How I learned to love reading fiction (again)

A journey.

Some time last year — in my long dark tea time of the soul — I realized I had mostly stopped reading fiction.

It wasn’t anything purposeful. I didn’t quit novels. I just stopped reading them.

What was I reading? Mostly political non-fiction. Books about the Trump presidency — there were a LOTS of them — specifically.

The problem? Reading had become just another extension of work. There was nothing WRONG with the non-fiction books I was reading. But they kept me deeply grounded in the granularities of my professional life.

I lacked, well, imagination. Flights of fancy. Reading not because I felt I had to but because I wanted to.

So, one of my resolutions for this year was to read more fiction. But, where to start? After all, I was a little rusty — and didn’t have a good sense of what was even out there. And I didn’t feel like starting off with “Moby Dick.” Sorry Herman Melville!

I went to the New York Times best books of 2023 list. It’s the ten books — five fiction, five non-fiction — that the book editors at the Times have picked as the best of the past year.

And I just started reading them. And what I found was there was a momentum to this. The more fiction I read, the more I wanted to read. I loved living — even briefly — in the worlds these authors created. Especially when our world can, well, be pretty dark at times these days.

It’s not even April and I have read (almost all) of the 5 books on the Times “best of” fiction list for 2023 (and a few other critically acclaimed ones too!). I reviewed each one, briefly, below. What should I read next?

• “The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray. This is the first novel I read this year and I absolutely loved it. It’s a family story — deeply entangled, and with an amazing reveal at the end. I don’t know why but this book reminded me of “Normal People” by Sally Rooney. And I loved it.

• “Chain Gang All Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. This is the book I’ve read this year that has stayed with me the longest. It paints a picture of a dystopian future where prisoners can opt to enter into a reality TV combat league rather than serve out the remainder of their sentences. They must fight to the death, however. This is a stunning indictment of our prison systems — and how we treat (and mock) the idea of rehabilitation.

• “The Fraud” by Zadie Smith. A man emerges who claims to be someone he clearly is not. But, somehow people believe him — and he becomes a massive celebrity. Sound familiar? That’s the central conceit of “The Fraud.” Of all the books I’ve read this year so far, I liked this one the least. Not even totally sure why.

• “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride. This book didn’t make the Times list but was Amazon’s 2023 book of the year. So there’s that. It tells the story of Chicken Hill, a neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania mostly populated by Jewish and black residents. It is beautifully written. Liked but did not love it.

• “Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett. A story about a family cherry orchard in Michigan during the pandemic may not seem like the stuff of a great novel but it very much is. This novel couldn’t be more different from “Chain Gang All Stars” but I loved both of them very much.

• “North Woods” by Daniel Mason. I am about 50 pages into this one. Like it so far. Too early to render a judgment.

• “Eastbound” by Maylis de Kerangal. This is next on my list. The Times description — “De Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, first published in France in 2012 and newly translated by Jessica Moore, follows a young Russian conscript named Aliocha on a trans-Siberian train packed with other soldiers” — scared me away just a little….