Are you looking for great books to read for your 2023 reading year? Then check out the books that made my list of the best of 2022! Out of the 129 books I read last year, I'm proud to call these th best of the best.
Head over to the link below ⬇️⬇️⬇️
https://bit.ly/CupOfTeaBestBooks2022
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Books of 2023: The Trial by Laura Bates ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.25/5
Bates has brought young readers another powerful and insightful tale of how sexism and harassment are rampant in our society. You think this is your everyday survival story, and it is not. It's a different type of survival story, a tale that most girls and women unfortunately live with every day. @bookstodon
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#bookstagram #laurabates #ukyabooks #feminism #yabooks #bestbooksof2022
#fightagainstmisogyny #femaleempowerment
I forgot one! Another of my literary standouts of the year: Claire-Louise Bennett's <i>Checkout 19</i>, which @DrBibliomane put me onto. A book about the way life is permeated with books, and a lush, stylistically striking immersion into an idiosyncratic consciousness. Absolutely loved it.
(I missed this because I forgot to enter it on Goodreads, apparently, which also now means that I read ONE MORE book in 2022 than I did in 2021!)
And a bonus mention for a piece of nonfiction which was as beautifully plotted, characterised, and written as my favourite novels of the year: Patrick Radden Keefe’s <i>Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty</i>, a three-generation family saga, like a more sober <i>I, Claudius</i>.
Three great campus/dark-academia novels:
Julia May Jonas, <i>Vladimir</i> - very enjoyable riff on <i>Lolita</i> via an investigation of sexual misconduct on campus
Jean Hanff Korelitz, <i>The Devil and Webster</i> - I wished she hadn’t gone with the twist at the end, which bought her out of the intractable moral quandary the novel sets up, but this was the most recognisable campus novel I have ever read (though UOW is... not Dartmouth) – like one of the great 80s campus novels (Lodge, <i>Nice Work</i>, Smiley, <i>Moo</i>) set in a recognisably twenty-first century world.
Mona Awad, <i>All’s Well</i> which was also one of my picks of the year, but deserves mentioning again bc it’s such a good contribution to the campus-novel genre. Sort of a grown-up version of her <i>Bunny</i>, which is a Buffy-meets-The-Secret-History novel about dark magic shenanigans among a clique of mean girls in grad school for creative writing (as good as it sounds).
Genre writers I got really into this year:
* Ruth Ware for her stylish, plot-driven British domestic noir
* Mick Herron's Jackson Lamb series: John Le Carre crossed with P G Wodehouse, and a bit of Reginald Hill thrown in
* Denise Mina’s realist crime fiction (mostly set in Glasgow) plus her gorgeous caper novels: like a twenty-first century Barbara Wilson
Literary standouts, part 2:
Sue Orr, <i>Loop Tracks</i>: a quiet book, entirely successful as a piece of realist women’s fiction, which at the same time, under the surface, manages to be terrifically conceptually and structurally complex (loop tracks!), so it quietly reorganises your brain while you read on for the understated plot and complicated characters.
Mona Awad <i>All's Well</i>: an amazing, unguessable, lush, magic-realist Shakespeare remix, a novel about a 40something woman in chronic pain, a campus novel, and a novel about putting on a play, so... perhaps the perfect book?
Literary (by which I mean books that are doing something out-of-the-box and contributing to something beyond their own genre) standouts of the year, part 1:
S J Norman <i>Permafrost</i>
Eerie, interlinked, very queer ghost stories: a reinscription of the European ghost/fairy tradition on Indigenous terms. Subtle writing which goes on working in you long after the book has finished, and packs a hefty political punch.
Nat Ogle <i>In The Seeing Hands of Others</i>
Extraordinary, unnerving, chilling, unpredictable book which walked around my expectations in many ways. Brilliant thinking-through of empathy via an account of sexual assault which never excuses or valorises the perpetrator.
Claire Vaye Watkins, <i>I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness</i>: a literal vagina dentata and a Kathy-Ackeresque feminist trip. Put this on your “motherhood” reading lists.
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