Best Books I Read in 2023
- Exercises in Criticism: The Theory and Practice of Literary Constraint by Louis Bury (2015)
Synopsis: A series of critical essays and essays about criticism and essays about critical essays and essays about essays about criticism, mostly focused around the topic of literary constraint Ă la Oulipo.
Excerpts from texts I sent while reading this book:
“It might end up being terrible but I love the idea of it”
“I really feel like I could send you every page of this intro and you would feel it on a visceral level”
“Anyway yeah so basically this guy is me if I’d gone to grad school, is what it seems like.”
“I think I’m in love.”
This book legitimately assuaged years of shame I’ve carried over not going to grad school. Because if I had, at some point I would’ve read this book and it would have destroyed me. Like, you can draw a direct path from my undergrad thesis to this book, which would be great except this book was published when I was still in college. If I’d read this in grad school I would’ve burned my laptop and moved out to the woods. As it is, I get to enjoy it with only the barest hints of jealousy as Bury confidently and adroitly codifies basically everything I hadn’t even realized I believed about literary criticism and constrained writing (after casually summarizing my thesis in the final sentence of his intro).
Presented both as a series of experiments (not 99, as the title implies to those in the know, though his dissertation did go the full distance) and as an almost accidental manifesto on the performative nature of criticism and the value of constraint for creative writing, Bury’s primary methodology is to write about his subjects (in this case, literary works that use various forms of constraint) in the same manner in which those texts were written.
[So at this point my Goodreads review just jumps to the paragraph below, and I honestly have no idea how I meant to construct this, but it’s clearly missing at least a whole sentence at either the beginning or the end or both. I think I was a little sleep-deprived when I wrote this. But basically the point is to view the quote (which is from Bury’s essay on Joe Brainard’s I Remember) in light of my reviews where, I feel, I’m doing kind of what the quote is talking about, and isn’t that neat. But how it connects to the previous paragraph I truly have no idea, and having failed to come up with a plausible transition between the two I’ve written this little editorial interlude instead.]
Given, for example, my reviews of Dream of the Trenches and Disco Elysium: “wondering if I could accomplish something similar in my criticism: in lieu of seamless argumentation, a patchwork tour of noteworthy passages—a reminiscence rather than an interpretation.”
[Right so what I’m realizing is that there was a different version of this that was talking about my reviews in terms of Bury’s methodology, writing about the thing in the style of the thing, then I didn’t think that was a strong argument so I changed it and somehow just…didn’t finish rewriting it. But that’s why there’s this callback to Inscryption in the next paragraph, as I was originally using that instead of Disco. What a mess.]
I’m not saying that to toot my own horn (though I am pretty proud of what I did with that Inscryption review), but just to explain why I cannot be in anyway objective about whether this is a good book or not, because in many ways it felt like it was written either for me or by me (or both), simultaneously thought-provoking and validating. It’s probably tied with Infinite Jest for favorite book I’ve read this year, which, you know, is saying quite a lot. But I have absolutely no sense of whether anyone else would care about it (except my friend who his currently finishing up his PhD, this is absolutely right up his alley, but more for the criticisms Bury has of academia and scholarship.)
Which of course is yet another idea that Bury talks about, the ways in which even supposedly “objective” forms of writing like criticism or academic writing are actually deeply personal. Like, I don’t know if I will ever be able to write anything that is not somehow prefigured by this book. It’s almost Borgesian…which is anothe— - 100 Best Video Games (That Never Existed) by Nate Crowley (2017)
Synopsis: A fictional history of video games set in an alternate universe.
Though the “Best” in the title seems at times questionable even by the book’s own internal logic, you can’t argue that the selections aren’t entertaining. From the titles (e.g. Dance Dance Industrial Revolution or War, on Drugs) to the genre descriptions (e.g. for Wasp Getter 6 the genre is “Wasps / Getting”; for Bread: The Game it’s “Roll-Playing Game,” a pun so elegant that it left me stunned for several minutes) to the (mostly*) impressively well-rendered concept art to the actual descriptions of the games themselves (which also build out the world of the alternate universe in which these games exist), there’s just so much to love.
And honestly, there are games in here the I could see actually existing, and some that I would even want to play. Gorillionaire, about a woman who, any time she climbs out of debt, transforms into a gorilla and goes on a spending spree, seems like it would fit right into the “weird indie action game” market. And the incredibly-named First Person Shooter sounds like a legitimately interesting time travel narrative and an innovative take on Far Cry-esque open world survival shooters.
Also, it should be noted that you’re really getting bang for your buck, because there are lists of honorable mentions every 5 entries, so there are actually over 200 games in here.
*I say mostly because there are several notable examples, such as Monopoly: Aftermath, where the concept art leaves out or even directly contradicts key elements of the game’s description. It’s not that isn’t still entertaining, it just doesn’t fit, and it bugs me. - A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)
Synopsis: A poor boy finds out he’s got magic powers so he leaves his family, who don’t much care for him anyway, to go to a school for magical people, where he befriends a kinda goofy kid with a lot of siblings, makes enemies with a wealthy aristocrat, gets a pet whose name starts with an ‘h’ and ends with a ‘g’, and I could keep going with the bit but we’d be getting into spoilers.
Usually when I watch/read/play/listen to some classic piece of media that formed the basis of an artform or a genre with which I’m very familiar, I find that it’s interesting as a historical artifact, but doesn’t really do anything for me as a work of art. I’ve already experienced so many different iterations of its ideas that it feels somewhat underdeveloped or unsophisticated, and for the really old stuff it often just doesn’t fit my aesthetic taste.
And that was…not quite the case here. It is true that the book didn’t do much for me because I was already familiar with the story from works that had been influenced by it. But it’s not true that it made A Wizard of Earthsea seem underdeveloped or unsophisticated. Because the main reason I knew the story was from T.A. Barron’s Lost Years of Merlin series which pretty much rips it off wholesale, pastes a (white) public domain character over it, then stretches it out over 5 books because he doesn’t believe in character development. Reading those books and then reading this is like watching Sleuth (2007) and then watching Sleuth (1972). I just wish I’d read Le Guin first.
As it is, while I could recognize the quality of the writing and the skill with which the story was executed, there just wasn’t anything truly novel about it (from my perspective, 55 years after it was written). The only moment that actually surprised me was his confrontation with the dragon, which was a very Gene Wolfe-esque “character over drama” resolution that I really appreciated.
But it’s still a good book, and if you’re introducing someone, particularly a young person, to the fantasy genre this is as good a place to start as any. As Le Guin says in her afterword, “Despite what some adults seem to think, teenagers are fully human. And some of them read as intensely and keenly as if their life depended on it. Sometimes maybe it does.”
p.s. Legitimately had not realized the Harry Potter connection until I was writing the synopsis, but, you know, same goes for her as for Barron except moreso. - No One Is Talking About This: A Novel by Patricia Lockwood (2021)
Synopsis: A writer becomes famous for her tweets and tours the world giving talks on the Internet. Then she becomes an aunt. It is very difficult to explain how these two things are connected to someone who hasn’t read the book, other than by the fact they are both true things about Patricia Lockwood.
“Patricia Lockwood novel about Twitter” seemed like a safe choice during an emotionally tumultuous time. TWIST it actually made me cry. Twice. At work.
And it’s tempting to say that’s because it’s not actually a novel about Twitter but is in fact [MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD, SUCKS THAT WORDPRESS DOESN’T HAVE BUILT-IN SPOILER TEXT FUNCTIONALITY, MAYBE THEY SHOULD GET ON THAT] the seemingly mostly true story of Lockwood’s niece who was born with a birth defect and died at 6 months and one day old, and sure that’s the part that made me cry because the vulnerability and poetry with which Lockwood tells the story makes it impossible not to [END SPOILER, JUMP TO HERE TO AVOID THE SPOILER, IF ONLY THERE WERE AN EASIER WAY TO DO THIS, LIKE HOW GOODREADS HAS BEEN DOING IT FOR YEARS FOR EXAMPLE]—but that’s Part Two. It’s slightly less than half the book. And everything from Part One comes back in Part Two.
So this is very much still a novel about social media, about the Internet, about how we view each other and ourselves through the filter of the Portal, even when we’re outside it. But it’s also recognizing that life, and death, keep happening. They’re a part of that story. Sometimes it’s that person you barely knew in high school who only posts baby photos on Facebook. Sometimes it’s videos of innocent people being murdered by the police nestled between MCU memes and ads for lights you can attach to your Crocs. And sometimes it’s not knowing what all that has to do with the beauty and tragedy right in front of you, not knowing whether or how to render your own joys and apocalypses for the consumption of others.
And yet, and so: “For whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for these moments.”
Ultimately Lockwood is not arguing for or against the online world of the current moment, but just acknowledging its presence, its impact, its inanities and cruelties, its joys and righteous anger. And she’s inviting us through to her side of the Portal, for a heartbreakingly brief and wondrous moment. - 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden (2005)
Synopsis: 99 different comics telling the same story about a comic book artist going to the fridge only to discover, to his horror, that there’s nothing to eat.
I’ve started to develop an interest in comics after a heady but short-lived attempt to write a script for a Batman adaptation. This was a neat little collection of some of the many ways you can tell a story in the medium, and several made me go “Ooooh,” and “Hmmmm” and other noises of inspired approval. - Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith (2018)
Synopsis: Essays about politics, art, and life, which sounds vague but that’s literally how it’s organized so don’t blame me.
I’ll be honest, I found the essays in Part I to be a little grating at times in their, as Smith puts it, “ambivalence” (or as I would put it, liberal centrism). That even extended a bit into the first two essays of Part II and her lack of cynicism about two wealthy billionaires and their mythologies. E.g. while her analysis of Zuckerberg is compelling up to a point, she completely ignores the fact that he’s a billionaire, and how becoming a billionaire and staying a billionaire might factor into his decision-making, instead ascribing it all to his psychological pathology. Like, does he want to create a Noosphere? Really? Or does he just want to get as many people to use his product in as many (monetizable) ways as possible? I’m unwilling to credit someone with having some grand long-term vision when they’ve got enough money to solve hunger and/or homelessness and/or global warming and instead are trying to get people to pivot to VR (and also helping incite political violence in multiple countries).
All that being said, the rest of the book is great. Parts II-IV offer analysis that’s insightful, thought-provoking, funny, and just a little bit weird (in a good way), showcased across a wide range of media and genre. And the same curiosity and ambivalence that comes across as naive in Part I serves her well in these later essays (see, for example, her remarkably generous and heart-felt reading of a Sean Paul music video in “On Island Life and Mother Love” [from “The Harper’s Columns”]). There’s perhaps something to be said about the correlation between good writers and “ambivalent” politics—I have the same problem with David Foster Wallace, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Part V is more personal and less structured, and includes probably her most delightfully weird essay (“Meet Justin Bieber!”) as well as her most surprising, an exploration of the nature of joy (vs. merely pleasure) that ends the collection on a deeply contemplative, and not entirely peaceful, note. I say surprising because it’s so abstract in concept compared to the rest of the collection, and yet surprising again because she so artfully grounds the abstract in real experiences and legible emotions. I’d make a joke here about how it was pleasurable to read but I see on the back the The New York Times already did that and I’m too tired to come up with a better ending so I guess I’m just going to trail off - Things to Do Before You Leave Town by Ross Sutherland (2009)
Synopsis: A poetry collection about experimentally proving love and the precise taxonomy of vulgar epithets.
Absurdism at its best, both hilarious and moving. You’d think I’d have more to say about it, but sometimes I just like something because it’s self-evidently good and I don’t really have any deeper thoughts than that. I will take this opportunity to shill for Sutherland’s podcast Imaginary Advice because it’s my favorite podcast. - Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)
Synopsis: *cracks knuckles* *cricks neck* *takes deep breath* …A roughly 4-part ensemble story about: 1. the Incandenza family, dead dad James was a filmmaker of debatable quality, mom Avril (yes, she’s Canadian, and it’s surprisingly relevant) helps run a tennis academy attended by youngest son, Hal (he’s smart and good at tennis) and middle son Mario (he’s physically and mentally disabled and also makes movies), and there’s also oldest son Orin (who gave up on tennis and now plays football and is fucked up in ways we do not have time to go into here); 2. Joelle Van Dyne, a drug addict who wears a veil all the time and claims to have a face so beautiful that it qualifies as a horrible disfigurement and I can’t say anything else about her without it being a spoiler but she’s pretty central to the whole thing; 3. Don Gately, a recovering addict and staff member at a halfway house and pretty good dude (plus associated house residents, the lists of which is too long to go into here); and 4. RĂ©my Marathe and Hugh Steeply, two spies looking for a film that is supposedly so entertaining that anyone who watches it never wants to do anything else. All of these stories intersect in ways you can probably guess and in ways you absolutely won’t guess. Also there are like 50 other characters you’ll be reading entire chapters about, and they’re all great.
Unsurprisingly this one went a little long, so I’ve made it its own post. Something I didn’t really address in my original review is how it actually felt to read Infinite Jest. Like, the book itself, while it is often funny, is also often deeply moving and literally breathtaking, like I found myself holding my breath during certain passages (Joelle’s first section being a prominent example for reasons I don’t want to spoil but if you know then holy shit, right?)
But on top of that there’s the baggage that I’m bringing to the table. I mean, this is the penultimate, and most famous, stop on a journey I hadn’t even fully intended to go on, and it really feels like I’m getting ready to, in a sense, say goodbye to David Foster Wallace. I mean, obviously I’ll be re-reading most of these books multiple times, but never again for the first time. And honestly it feels like saying goodbye already even though I’ve got one book left. After all, I’ve read Oblivion and if The Pale King is anything like those stories then this will be the last I’ve seen of the Wallace I know and love for this trip, and that makes me, well, sad. Which I guess isn’t really useful to someone who just wants to know about the book, but when have I let that stop me.
Speaking of useless things, one fairly technical aspect I didn’t comment on in my main review is the narration. It’s starts out in 1st-person from Hal’s perspective, but then is largely 3rd-person throughout the rest of the text, but this 3rd-person is so closely tied to the POV character for each section that the narration takes on that character’s voice, making it a sort of narrational projection of the character, as if each character is narrating their own life in 3rd-person. Then there’s the endnotes, which are clearly in a different voice but it’s not entirely clear if it’s just one voice or whose voice that is, whether it’s a character’s voice or DFW’s voice or just the omniscient Author (except he’s not omniscient, or at least chooses to pretend he’s not sometimes). And then there’s that weird moment on pp. 693-694, in the midst of an otherwise seemingly 3rd-person section: “It may well be that the lower-ranked little kids at E.T.A. are proportionally happier than the higher-ranked kids, since we (who are mostly not small children) know it’s more invigorating to want than to have, it seems.” Where did that “we” come from? Is there an “I” implied by the “we” or is this a more universal “we” like in Seth Fried’s The Great Frustration?
I don’t actually know what to do with any of this, but it’s one of the only things I did actually write a note about, so it seemed worth mentioning.
Also, it wasn’t until reading Infinite Jest that I realized DFW has a huge pop culture blind spot: video games. He invented Zoom and Netflix but can barely be bothered to even vaguely gesture at the possibility that teenage boys in the near future would be playing video games. It does kind of make sense, Super Mario 64 came out the same year as Infinite Jest, GoldenEye 007 the next year, Half-Life and Ocarina of Time didn’t come out until 1998; I don’t know exactly what the zeitgeist was but it seems reasonable to say gaming hadn’t quite taken off as the cultural force it is today. But, like, Doom existed. The Secret of Monkey Island and Myst existed. Not to mention the arcade classics like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. And DFW is a guy who pays attention to pop culture. But it feels like he just does not give a shit about video games. It’s a shame, too, I would’ve loved to read his essay on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. - Assorted Calvin and Hobbes collections by Bill Watterson (1988-1996)
Synopsis: A precocious 6-year-old kid and his stuffed tiger have various adventures of ambiguous reality. And sometimes there’s a poem about aliens.
I put all of these together in their own thing because otherwise they would’ve broken the format, and also I didn’t want to synopsize every single one.
Honorable Mentions
- Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director’s Cut by Jhonen Vásquez (1997)
- We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924) [I don’t normally include 2-star reviews in Honorable Mentions but this book has stuck with me to a degree I was not expecting so it feels weird not to give it a spot]
Certain of Eventual Failure 