First of all, thanks to everyone who helped out and submitted their favorite 1-3 books that they read within the last two years.
There are some really intriguing submissions here that span a wide range of genres, from light beach reads you could imagine being turned into the next big Netflix romcom to post-apocalyptic fiction and actionable guides to living a long, healthy life. They geographically span from Sri Lanka to the US, Argentina, and China.
This list might find you at the tail end of your summer reading (it took longer than I expected to compile everything), but I hope it can guide you into the chilly fall season, when you’re craving heavy socks, chunky knits, and an engrossing book while you cozy up with a mug of something warm.
Here are a few features of the list:
I’m a huge nerd, so I analyzed some of the results and made word clouds of two columns on the spreadsheet I added in.
There were 50+ respondents.
There are 100 total books that made it onto the list (I didn’t filter any out).
There were 53 Fiction books and 47 Non-fiction books that made it onto the list.
Just over 20% of the books were under around 250 pages (in case you are aiming to read a certain quantity of books this year and are trailing behind); 50% have around 350 pages or fewer; and the other half of the books came in over 350 pages.
The longest book someone recommended was The Stand by Stephen King, the horror writer’s magnum opus that feels particularly prescient given the pandemic we just endured, and the shortest was one that I recommended called Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, an extremely taut and affecting novel about a mother with debilitating Parkinson’s crossing Buenos Aires collecting clues that might help her solve the mystery of her daughter’s untimely death.
Theme Analysis
Across the 100 books, here were some dominant themes for the 2023 list.
Autobiographies & memoirs: Deep dives into the minds of change-makers and ordinary people—seeing the world through their eyes, from their thought processes, triumphs, and quirks to capturing experiences from wildly diverse cultures and backgrounds.
Business & startups: There’s a raw fascination with the grind of startups and large corporates that have become spectacular successes or catastrophic failures. They teach us about ambition, trends, and the highs and lows of innovation.
Cultural & historical analysis: Offering a seat at history’s table to provide context on specific eras, influential figures, or shifts in human society—in fiction and non-fiction.
Self-help & personal development: Wisdom with a nudge toward action and personal growth. Many are overtly practical guides—on writing, longevity, and even negotiation.
Contemporary global issues: Themes of tech dominance, corporate ambition, climate, and societal norms focus on dissecting and understanding the challenges of the modern world.
Category Analysis
This first word cloud (below) is a collection of the words most frequently mentioned in the Category column of the spreadsheet, which uses industry genre and sub-genre tags to classify a book.
The books were grounded in the here and now and were often classified as contemporary, so belonging to or helping to process the present—in both non-fiction and fiction books.
Topically, the crowd leaned heavy on historical, romance, business, biography, family, women, science, and self-help—I think it speaks to the time we’re living in but also to the average age of most of the respondents (majority millennials, rise up!).
In the previous newsletter I wrote, I mentioned that we often want to filter books outside of these categories—like, how descriptive is the term contemporary anyway? Seems like talking about the present is too wide of a net to actually describe what the book feels like when you’re reading it?
Vibe Analysis
For that, I added in a column for a Vibe check, and tried to add in a texture of how it feels to be engaging with the book. For titles that I wasn’t super familiar with, I enlisted the help of GPT4 to add in five vibe tags for each book—and I cross-checked these with reviews, Amazon, and GoodReads (technically also Amazon).
What I found interesting here was that most of people’s favorite books weren’t very light—there were a few romcoms on the lists, but the books that people remembered most were the ones that altered their perceptions of the world around them—that were thought-provoking, insightful, analytical, empowering, reflective, and so on.
What I love most about books—non-fiction and fiction—is that they help you wrestle with ideas that are already jostling around in your brain. You probably wouldn’t be picking a book off the shelf or your To-Be-Read list unless you were already preoccupied with a topic the book speaks to in some way.
And devoting hours of focus time (required if you’re reading a book, compared to an article or a podcast), exposing yourself to a certain world, way of being, environment, character, guide, or framework, lets your brain develop its own opinions in relation to the ideas it confronts in the book. You consciously and unconsciously cherry-pick which opinions from the book you want to keep and discard. It seems that the books that stick with us are the ones where we took one, two, or ten ideas and carried them with us after reading.
The 6 books that were recommended multiple times
Six books were recommended multiple times.
Lessons in Chemistry: Sidelined scientist Elizabeth Zott takes on late 1950s - early 1960s societal (and lab) norms when she becomes an unexpected celebrity of America’s most beloved cooking show.
Pachinko: A sprawling saga of love, pain, resilience, destiny in a Korean family in Japan across several generations.
4,000 Weeks: Reckoning with our finitude on earth and how we need to live intentionally and build communities, rather than over-optimizing our time for productivity and efficiency to fight the fear that we won’t be able to do it all.
Killers of the Flower Moon: A deep dive into a sinister chapter of American history, where the Osage nation, rich from oil, falls prey to a chilling conspiracy.
Empire of Pain: An investigation into the Sackler dynasty—where big Pharma meets family drama with the opioid crisis at its heart.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: It’s as good as you’ve heard—a love and friendship story about Sadie and Sam, who together navigate growing up and building a generational video game company.
My picks and current reads
Here were my favorites that I contributed:
Elena Knows (mentioned above): Haunting novella about a mother’s relentless quest for answers to the mysterious death of her daughter—among disability, faith, and societal norms in Argentina.
The Remains of the Day: A lyrical novel about regrets and what goes unsaid from a butler who has devoted his life to serving someone else.
Trust: Pulitzer Prize winner about the stories we tell and consume about powerful people.
Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination: Reflecting on the AIDS epidemic in New York and urban transformation, memory, and the cost of societal change.
And here’s what I’m reading now:
Becoming Trader Joe: Honestly, I can’t believe how poorly structured this book is, because the tactical insights—especially the way that the company navigated shifting regulatory environments and marketed the brand to “overeducated and underpaid” Californians—are pretty fascinating.
Chip War: This book is having a moment, and it’s easy to understand why, because the battle for semiconductor technology that powers the devices we use is and will continue shaping global politics for years to come.
Last Summer in the City: Picked this one up from McNally Jackson when I was last in New York, where it’s a Staff Pick, and because I always want to plow through a wistful or nostalgic summer novel of discontent young people in sunny places (last year, mine was Garden by the Sea, which someone else included on the 2023 list!). This one is about a frustrating and unstable young man (think: Holden Caulfield but Italian and all grown up) who has a summer romance in Rome that collapses and throws him over the edge.
Here’s the list!
Thanks again for contributing and making it to the bottom of this newsletter. Don’t hesitate to leave any other excellent reads in the comments and share with any friends who might want to do the same.
View the link here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g__IO149Lr5b1sa5qxGHfKjOHQ5cC_AHKfc3DPIwzM8/edit?usp=sharing