I am both sharper and lousier at best-of lists with each passing year.
My brain and my heart cannot be satisfied with sharing just a few titles here, a few there. As such, what follows is just the first of a three-part look at my favorite reads that arrived in 2023. And yet, these lists strain the seams because I am so much more in touch with what I want, and now find it everywhere.
A friend reminded me recently of “ecstatic truths,” or those which cut closer to the heart of reality. This year, my favorite nonfiction books dealt, yes, in the evident and measurable. But in doing so, they touched the spiritual center of what’s real about a given situation or sequence of moments. And I’m so very grateful.
My favorite nonfiction books of 2023, alphabetical by author:
Matthew Desmond, “Poverty, By America” / Rather than merely describe distinctly American strains of poverty (though Desmond threads crucial illustrations throughout), the acclaimed author and sociologist asks how the self-proclaimed greatest country on the planet could come up so short, so often—and offers real answers for what should come next.
Harrison Scott Key, “How to Stay Married” / Somehow hilarious and harrowing, Key offers scenes from a seemingly irreparable marriage, then documents its one-step-forward, two-steps-back reconciliation in one of the most unique, ultimately faith-keeping memoirs you’ll ever read.
Josh Larsen, “Fear Not” / My friend and sometimes editor Josh Larsen crafts a pitch-perfect theological analysis of horror films, the compendium both a fitting introduction to genre novices (like myself) and a plumbing deeper into the soul of what scares us.
Alex Mar, “Seventy Times Seven” / Mar’s substantive, soulful work—subtitled “A True Story of Murder and Mercy”—further complicates our American narrative around the death penalty, asking what it means to forgive and damn our youngest criminals, those whose lives taste ruin so very early.
Shane McCrae, “Pulling the Chariot of the Sun” / The ever-staggering poet Shane McCrae handles the elusive shapes of memory and belonging in this lyrical recollection of his own childhood kidnapping and the portrait of family formed in its wake.
Alan Noble, “On Getting Out of Bed” / Even now, I read the title of Noble’s latest and feel the many tensions within that very idea: getting out of bed. In a slim but significant volume, the author considers what it means to broker tenuous peace with our own bodies and souls; Noble’s commentary is both thorough and empathetic.
Sarah Sanderson, “The Place We Make” / Sarah Sanderson fulfills the word “revealing” as she examines a troubling instance of racial exclusion; and discovers how the history of racism in Oregon is her own history—and that of white Americans across the country.
Jeff Sharlet, “The Undertow” / Embedded deep behind the dividing lines of his own nation, veteran journalist Jeff Sharlet underlines the stakes of our present fractures, fingers the history which led us here and so beautifully laments all we stand to lose if we miss the closing window of repair.
Maggie Smith, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” / Let the poets write our histories. Maggie Smith’s gorgeous, humane memoir takes a supremely humble approach to her own story while never yielding an inch or iota of what and how she loves the world around her. To read Smith anywhere (and especially here) is to maintain touch with the best angels of our natures.
Christian Wiman, “Zero at the Bone” / Wiman’s “Fifty Entries Against Despair” shift genre and shape, crumbling and constructing various forms of spiritual resolve within poems, essays and odes to other writers. These pieces don’t form existential fighting words so much as they grant us extra measures of soul for the road.
And lest you think I lingered too long in this moment, here are a few favorite nonfiction reads from this year, transmitted in from years past:
Edward Abbey, “Desert Solitaire”
James Baldwin, “The Last Interview”
Paul Bogard, “The End of Night”
Bono, “Surrender”
Diane Glancy, “Home is the Road”
Next up: Part 2, poetry