2023 Reading List

New year, new reads.

1. Reluctantly Home by Imogen Clark. “Bottling things up is no way to carry on.”
2. Every Summer After by Carley Fortune. “The way I felt about you was always so clear to me–even when we were young I knew you and I were meant for each other.”
3. How to Stop Time by Matt Haig. “Montaigne himself was also in the room. ‘He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.'”
4. Through Darkening Glass by R. S. Maxwell. “I think we should occasionally be haunted by those ills that we create ourselves–for when we peer into strange and darkening windows, we see not monsters, but often our own reflection.”
5. An Unfinished Story by Boo Walker. “The only way to learn to live is by crashing hard a few times.”
6. Great House by Nicole Krauss. “Terrible things befall people, but not all are destroyed. Why is it that the same thing that destroys one does not destroy another? There is the question of will–some inalienable right, the right of interpretation, remains.”
7. The Tree of Knowledge by Daniel G. Miller. “When I see how rich this country is, and then I walk around the city and see all the homeless people, or drive on the roads that feel like they’re going to break at the seams, I’m embarrassed.”
8. The Way We Weren’t by Phoebe Fox. “Who knew what swam under the surface of any relationship, waiting to pull you down unexpectedly?”
9. From Doon with Death by Ruth Rendell. “‘The usual things, I suppose, shopping and the house. You know the sort of things women do.” He paused, then said suddenly: “Look, she wouldn’t kill herself. Don’t get any ideas like that.'”
10. Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis. “In the darkness and silence of his living room, with a cool glass of melting ice and whiskey in his hand, DeMarco wondered if he was trying to apply reason to a situation where reason did not exist.”
11. Aria by Nazanine Hozar. “She would think about how Mana had shared her heartache, and would realize that it was a lie to say you have no regrets, that in fact, most of life was filled with regret, and at road’s end you might well feel that things would be much better if all your former acts disappeared. Yet despite midnight please to gods or deities, nothing could ever be changed.”
12. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. “And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do.”
13. The Radleys by Matt Haig. “We have to learn that the things we desire are very often the things which could lead to our own self-destruction.”
14. Runaway Groomsman by Meghan Quinn. “Sometimes when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, what you’ve really hit is the foundation for the next chapter in your life.”
15. The Given Day by Dennis Lahane. “Steve put a hand on his arm. ‘Coughlin, I love ya, but there’s not always ‘some way.’ Most people fall? No net. None. We just go off. Where? Steve was quiet for a bit. He looked out the window. He pursed his lips. Where the people with no nets end up. That place.”
16. We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz. “Because we’re three-dimensional creatures, stuck on a one-way timeline unable to redo the past.”
17. The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff. “She ignored the unintended offensiveness of his remark.”
18. Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri. “This was when we were in communion; when we stopped talking and acknowledged this desire – not to own (that would be impossible) but to imagine.”
19. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. “This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.”