"Where do you hear about books?"
I get asked this a lot. Plus: my 2023 favorites. And: not counting up your books.
Good morning and welcome back, Writing About Reading readers, after another longer-than-intended hiatus.
Today’s issue is more kitchen-sinky than when I zoom in on a single book or author. I think of these kitchen-sink / macro posts as outliers for this newsletter, but then again, the issue on not rushing through books and the issue on audiobooks are my two top posts, so maybe I’m wrong to keep doing single-book dives?
My planned end-of-year post in December got left for dead, so if you scroll down, you’ll also find my favorite reads of 2023, in capsule form.
I’m constantly asked by friends who aspire to read more books: “Where do you hear about books?”
I’ve addressed this before with a rapid-fire list of publications, but have long thought about going more in-depth. To get this post done, I tried to clinically study my own discovery habits over the past couple months. What are the magazines, web sites, and email newsletters that directly lead me to books I didn’t know about before?
The first thing I tell people is that if you’re looking for more diverse places in which to get book recommendations, you’re already on the right track, because you need to branch out from the NY Times. To be clear, I certainly keep an eye on their book reviews, and their end-of-year “10 best” and “100 notable” lists (hate-read catnip). And my favorite thing they do is “By the Book,” where authors list the books on their nightstand. But if you only read what the NYT highlights, you’ll miss fiction that might even be more in your personal zone of interest, and you’ll only hear about books that have reached critical mass / mainstream approval. (I wrote about this w/r/t Trust.)
I’ll start with print. (Not completely dead!) I subscribe in print to Bookforum, New York Review of Books, Literary Review, and Harper’s. The first three are entirely devoted to book reviews Harper’s is broader in scope, but heavy on reviews and short excerpts from new books. (Businessweek is my other print mag subscription, but not relevant to this discussion.)
It won’t surprise you to hear I have a bunch of draft posts for this newsletter that I’ve started, then had to put on the back-burner as other things took over. One of those drafts, from January 2023, was an obit/paean to Bookforum. In December 2022, the magazine announced it would have to shutter; the news felt like a dear friend had received a terminal cancer diagnosis. But before I could get around to finishing the post, the patient made a miraculous recovery: in June 2023, Bookforum announced it would return to print thanks to a new publishing partnership with The Nation. Phew.
Bookforum certainly reviews the same hot novels of the moment everyone else is reviewing and buzzing about. But in every issue, I also learn about a new title I haven’t seen covered elsewhere.
And while NYRB (heavy on political books) and Literary Review (extremely British, with lots and lots of history and academic books) both have sections I skip past, there are almost no reviews I skip in an issue of Bookforum.
Reviews in these places will often mention another book (maybe the author’s prior novel) that interests me more than the one being reviewed. There was an example in the latest issue of Bookforum: Lexi Freiman’s first novel Inappropriation sounds a lot more fun to me than her new novel The Book of Ayn: “Inappropriation is the story of a nerdy, neurotic, underdeveloped fifteen-year-old Jewish girl named Ziggy who is trying to find her place in the hierarchy of an all-girls prep school in Sydney, Australia. Her best friends are Lex, a cancer survivor with a prosthetic arm, and Tessa, a Bangladeshi adoptee with dreams of a rap career… The Book of Ayn resumes Inappropriation’s line of inquiry with a very different set of stakes. Whereas Ziggy is coming of age agonizingly slowly, Anna’s middle age is coming at her like a runaway train. She’s thirty-nine years old, hasn’t had a serious relationship in years, and is living in an apartment that belongs to friends of her parents. She’s been frozen out of teaching and freelancing, also dropped by her publisher and most of her friends.” That’s sometimes all it takes, a quick mention that piques your curiosity. I’m going to seek out Inappropriation soon.
All that said, there is also a drawback of these review journals: their reviews are often so in-depth that, after reading one, I don’t need to read the book that was reviewed. It’s like a movie trailer that gives the whole arc of the movie away. (I often wonder if authors are ever annoyed by this.) For me, this tends to happen mostly with nonfiction books. Two recent examples come to mind. There was an NYRB review last year of a new book about how Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary got really into mysticism and trying to contact the dead after their son Willie died. Wild, right? Sounds fascinating, like a nonfiction companion to Lincoln in the Bardo. The other example was in the latest issue of Literary Review, a review of a new book about the affairs of John le Carré—reviewed by one of his lovers! Both reviews were so extensive that I walked away feeling like, “That sounds interesting, but I’ve got the full idea.” There are only so many books you can make the time to read. In the case of fiction reviews, once I get to the point in a review where I decide I want to read the book, I stop reading the review.
Next up: literary sites and blogs, for the non-paper-inclined. Here are just a few of my favorite literary sites, and I’m leaving a ton out. (I’m also proud to have written for many of these.) The Millions runs a fun twice-annual “most anticipated” preview of the new releases coming out over a six-month period; skimming it always gives me a few new titles to add to my watchlist. LitHub has a whole vertical, Book Marks, devoted to tracking the average reviews of new releases, almost like a Rotten Tomatoes for books (though it doesn’t quite work as well, since scoring the tone of a review is subjective and imperfect). Five Books runs themed recommendation lists, both expert-submitted and reader-submitted (I just bought one of the books on this “books like The Secret History” list.) Reactor, the blog of sci-fi publisher Tor, is an excellent discovery engine for sci-fi fans. The Paris Review Daily is the blog of the vaunted Paris Review print mag, and runs wonderful essays about books, usually without any attempt at a news peg. Same goes for the blog of The Sewanee Review. The LA Review of Books runs consistently high-quality reviews and essays.
Of course, all of these sites also have email newsletters, which is a nice way to get a quick skim of what kind of stuff they cover on any given day/week.
That brings me to newsletters, a great alternative directly to your inbox for those who don’t want to commit to getting a review journal in print and aren’t likely to remember to hit up literary site homepages. These are the bookish newsletters I love and often discover books from (most of these are not specifically ‘book review newsletters’ per se, but I end up discovering books from these frequently): Ann Kjellberg’s Book Post; Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press; Maddie Stone’s The Science of Fiction; Christian Lorentzen’s newsletter; Robin Sloan’s newsletter; Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft; Brandon Taylor’s Sweater Weather; Caleb Crain’s Leaflet; Simon de la Rouviere’s newsletter; J.E. Petersen’s Dispatches From Inner Space; Ken Whyte’s SHuSH; Washington Review of Books; FSG’s Work in Progress.
A newsletter carries less visible pressure than a physical magazine, which arrives at the house and, until you read it, sits there reminding you that you haven’t read it yet; I suppose newsletters do the same thing in your inbox, but it feels like the stakes are lower. If unread issues are piling up, you can simply… delete one.
If nothing else on this list—if you don’t subscribe to any of the print mags, or any of the newsletters, or check out any of the web sites—there’s something else you can do to find cool books that aren’t all over Instagram or selected by celebrity book clubs: go to indie bookstores.
This is my final bucket of how I discover great literary fiction that isn’t being widely covered. I see it on the shelves or tables at my favorite bookstores. And usually, those moments are when covers matter. I’ve written about this w/r/t William T. Vollmann covers. There are a number of books I’ve pulled off the table purely because the cover grabbed me. (I adore the cover of the widely-reviewed new release Martyr! by the way.)
You will find something great for you using your eyes in your nearest bookstore.
When my wife and I go to a new city, a bookstore is the first place we seek out. It feels stupid to name any bookstores at all when there are so many wonderful ones across the country, and I’m about to leave many out, but to rattle off just a few I love that come to mind. Near(ish) me: Booksy in Pound Ridge, NY; Books on the Common in Ridgefield, CT; RJ Julia in Madison, CT; and Bank Street Books in Mystic, CT. In the Boston area: Trident Books and Brattle Book Shop. On the Cape: Brewster Book Store and Sea Howl in Orleans. In Brooklyn: Books Are Magic (Cobble Hill); Greenlight (Fort Greene); Spoonbill & Sugartown (Williamsburg). In Manhattan: McNally Jackson; The Strand; Rizzoli; and Housing Works. Other shoutouts: Powell’s in Portland; South Congress Books in Austin; Square Books in Oxford, Miss.
So, that was the long answer to “where do you hear about books?” The short answer is: from newsletters, litmags, and litblogs. And shmying around in person.
My favorites of 2023
Of course, there’s one more category for book discovery: word of mouth / recommendations from people you know. Does that qualify as a segue to list my favorite books I read in 2023? Only two months late. Not all of these were new releases in 2023, but this is my list. I’ll be very brief (for once) and I’ll remind you that all of my links go to Bookshop.org if you want to purchase:
Big Swiss, Jen Beagin: It’s laugh-out-loud funny, sexy, the premise is extremely creative (a woman in Hudson NY knows everyone’s private business because she works as a transcriber for a local sex therapist), and it goes to surprising places.
Little Monsters, Adrienne Brodeur: One of the best depictions of the difficulties of adult sibling relationships I’ve ever read. And set on the Cape.
The Guest, Emma Cline: Reads like a slow-motion trainwreck, you keep cringing as you turn the pages to the unsurprising conclusion.
Under the Dome, Stephen King: Had never read this one (and certainly did not watch the CBS miniseries) but obviously the premise is unsubtle and ridiculous: one morning a town wakes up encased in a dome. But his vision of all the different mini-disasters that arise, and how a town full of very flawed people would respond and behave, is extremely smart and believable.
The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy: Wrote about it here. Ironic to say this since it was his final novel (I do not count Stella Maris), but I believe it could be a good place to start if you’ve never read him.
Inland, Tea Obreht: Wrote about it here. Wonderfully weird Western.
Here I Am, Jonathan Safran Foer: I can’t begin to summarize this long, epic family drama with a couple sentences. I’ll just say it’s the most Jewish novel I’ve ever read, and that it contains dozens and dozens of scenes where I wanted to underline every piece of dialogue for three pages straight. It also presciently foretold, sadly, another full-on Israel-Palestine war.
Stop counting
One last thought for this issue: At this time of year three years ago, I wrote about when you catch yourself rushing through books just to achieve volume, and I urged everyone to try to slow down your reading. If you’re a voracious reader, it’s only natural to whip through books on your way to the next one on your nightstand. That year, I noted that I read 53 books (and felt that was an unseemly total). I see in my reading log that in 2023, I read just… 39 books. That’s surely in part from having welcomed a baby in June (!) but I also read some longer novels last year that took up more time. I also turned to more audiobooks.
But I think the healthiest thing would be not to count at all.
I’m bringing this up again because I’ve seen a lot of tweets lately (on the algorithmic hellscape formerly called Twitter and now called X, on which we all now see the exact same viral engagement-farming posts because that’s what gets promoted to us in the feed) in which people either share their goal for this year (50 books! 100 books!) or boast about their tally from last year. This is a map/territory problem: stating how many books you read in a year doesn’t say anything about how you read them (probably not closely) or what you got out of them (probably not everything you could have) or what kind of reader you are. It doesn’t say you’re smart, or erudite, or interesting, or really anything about you at all, other than that you made the time to rack up a lot of books.
I write down every book I read in a physical notebook (just title, author, the date I finished, and a star if I thought it was outstanding; no other comments). I’ll keep doing that for the sake of my own memory, but at the end of 2024, I’m going to stop myself from looking at the final tally for the year. I’d encourage everyone not to read for the sake of volume.
If you made it all the way to the end of this lengthy one, thank you so much for reading. Forward to your friends! Leave a comment! I love hearing from you, otherwise why am I writing these?
Happy book discovering.
Great list! I loved Under the Dome, too. It was a fun thousand pages.
This is a great source! Thanks for sharing my newsletter as well. 🙏