage of her throughout her career, especially when she was at her most vulnerable.
The details of her conservatorship, her relationships, and her struggles with mental health are startling at best. This book surprised me in every meaning of the word, and I highly, highly recommend it—with the caveat that you may need to take several breaks.
Yellowface
When literary darling Athena Liu dies in a freak accident and her old friend June Hayward is the only witness, it breaks June—but her response to the tragedy is decidedly unhinged. Unable to make a publishing breakthrough with her own work, June steals Athena’s unfinished manuscript for her next novel and passes it off as her own, which works… for a while. But when the Internet begins picking her apart for writing about Asian history as a white woman, things quickly spiral out of June’s control (if she ever had that to begin with).
This book is phenomenal. Suspensful, grotesque, painful, engrossing, and deeply, deeply disturbing. R.F. Kuang uses social media to frame the story in a way that feels as breakneck and back-and-forth as an actual feed, and her writing is hyper-detailed and incomparably good. White creators get away with far too much, and this novel—though fictional—bites at the heels of enablers and perpetrators alike.
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