I look forward to this thread every year and yet I'm really late to it. I've had holiday company for the past two weeks (leaving tomorrow) and I was reading a couple of books that had "ten best" possibilities, but once the jollity started I wasn't able to finish them. So here's how it fell out:
Nonfiction- The Broken House: Growing Up Under Hitler
- Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History
- Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern
- A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life, The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 3
- Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin
Fiction- The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth)
- Uncle Dynamite (P.G. Wodehouse)
- Irretrievable (Theodor Fontane)
- Diana Tempest (Mary Cholmondeley)
- The Fortnight in September (R.C. Sherriff)
I usually try to discern a few themes or commonalities, but it beats the heck out of me this year. Two nonfiction books set in wartime Berlin (different wars). The fiction's all dated; the Wodehouse is the most recent at 1948, a mere 75 years ago. Only one of the authors is/was American by birth (Belinda Davis,
Home Fires Burning), although two were naturalized (Merton and Wodehouse).
Overall, I didn't like most of the books published in 2023 that I read. A couple were dnfs; others were a weak two stars. Two exceptions were Claire North's
House of Odysseus and the Anna May Wong bio that made my ten-best list. The North book was also an exception to the mostly terrible retellings of classical myths that I read/abandoned this past year. It's a concept I love but the execution tends to stink. IMO, of course.
The book I'm most looking forward to this year is published today,
Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth by Natalie Haynes. I love her nonfiction, dislike her fictionalized myths.