Best books I’ve read 2023

In 2023 I felt my reading was rather chaotic, but now as I consider my favourite reads of the year some distinct themes emerge. Also this year I’m throwing in a bit of a wider cultural round up, because why not!

Chloe Wilson’s short stories made me scream, wince and cackle while Mykaela Saunder’s anthology of First Nations spec fiction opened portals in my brain. I was enchanted by two historical novels: Robyn Mundy’s Svalbard-set Cold Coast and Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek. The Right To Sex and The Patriarchs were damn good reads about power and inequality. And I read a bunch of boundary-shaking, inventive short novels (some thanks to briefly joining a queer book club): the murky politics of Box Hill and If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, the bedroom-horror of Boulder, the grief of Waypoints and the picaresque madness of Macunaíma. Two poems are going on my forever list to return to: Sarah Holland-Bart’s Time Remaining and W. H. Auden’s Since.

My partner’s book, The Boy In The Dress, won a Danger Award for Best True Crime, and at the festival where the award was announced I saw one of the best writing panels I’ve ever seen featuring Tony Birch, Julie Janson and Nardie Simpson, chaired by Larissa Behrendt.

I didn’t read much useful about the Voice Referendum here in Australia and its devastating result (a lot of the media was caught up in the execrable debate among politicians). One exception being the great work that goes on at IndigenousX. Further afield, I devour pretty much everything the Boston Review publishes, but was particularly provoked/enlightened by this thoughtful review of several novels co-composed with AI, an interesting take on misinformation and rigorous coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza. Speaking of the war, UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese‘s school Australia’s journalists is well worth a watch. Ceasefire now.

On screen I was team pink in the Barbenheimer event, even if Barbie disappeared up the wazoo in an effort to balance being a giant ad with its satire of patriarchy. I was delighted to discover queer classics in Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together, Tony Ayres’s The Home Song Stories and Clair Denis’s Beau travail, a new queer voice in Goran Stolevski’s Of An Age and the naughty and entertaining Passages from Ira Sachs.

I neglected music a bit this year, although have had Lana Del Rey’s gorgeously messy latest album on regular play, and have been watching every mute challenge and blooper from the Renaissance World Tour on TikTok. I was as rattled by the Padam-quake as every other queer on the planet and later felt the Rush, although it was the music video for One Of Your Girls that had me truly gagged. Still to recover.

But onto the best books I read.

Shirley by Ronnie Scott — an unnamed Melbourne woman looks back from lockdown to the summer before the pandemic, in this scintillatingly strange and painfully funny take on early 30s life and what it means to care. Despite its mannered surfaces, there’s a thrilling animalness stalking the pages. A brilliant companion and follow up to The Adversary.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright — there are few things more exciting to me than a new Alexis Wright novel, and at nearly 800 pages this one overwhelms in its ideas, craft and spirit. A vast “open-wound theatre” about an Aboriginal family living on the edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria, it’s a satire of the colonial absurdities of Australia, an agonising fable of family, and a manifesto for surviving the end of the world … again and again and again.

We Come With This Place by Debra Dank — Debra Dank tells the story of her family on Gudanji Country on the Gulf of Carpentaria in a constellation of stories. It’s a warm, beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes funny memoir, but it’s Dank’s way of telling that offers a way of listening to and being in the land that’s really seeped into my mind.

Porn by Polly Barton — Polly Barton interviews 19 friends and acquaintances — totally everyday folk, a range of ages, genders and sexualities — about their relationship with porn. The ground it covers is vast, from ethics to violence to politics to shame and desire, but the overall impression is of the exuberant complicatedness of being human.

A Passage To India by E. M. Forster — a young British lady arrives in India under the British Raj in this mannered, comedic and melodramatic 1924 novel. When a crisis of justice arises, the tensions between rulers and oppressed detonate. Where A Passage To India still thrills today is its clear-eyed depiction of how colonialism manifests in the relationships between people, and its ambivalence about whether friendship is possible under such a system.