The LRG Best Books of 2023

With the last month of this year officially upon us, it’s time for me to reveal my picks for Best Books of 2022.

This is a Top Five list but rest assured, there were many other great books that I throughly enjoyed and wholeheartedly recommend (a shout out to some of them will appear at the end of this post).

To start things off, Gabrielle Zevin’s  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is making the rounds on many a best of list and for good reason. While this novel focuses strongly on the development of video games from the eighties until now, the central theme here is far from a game.

When Sam Masur reconnects with Sadie Green in college (their initial friendship started in a children’s hospital over multiple games of Oregon Trail), their mutual love of video games, particularly role playing ones, not only sparked up a new bond, it lead to them becoming major creative forces within this growing industry.

Aided by their friend Marx, Sam and Sadie made some of the most imaginative games ever that ignited generations of fans. However, obstacles such as sexism and egotism were harder to dodge than any pixel made menace.

All in all, T&T&T is a tale of love and friendship, which lasts longer than any online challenge or real world difficulty in the end. This may be Zevin’s masterpiece and I don’t say that lightly:

Another out of this world read that’s rightfully on a number of best books as well is Sea of Tranquility by Emily St.John Mandel.

This is one of those “don’t know too much before reading “ type of books but I can safely say that this is a time travel story that has several different people sharing a strange moment of music and sound together across multiple realms.

The one person meant to simply observe it all decides to make a choice that does and doesn’t affect these realities and the price paid is heartbreakingly beautiful indeed.

I know this sounds like a complicated story yet it’s easy to get into and almost hypnotic in it’s pacing that compels you to stay up as late as possible to see what happens next. Such a treasure is worth diving into at least once:

For something completely different, Deanna Raybourn gives us Killers of a Certain Age as four retired hit women find out that their professional career departure is meant to be permanent.

This quartet of seemingly meek and mild older ladies, lead by the boisterous Billie, are set up as pawns in a power struggle from their former employers but despite what the younger generation thinks, these women, who cut their teeth on hunting down Nazis, are far more formidable than they appear.

For those looking for less than likely leading ladies in an action packed drama with some humor and heart, this novel is all and a slice of cheesecake:

Natalie Jenner followed up her charming debut novel, The Jane Austen Society, with another literary themed tale of books and people connecting in Bloomsbury Girls.

Set in post WWII London, the trio of women who work at this previously all-male bookstore are doing their best to match their colleagues in making the shop more appealing to a wider set of readers(which the business financially needs ).

Despite the individual efforts of shy Evie, modest Grace and the dynamic Vivien, their attempts to improve the shop and their personal lives keep being held back from true success. Only by working together can these women find a way towards a better bookish tomorrow.

You don’t have to have read The Jane Austen Society first(even though there is a shared character) to appreciate Bloomsbury Girls, although the two books do make for a lovely literary pairing for any true reader indeed:

For my nonfiction selection, Not All Supermen by Tim Hanley continues the author’s winning streak of engaging in depth looks at the comic book industry.

Hanley chronicles the development of male and female archetypes within the pages of both Marvel and DC Comics from Superman to the X-Men and how the current and changing times have been reflected in these iconic characters.

Hanley also looks at the behind the scenes office politics that allowed for rampant sexism and other bias based attitudes to flourish over the decades. Despite these challenges, inspiration and hope to create a better world both on and off page is still a solid reason to keep this format going by bringing much needed change and representation to the forefront.

You can still love a genre and be able to criticize it as well as encourage those involved to do better, which Hanley does brilliantly here and in his other works that focus on the likes of Lois Lane, Betty and Veronica, Wonder Woman and even Catwoman. By flipping the script and using our real skills against the naysayers can genre fare strive to be the heroes that we all long to be:

Like I said before, there were so many great books to highlight this year and while it would take way too to list them all, I do want to salute these particular authors for their fine work in 2022:

Love and Other Disasters by Anita Kelly: A cooking competition romance that celebrates more than one form of love. This is a delicious dish of a read to slowly savor.

A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting by Sophie Irwin: Fans of Mr. Malcolm’s List(great movie,btw!) will rejoice in this clever bit of romance and social satire in Regency England.

 The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray: A delightful blend of Jane Austen characters dealing with an Agatha Christie mystery in the midst of their house party. A good time to be had by all here!

I hope that this list is useful for your holiday shopping as well as your personal TBR piles for next year. Reading is definitely the gift that keeps on giving all year round but it is nice to have a proper excuse for getting and giving more books, that’s for sure: