Thrillers! Fascism! Fascist Thrillers! Top Books Read in 2023
Hey nerds! Here's my Top 10* list of books read in 2023. This year, in a word: Thrillers! In two words: Thrillers and fascism! Slip on your horned-rim specs and buckle your seat belts.
(* denotes more than 10.)
(No climate/energy books here.)
Link to prior lists: www.ericroston.com/booklists/
Engrossing pastiche procedural unrolling over the WWII years, with a sturdier-than-noir detective tracing the crime he can't forget. This story really cooks. A key theme is also increasingly relevant as [gestures everywhere].
I couldn't in good conscience extend a Top 10 list into 16, but I also couldn't drop this long-lost peak noir. A sinning, imperfect man, in morally challenging circumstances, always wants to do the right thing, sort of, and never can.
A serial killer who starts making mistakes hides in plain sight of local authorities. A tense, satisfying thriller all the wiser for Hughes having to make her points in the cryptic way 1947 would let her.
A middle aged investigative podcaster teaches a class at her old HS. Students take on a cold murder case — of her roommate, 20 years before. A searing look and look-back at embedded misogyny and racism, how they change over time — and how they never do.
A good, desperate man is naively conned in a well-known hoax, and remains true, sometimes against logic and reason, to the woman he loves. Immaculately plotted, hilarious, grisly.
Julia reveals the story beneath, around and in-between 1984. An imaginative sequel to a superlative novel at the time we need it most. Told from the perspective of the original's female lead, this fast-paced,thought-provoking gem gives you Big Brother as never before.
Before tech cos began vacuuming in our thoughts and behavior automatically, totalitarian governments had to do so by hand. One out of every 6 or 7 people spied for East Germany's Stasi. Funder reveals heroes — and how they fared living next door to former informants after 1990.
7 Three Girls From Bronzeville | Turner 2022 Memoir of childhood and formative years growing up in the Chicago neighborhood. The story of three women whose lives start out the same and take tragically different paths. Haunting, the triumphs and tragedies burn into your memory.
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Multiple murders in a medieval monastery — and the monk from Baskerville (get it? get it?) is on it. The plot (and cumbersome backstory) elevates and solves mysteries beyond flesh and blood, with twists around every bookshelf.
A sophisticated Planet of the Apes but it's spiders and it has literally nothing to do w Planet of the Apes. Ingenious world-creation, relentless exploration of its implications. None of this should work, which makes the accomplishment all the more remarkable
"The best book you've never heard of" (NYer) follows a mediocre guy leading a forgettable life and it's all somehow a masterclass in fiction.
Few villains are quite like jackass petty misogynist tenured professors. I think because their tie is so clear to the lower circles of Dante's Hell. Still, reason prevailed at MIT in 1999 when it embraced this sad legacy, vowing change. The last 3rd could be "Ocean's 16."
What do we do about great art that we love by horrible men? Cancel them and shun it? Imagine we can cleave the art from the artist? Who's a monster anyway? You? Me? Insightful, probing answers to tough current and eternal questions in this totally brill book-essay.
Nations are elaborate stories that people call into being by believing they exist and behaving accordingly. If the US’s story—a multiracial entrepreneurial powerhouse founded on equality under law—is to persist, it’s good Lepore put the whole case file between 2 covers.
A very very very urgent book, still, filled with critical messages about how the horror occurred, few as relevant and generalizable as: It was easier for Nazis to just obliterate laws and states than to separate Jewish people from the protection of laws and states. I turned from the last page to the 1st and reread it.
A review of the Russian abyss and what it means for the US etc. Fascist tactics are easy to spot, hard to uproot: But you have to or they'll keep at it: Een Rahsha fashEEzm eats you. I turned from the last page to the 1st and reread it. Welcome to 2024.
Vice President, External Affairs
1 年One of the few Timothy Snyder works I haven’t read. Will check it out. Thanks for posting.
Managing Director
1 年Here’s to great reads in 24!
The Sustainability Strategist? | Greening Corporations, Private Equity & Real Estate Investments for Higher Returns??
1 年Thank you Eric!
Thanks! Excellent and intriguing reviews (excellent for their coinciseness ??). Impressed you read Eco’s… not the shortest of fictions
Esri Comms Leader + Media Relations Executive Eminence Program TED SXSW TIME 100
1 年I loved I Have Some Questions for You.