Year in Books 2023

It was the best of books, it was the worst of books...

Welcome to another year in books. This isn’t a best-of list or even a list of my favorite books. It’s simply a list of all the books I read in 2023.

I read 65 books this year. I set my reading goal for the year at 55—one book for every year I’ve been alive. Goodreads, despite its issues, is useful for tracking the books I’ve read and the books I want to read. Here’s my philosophy for using Goodreads:

1. Rankings are dumb (art is not a contest) so I’m very generous
2. I try to say something about every book I read
3. I don’t read reviews of my own books

If I wrote about a book here in Message from the Underworld, the LA Times, or elsewhere, I’ve included a link in the listing, but you may have to scroll a bit to get to the review. If there’s a link in the write-up, it’s to the book’s listing at Bookshorp.org, for which I get a small commission if you purchase the book through the link.

As usual, there were a few surprises. For instance, I didn’t read any historical fiction or science fiction this year. That’s kind of weird since I’ve already read a sci-fi novella in 2024. I’m not ready to put books set in the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s into the historical fiction category yet. I find it difficult to countenance my own youth as historical. Maybe after the AARP gets a hold me or when I’m eligible for Social Security. Until then, no chance.

This year I read a lot more poetry, which was a welcome change. It started with Matthew Zapruder, who I met at the LA Times Festival of Books and was really impressed with. His book, Story of a Poem, which I didn’t finish for some reason and will get back to shortly, inspired me to write a couple poems. That kicked something loose inside me. I spent a lot of time away from home this year and poetry made the dislocation I was feeling more companionable. It made me more aware of my surroundings, whether it was a Redwood forest or a waffle station at a hotel outside Indianapolis. Poetry fueled me when I was looking for inspiration in a motel room in Utah at 11pm and I was too tired to grapple with narrative, and it set my brain on fire at a Dunkin’ Donuts on Avenida Vitcura in Santiago, Chile.

The thing about books is you have to seek them out and there’s something about having poetry in your life that turns you into a seeker. So much of our attention is consumed by things that are served up to us by algorithms, delivered to our in-boxes, or preselected according to our preferences. It’s such a passive way to be stimulated—and we all want to be stimulated—but it’s getting harder to be stimulated by things that are strange and wonderful and new. I’m trying to become someone who carries a book of poems around with me so that when the urge comes to pick up the phone, I read a poem instead.

So here we go. If you’ve read my list before most of these categories will be familiar to you but, as always, there are a few new ones:

Books That Made Me Question the Worthiness of the Human Project

Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter

It’s kind of telling that, Ripe, one of the bleakest books I read all year is set in the tech industry. The two Bolaño novellas, one of which I read on the way to Santiago and the other I read on the way back, grapple with the atrocities of the Pinochet dictatorship. The thing that alarms me about the dictatorship is the way right-wing Chileans of a certain age contend that things were weren’t that bad, that things were actually better during Pinochet’s reign of terror. This is a government that tortured and murdered thousands of its own citizens in the most brutal ways imaginable. That scares the hell out of me, especially when I consider the divide here in the United States, the constant violence, the way Fox News encourages viewers to view Democrats was unpatriotic socialists, as sub-citizens.

Books That Reaffirmed It

The Butchering Art Lindsey Fitzharris
The Book of Extraordinary Sadness by Joe Meno
The Wrecking Crew by John Albert
Close to Home by Michael Magee

I didn’t consciously set out to read a bunch of heartwarming books this year (you can tell by some of the titles that wasn’t my intention) but these books were a much needed tonic to the horrors of 2023. I loved The Butchering Art because it’s hero, Joseph Lister, the man who changed the way we practice medicine, is such a decent, hardworking person who persisted when everyone told him he was crazy. Joe Meno is a hero of mine and his novel is also a story of persistence, albeit a much quirkier once. The Wrecking Crew quietly devastated me when I read it after John Albert’s sudden passing and Michael Magee’s Belfast novel is the closest thing I’ve read to a story that reflects the experiences of my friends in that fascinating city.    

Books about Music & Musicians

I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall
Rememberings by Sinead O’Connor
Some New Kind of Kick by Kid Congo Powers
Gone to the Wolves by John Wray

I blurbed Stovall’s novel and I’ll have more to say about it when it comes out, but I loved her story of a troubled young woman who loves punk too much. I can’t recommend it enough. In fact, I recommend all the books in this category as they are all exceptional. Last year I predicted I would read more Henry Rollins but I didn’t. I’m going to double down on that prediction. I’m curious to know what music-related books you are looking forward to reading this year. As for me, I’ll be writing at least one. How’s that for a tease?

Books I Read for Research

Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and translated by Asa Zatz
Shrunken Heads: Tsantsa Trophies and Human Exotica by James L. Castner
Lowboy by John Wray

One of these books really stands out from the rest of the list and I wish I could tell you why but you’re just going to have to wait.

Books by Irish Writers I Listened to While Driving Around California

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
The Well of St. Nobody by Neil Jordan

You should all know by now that I think Kevin Barry is a wonderful writer. He’s also a wonderful reader of his work and I “re-read” his first two novels via audio book. The man is a poet and a magician. He’s got a new novel coming out this summer, his first set in the United States. I have a feeling that after I get my hands on it I’m going to want to get back to my bare knuckle boxing novel. The Wren, The Wren was the first Enright novel I managed to get through and I have a few more on my shelf I’m now looking forwards to revisiting.

Books That Don’t Rhyme

The Captain’s Verses by Pablo Neruda
In Quest of Candlelighters by Kenneth Patchen
Scar and Flower by Lee Herrick
Blade Pitch Control Unit by Sean Bonney
Toska by Alina Pleskova
Couplets Maggie Millner
Emergency Brake Ruth Madievsky
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris

I was standing in the Libros en Ingles section of Cafebrería El Péndulo in Roma Norte last summer when I found Blade Pitch Control Unit by the late Sean Bonney. How did this strange collection by an obscure poet by a small press make its way here? I went to the cafe and started reading. The book is written with such urgency that it immediately went into my novel. What does that mean?

It’s hard to explain but there are lines in this book that feel like they are being beamed into my brain, leaving me with two options: 1) become a street preacher devoted to weird poetry or 2) incorporate that intensity into the project that’s consuming my imagination. I opted for the latter. Then, a few months later, it happened again in the same bookstore and the same brain beaming with Kenneth Patchen’s In Quest of Candlelighters. Reading Patchen one can sense the poet that Ginsburg wanted to be and every poem is like Howl. Listen to this:

O I say look at your hands they are smeared with the blood of human beings and O I say look at your lives and at all your smug works they are smeared with the blood of human beings and I tell you there is no difference between murdering the human beings you have already murdered and murdering every human being on earth O I weep at the monstrous horror of this crime against man and against God! if you have blood on your hands take them off this page.

What do you do with something like that once it infiltrates your consciousness? These are words that demand to be reckoned with. That it happened twice in the same bookstore many miles from home mean something. Cafebrería El Péndulo is a magical place for me. I’ll be reading more of Bonney and Patchen in 2024. A lot more.

Books That Make Me Wanna Commit Some Crimes
The Confession by Dominic Stansberry
The Big Boom by Dominic Stansberry
Gallows Dome by Nolan Knight
Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda
Gangsters Don’t Die by Tod Goldberg
High Priest of California/Wild Wives by Charles Willeford
Nobody Runs Forever by Richard Stark
Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott
My Darkest Prayer by S.A. Cosby
The Eden Test by Adam Sternbergh
City on Fire by Don Winslow
City of Dreams by Don Winslow
The Grownup by Gillian Flynn
Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
The Last Songbird by Daniel Weizmann
Nineteen Seventy-Four by David Peace
No Home for Killers by E.A. Aymar
Scorched Grace by Margo Douaihy
Arise and Walk by Barry Gifford

I celebrated the release of one crime novel (more on that in a bit), and wrote another. Naturally, I read a ton of crime novels as well. Reading this list I see some of my friends, some of my favorites, and some writers that were new to me. I probably won’t read 20 crime novels next year, but I’ve been wanting to read all of Jim Thompson’s novels for a while so who knows?

Books That Go Bump in the Night

The Bad Weather Friend by Dean Koontz
Audition by Ryū Murakami
Certain Dark Things by Sylvia Morena Garcia
Shutter by Ramona Emerson

Remember when I was obsessed with Japanese gangster horror movies and threatened to review a bunch? That was the highlight of my horror consumption in 2023. I am very excited to read Paul Tremblay’s new one. What other horror novels are you looking forward to?

Books with Pictures in Them

Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke
Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit by Darwyn Cooke
Night Fever by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

It’s a shame that graphic novels still don’t get the same treatment that other forms of narrative receive because if they did everyone would be talking about Night Fever, a story as mind-bending as Paul Auster’s City of Glass but much darker.

Books That Are Difficult to Classify

The Dirt in Our Skin by J.J. Anselmi
All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky
Shy by Max Porter
Farsickness by Joshua Mohr
Dog on Fire by Terese Svoboda

I blurbed both The Dirt in Our Skin, which is forthcoming, and Farsickness, which you should only read if you are in a mentally stable place. This sounds like a joke but I promise you it’s not.

Books with Short Stories in Them

Thrillville USA by Taylor Koekkoek
Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson by Jack Skelley
Inside Jobs: Tales from a Time of Quarantine by Ben H. Winters

I didn’t read many collections this year, but I published a few short stories. First there’s “Incident at the Charging Station” (crime), which appeared in Uncharted Magazine, then there’s “The House on Dead Confederate Street” (horror/crime), which was published by Short Story, Long, and, finally, “Dead Gangsters,” (horror/crime/grief), which you can order here from Starlite Pulp.

Books Recommended without Reservation

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
The Shards by Brett Easton Ellis

I wrote about all these books when I read them and they’ve all stayed with me. I’m still wrestling with the worlds that Enriquez and Ellis created (and Dederer’s book is about wrestling with problematic art). The novels inhabited me as much I inhabited them, which is one of the greatest feelings a novel can deliver. A sense of a world that exists even when you’re not in it. This feeling used to be unique to novels, but is one of the main attractions of games—both video and role playing. I think when we think back to the books that moved us as children and young adults it’s not the books we remember so fondly but the feeling of being inside them. I’ve been reading a lot of short novels and poetry lately but one of my resolutions for 2024 is to wrestle with more big books this year.

Book That Had the Biggest Impact

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

What else could I possibly say about The Savage Detectives at this point? Well, a lot, actually, but I’m going to try to restrain myself by talking about the impact it had on me. I was in a taxi in Mexico City, stuck in traffic and reading The Savage Detectives, when I was hit with an epiphany about a story I was struggling with that struck me clear as day. Two things immediately became clear: 1) the way to fix the story was to reimagine it as a novel and 2) I needed to do it immediately. Not now, but right now.

I started jotting down some notes in my journal and I haven’t stopped since. That moment is kind of amazing to me because the epiphany was pretty vague as epiphanies go, something like “mythologize punk the way Bolaño mythologizes poetry.” That’s not exactly novelistic, is it? Not even movie-of-the-week material. But that moment put me on the path I’m on now and if I hadn’t been on that path I don’t know if I would have accompanied Nuvia to Santiago, the birthplace of Bolaño, a city that is every bit as important to him as Dublin was to Joyce and thus key to understanding his work. If my novel was born in Mexico City, Santiago showed me how it ends.

Make It Stop

Last year Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records was named to a bunch of best-of lists, which was unexpected and gratifying. I never imagined that Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair would single out Corporate Rock Sucks but they did and I’ve been putting it in all of my pitches and creative bios since.

I also promised I would never again complain about not being named to a best of list and this year I don’t have to break my promise because Make It Stop was named to The Pensive Quill’s Books of 2023. Here’s what they have to say.

“Infused with the anger and positivity that punk rock can offer, Make It Stop is both an excellent comic book style romp and a frightening look at what, potentially, lies ahead.”

Yes, I still find lists problematic because they take up space that might go to covering books that haven’t received much recognition. Lists dominate the way the arts are covered so now we get things like “The fifteen novels you need to read this week,” which is just book promotion in disguise.

It used to feel irresponsible to shrug and say “I guess that’s just the way it is” but now I’m not so sure. The media landscape changes so quickly that the way things are is constantly in flux. Maybe the next way will be smarter, less cutthroat, more equitable, etc. I wouldn’t bet on it, but we can hope, right? Maybe newsletters like this one is the way. I wouldn’t be on that either.

I want to use the remainder of this space to thank everyone who read Make It Stop this year. Thank you for taking the time to order it, or check it out of your local library, or download it to your phone, or borrow it from someone much cooler than you (just kidding). Art is unusual. The things that called me to write Make It Stop are very far removed from the realm of commercial art. The world didn’t ask for a sober vigilante novel set in a perilous future, but I gave it one, and a lot of you read it, told me you liked it, and shared it with friends, which kind of blows my mind.

There’s a scene in the novel where the villain, who has this very weird kink, discovers there are other people out there who are into the same thing. I kind of feel like that. Is that a weird comparison? Did I just compare myself to a guy with a fetish for injecting people with needles? Did I just low-key call the people who read by book freaks?

That wasn’t my intention but I love every one of you freaks for supporting my work in 2023 and I hope to give you plenty of reasons to keep doing so in 2024 and beyond. Just the fact that you’re still reading demonstrates your love for literature that isn’t valued by a large portion of the population. Kudos to you. Thanks again for reading Make It Stop and thank you for reading Message from the Underworld.

If you’re new-ish here and you liked this newsletter you might also like my new novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get Orca Alert! every Sunday. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, and science you may have missed while trying to avoid the shitty news of the day.