Reading Pleasures of 2023
by Gwynne Garfinkle
Looking back on this year's reading, I find that I read way less nonfiction than usual. Most of my favorite books this year were fiction, many of them in the horror and thriller genres.
In Silver Nitrate, the latest novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a movie sound editor and her best friend (a former soap star she's always been in love with) must unravel the mystery of a cursed film and the Nazi occultists fixated on it in 1990s Mexico City. I loved all the references to horror movie-making, but my favorite aspect of the novel was the cranky but profound relationship between the two leads. 
This year I read all of Rachel Harrison's novels. Each one explores female power and violence through a different horror staple: witches (Cackle), werewolves (Such Sharp Teeth), and "coming back wrong" (The Return). Her 2023 release, Black Sheep, is a neat feminist twist on The Omen that may be my favorite to date.
Another horror novel from 2023 that I enjoyed is Chuck Wendig's Black River Orchard, a sprawling but propulsive story about a town beset by evil apples. (While reading it, I found myself eyeing apples with suspicion at the grocery store.)
This year New York Review Books published a new translation by Paul Eprile of Colette's Chéri and The End of Chéri. I read these books long ago in an earlier translation, but this version brings them to life in all their exquisite earthiness. 
NYRB also reissued Lisa Tuttle's novella My Death this year, and a wonderful Zoom discussion between Tuttle, Kelly Link, and Amy Gentry prompted me to finally read the Aqueduct edition that I'd bought years ago. I found this story of a widowed writer excavating the life of a neglected woman author and artist so irresistible, I would have loved it even without its uncanny elements and haunting spiral structure. (I also read Tuttle's earlier novel Familiar Spirit, a straight-up horror tale of possession, heartbreak, and sexual desire, reprinted in Valancourt's Paperbacks From Hell series.)
In Meg Elison's thriller Number One Fan--a gender-swapped version of Stephen King's Misery--a famous urban fantasy author is held prisoner by a misogynist fan. The different gender dynamic changes how the story plays out (it's the first time I've read a story about a captive woman in which she gets a raging UTI), as does the fact that it's set in the age of social media and toxic fandom. This book gave me nightmares, but I couldn't stop reading it.
R.F. Kuang's Yellowface is another compulsively readable novel that deals with publishing, plagiarism, and social media. An unsuccessful white writer steals a manuscript by her deceased Chinese-American friend, a young literary star. She claims to have written the novel herself and takes on a "racially ambiguous" persona to fend off accusations of cultural appropriation. This brutal satire is as uncomfortable as it is entertaining.
Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine is a pregnancy thriller à la Rosemary's Baby about an actress in her late thirties attempting to have a baby by IVF. Although an embryo is successfully implanted, the woman miscarries--or does she? (The novel has been adapted by the American Horror Story TV series, but the AHS version, Delicate, makes changes that--at least up to the point that has aired so far--only point up the novel's more skillful storytelling.)
Probably the most joyful book I read all year was Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a trans coming-of-age story featuring music, space aliens, Faustian bargains, and donuts. As a life-long Angeleno, I particularly enjoyed the novel's San Gabriel Valley setting.
My favorite poetry book of 2023 is R.B. Lemberg's Everything Thaws: A poetic cycle. This stunning autobiographical work spans Lemberg's childhood in the Soviet Union through their time in Hungary, Israel, and the United States, as it explores family, Jewish generational trauma, and memory. The thawing Siberian permafrost, a harbinger of climate change, also becomes a metaphor for unburied truths.
Gwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of a novel, Can't Find My Way Home (2022), and a collection of short fiction and poetry, People Change (2018), both available from Aqueduct Press. Her work has appeared in such publications as Strange Horizons, Worlds of Possibility, Fantasy, Uncanny, Escape Pod, Apex, and Not One of Us.
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