Books of the Year, 2023

in , , ,

So here are my books of 2023 (not all published then). For reviews of many of them, go to my books page.

Quick Links: Fiction | Non-Fiction | Professional Reading

 

My Book of 2023:

Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap: a memoir of art and life and sudden death was pure pleasure: a favourite subject (Dutch Golden Age Art) approached by a writer of rare elegance and perception. Ostensibly about the mysterious Carel Fabritius, creator of ‘The Goldfinch’, it was about so much more, particularly the author’s painter father, James Cumming. And there were 8 pages on the stunning works of Adriaen Coorte.

[Related: I'm looking forward to this small exhibition next year at the National Gallery of Ireland: 'Turning Heads: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer.']


Recent Books of the Year:

Fiction of the Year

My reading year began in the darkness of January with Jon Fosse’s slim and haunting Aliss at the Fire, and later in the year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Joseph O’Connor’s My Father’s House was an exciting imagining of the life of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty who ran escapees out of wartime Rome (the book's other vividly recreated character). Another mixture of the continent and Ireland was in Billy O’Callaghan’s The Paper Man, about the Messi of his time, Matthias Sindelar, partly set in Cork and partly in the other European country I know best, Austria. Deborah Levy always writes interestingly, as she did in August Blue.

Alice Winn’s début In Memoriam was a moving story about two gay men from the same public school in the First World War. An utterly different story about young people was Kevin Curran’s Youth, a fizzing vision of contemporary Balbriggan. William Wall’s Empty Bed Blues evoked Northern Italy beautifully as a woman tried to cope with her husband’s death and his betrayals. Anne Enright had effortless fun in The Wren, The Wren. Katherine Rundell was my writer of 2022: this year she produced the first volume in a fantasy series for children, and I read it with my daughter. Impossible Creatures confirms what an extraordinary writer she is.

Non-Fiction of the Year

Recently, John Niven’s O Brother, in which he searches for the roots of the suicide of his brother Gary was both heart-wrenching and very funny. Annie Ernaux’s I Remain in Darkness was ferocious and terrifying (I’m gradually making my way through her work). Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist, about the first Jewish person to escape from Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba, had me gripped throughout (the post-escape life is almost as astonishing).

Near the end of the year, Martin Doyle’s Dirty Linen: the Troubles in my Home Place was a hard - but powerfully-achieved - read, looking sensitively at the terrible toll in one small parish during the Northern Ireland Troubles. In The Stirrings, Catherine Taylor wrote compellingly about growing up in Sheffield in the years of Margaret Thatcher, the Yorkshire Ripper so much more.

Finally, it’s a bit of a cheat to put in here The Letters of Seamus Heaney, in Christopher Reid’s superb edition, since I’m a long way from finishing it, but I’m reading a few letters a day, and it’s such a civilised warming experience, and it’ll certainly be on the 2024 list.

Professional Reading of the Year

This is the catch-all title for books I read partly for my job as an English teacher: but of course the boundary between these and the earlier categories is very porous.

There is some superb writing going on these days bringing high-quality academic work to a more general audience in a fresh way, such as in Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath (Chaucer), Farah Karim-Cooper’s The Great White Bard, Sophie Duncan’s Searching for Juliet (both Shakespeare), and in two slightly older books, Jonathan Bate’s Bright Star, Green Light (Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald) and Gabriel Josipovici’s thought-provoking Hamlet Fold by Fold. And much older, and now republished by McNally Editions: Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s Emily Dickinson Face to Face brought alive her famous aunt in a way I’ve never seen before.

Memorable poetry collections: Anthony Joseph's Sonnets for Albert, Fiona Benson's Ephemeron, Jason Allen-Paisant's Self-Portrait as Othello.

Good writing from Ireland about my subject is rare, so it was cheering to receive Perspectives on the Teaching of English in Post-Primary Education, edited by Kevin Cahill and Niamh Dennehy - a dry title but a book full of interesting contributions from across third and second level. Finally, The Art of Explanation by Ros Atkins sharpened my understanding of that crucial tool for teachers.