It is possible that by writing this in February 2024 I am already towing the perilous line of Wrongness that comes with a new year, where looking back at the past feels like a faux pas at best and kind of weirdly depressing at worst: everyone has already posted their previous year wrap-ups over the last two to three month; the ball has dropped. Time to move on!
But 2023 was a great reading year for me (as surviving another year where I was able to keep reading almost always is), and I’d actually been really excited to post my own wrap-up throughout December, until the end of December actually came and I choked. I think I feel a particular paranoia about posting my “best of” or “favorite” anything bookwise on my social media now, now that I know how much it can inadvertently hurt to be left out of those lists, especially when they’re compiled by another writer or reviewer you like or admire.
And so here I return to my humble blog, which I suppose still exists for moments just like these: when I don’t want to post on social media, or send something in a newsletter, but write something semi-public for myself…somewhere.
So without further ado, here are some things I’ve been reflecting on about my favorite 2023 reads.
- Falling in Love with New York: Some of my most favorite reads of the year, that stayed in my memory longest after finishing the last page, were ones that made me fall in love with New York just as hard as I fell in love with the characters. Or, perhaps more accurately, ones where the characters being young and in love in New York was such an essential part of the story. I have a bit in How You Get the Girl about being nostalgic for New York even without having ever actually lived there, and these books filled that ache so perfectly for me, one of my favorite aches to feel (as someone who has almost moved to New York several times but never actually done it). Specifically, two debuts: Clare Gilmore’s Love Interest and Becca Freeman’s The Christmas Orphans Club captured being young in Manhattan so very acutely, while Cara Bastone’s Ready or Not (a 2024 release) placed me directly inside of Brooklyn. (There is a description of the stoop of her apartment in particular that almost made me scream it was so accurate.)
- Actually reading some of my Book of the Month books?? I know, this still sounds fake to me, but after beginning to subscribe in 2022, all of those huge pretty hardcovers had just…….sat around on my floor and in my bookshelves for a year, but in 2023 I actually picked some of those suckers up, feeling prouder than I have ever felt every time. Granted, I still have a crap-ton of them I haven’t read, but the ones I did read this year were all winners and were also, importantly, some of the more diverse reads I finished this year. In other words: I should read more of my BOTM books. (And more books outside my comfortable wheelhouse in general.)
Some of the ones I enjoyed most were Sarah Addison Allen’s Other Birds, Liana de la Rosa’s Ana Maria and the Fox, Zoulfa Katouh’s harrowing and beautiful As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow, and Isabel Cañas’s incomparable Vampires of El Norte. I also got to read one pick early and write the BOTM recommendation for it: Stars in Your Eyes by Kacen Callender, another special experience for me this year.
- Comforts from Old Faves. As the year went on, I started sorting my reading in my head into two buckets: new-to-me-authors, and old faves. The large majority of my reading this year was from new-to-me-authors, but some of the ones I squeezed in from old faves REALLY hit. In particular, absolutely inhaling KJ Charles’s Society of Gentlemen series early in the year was just *finds something soft to aggressively squeeze* OOMPH. Mind altering. FUCK.
I also made my way through Joanna Shupe’s latest series, The Fifth Avenue Rebels, over the spring and summer, and each one was just an absolute delight. And then there were the entries from true old faves, perhaps the three authors who most got me into romance, whose work I feel a strong personal connection with: Alexis Hall, Tessa Dare, and Cat Sebastian. I probably don’t need to say much about We Could Be So Good (other than on a sentence-level writing perspective it made me want to weep). For Hall, while I had like 21093 books to choose from, the one that really got me this year was Something Fabulous, which I had heard (from others and Hall himself) was quite silly, and it definitely fit that descriptor when I was in need of some silliness (in a way that could possibly drive anyone not into Hall’s specific type of silliness batty, but I loved every moment), but what made me happiest was how deeply sweet and loving it also was, perhaps one of the most classically Hall things I’ve read from him in a while. (I also read Husband Material this year, and while I did enjoy returning to Luc and Oliver, I had slightly more quibbles with it, although not the main quibble a lot of folks had.)
Anyway! I also picked up A Week to Be Wicked from Dare, as I still have not yet read all of the Spindle Cove books and it’s my (very slow) mission to wrong that right, and what a winner it was. Perhaps my favorite road trip histrom ever. (Although I also read another comfort from an old fave, Sarah MacLean’s Heartbreaker, this year, and that could very well take the second place spot in that category!)
- YA that blew me away: I truly did not read a lot of YA and MG this year, but a lot of what I was able to fit in really knocked my socks off. Is “knocked my socks off” a phrase people use anymore? I had a sudden flashback to 1996 when it just came out of my keyboard.
Anyway, most monumentally, I’m referencing Jonny Garza Villa’s Ander and Santi Were Here, which, if pressured to name my number one book of the year, this one probably remains it. What Villa is able to accomplish here—a book so queer and so funny and so real and warm and heartbreaking and hopeful all at once? A book about young love but also family and community, that investigates both immigration and art and…so many things? Honestly, it’s just a real masterpiece to me. I love Santi so much it hurts.
I was also knocked flat by the talent of Ellen O’Clover in her debut, Seven Percent of Ro Devereux. That level of angsty romance? Combined with that level of clever plot? And beautiful writing? Like okay!! Damn! I also really loved the writing (and the whole painfully honest vibes) of Aaron Aceves’s This Is Why They Hate Us. Also overlapping with the comforts-from-old-faves category, I fully loved Rachel Lynn Solomon’s See You Yesterday so much (which, like Ander & Santi, is pretty solidly New Adult). And I had the absolute pleasure of reading Kaitlyn Hill’s upcoming 2024 release, Wild About You, which was hands down my favorite of hers yet. Like all of Hill’s writing, so so funny but also so heart-warmingly charming and smart.
Other really strong honorable mentions: Edward Underhill’s Always the Almost and Mason Deaver’s The Feeling of Falling in Love—both wonderfully, complicatedly trans; both captured my heart in the painfully honest ways that teens can be their own worst enemies (but still somehow find messy love along the way).
AND last but not least I really loved the nostalgic-yet-new experience of getting to return to the Rick Riordanverse with Nico and Will in The Sun and the Star. And in the same vein of fantasy-adventure-slightly-scary-for-Anita genres, I loved diving back into Vanessa Len’s brilliant, dark world in Never a Hero. Huh, okay, apparently I had a lot more to say about YA and MG this year than I thought.
- SPORTS!: I was blessed to have more opportunities to feel my favorite feeling—being wrecked by KD Casey‘s writing, most notably this year via Diamond Ring. I was also so pleased to find a new writer whose writing hits me in a similar way to Casey’s in Ari Baran, although I really can’t tell you if I loved Game Misconduct or Delay of Game more.
I also got to read Alicia Thompson‘s upcoming The Art of Catching Feelings, resulting in me having Feelings anytime I now hear Fastball’s “The Way,” and got to re-read KT Hoffman’s The Prospects for a blurb, which I have too many feelings about to include here. But essentially, every book in this category: a blessing.
- Blurbed: I was about to make a last section of more new-to-me standouts, but it occurred to me that a lot of the ones I haven’t mentioned yet are ones I got to blurb, so I’ll just include the rest of my blurb list here to commemorate both the books and the work that I did to find the right words for them (even if they’re not ALL from new-to-me folks…wowzers, how convoluted can I make this for myself! Good thing only like ten people will ever read this!):
Alicia Thompson’s With Love, from Cold World (technically read in 2022 but I think I blurbed in 2023 and either way I loved it all year so it gets included here!), Rachel Runya Katz’s Thank You for Sharing, Dominic Lim’s All the Right Notes (which also gave me the fun little milestone of having my blurb on the cover of a book!), M.A. Wardell’s Mistletoe & Mishigas, Ashley Herring Blake’s Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date, Helena Greer’s For Never and Always, Christen Randall’s The No Girlfriend Rule (YA, 2024), Sarah T. Dubbs’s Birding with Benefits (2024), Mae Bennett’s Barely Even Friends (2024), Shelly Jay Shore’s Rules for Ghosting (2024), Amy Spalding’s At Her Service (2024), and Melissa Wiesner’s The Second Chance Year.
- #23for23: Attending Steamy Lit Con in the middle of 2023 gave me a good kick in the pants to realize that I had really dropped off in paying attention to the diversity of my reading, and I remain so grateful both for the experience of attending the con and for this lesson in particular. To be brutally honest here, while I really tried to make sure I was reading diversely in the second half of the year post-Steamy Lit, by 2023’s end, I still fell a couple books short of the VERY reasonable goal of reading 23 books by people of color about people of color. Largely because I had been so complacent about reading with purpose in the beginning half of the year, which made my reading life skew very white. Experience has taught me that when I’m left to my own devices, because of my privilege and the overwhelming white supremacy of the publishing industry, what I fall on for comfort reading will be white leaning unless I force myself to do better. #23for23 was just one poignant reminder of that.
I’m hoping to read more diversely as a whole in 2024, not just in terms of reading outside my personal experiences but also in reading more outside my most comfortable genres.
I know there are so many standouts I’ve somehow missed that are already running through my mind (Jacqueline Firkins’s The Predictable Heartbreaks of Imogen Finch, Steven Rowley’s The Celebrants, Erin Langston’s Forever Your Rogue, Angelina Lopez’s After Hours on Milagro Street, Regina Black’s The Art of Scandal, Ava Wilder’s Will They or Won’t They...) BUT for my own well-being, it’s time I cut myself off now.
Truly, though: 2023 was a bit of a tumultuous year writing wise, which makes the fact that it was such a meaningful reading year all the sweeter. Thank you, writers, for what you do. ❤
Anita Kelly 