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.”
20. The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle. “He lost himself there for a while and that wasn’t cool, that wasn’t military, and he would have been the first to admit it. But so what.”
21. The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso. “Marion had avoided history. Or she had invented her own. After all, what was history but a record of what gets noticed? Noticing, it seemed to Marion, was what life was really about. Noticing and not noticing, remember and forgetting.”
22. The Lost Girls of Ireland by Susanne O’Leary. “Right now she had to stick to the present and keep working while she decided what to do – she didn’t want to let anyone down.”
23. The Oceanography of the Moon by Glendy Vanderah. “Her beginnings are like inviting spells, and once you’re inside, you’re involved, really involved.”
24. The Bright Side of Going Dark by Kelly Harms. “We’re all just good people accidentally on purpose hurting ourselves.”
25. Beyond the Moonlit Sea by Julianne MaClean. “My place was here, in the present, in the light, where happiness lived.”
26. The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman. “A lighthouse warns of danger–tells people to keep their distance. She had mistaken it for a place of safety.”
27. Seasonal Work by Laura Lippman. “Do understand men and women are fundamentally different. Don’t claim you can simultaneously believe in Darwin and monogamous men. Pick one.”
28. Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. “Designing a life of her own making would not be easy, and though she was finally freer than free, it had cost her. Sometimes it seemed like everyone, everywhere, had sacrificed something to get to something better.”
29. I Thought You Said This Would Work by Ann Garvin. “Consider this,’ Marvin said with kindness. ‘Speaking shows passion. Maybe you have to be passionate about you’.”
30. I Walk Between the Raindrops by T. C. Boyle. “One minute you’re alive, the next you’re dead–those were the conditions of the world, and even to attempt to assign any logic to them was to fall into the deep, dark vat of religion and other associated forms of voodoo.”
31. Call the Canaries Home by Laura Barrow. “Maybe if I stepped back to let others in, they might just surprise me.”