Most Enjoyed Reads of 2023

As  2023 comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on the many incredible journeys that books have taken me on this past year, and looking forward to more new reads and rereads in 2024. Every book I read this year taught me something, and if I had time, and didn’t care about boring you to death, I would list each one of them and a few pearls of wisdom obtained from their pages. Instead, I am just going to reflect on the three books that made the biggest impact on me this year. 

I’d like to start with Larry McMurtry’s epic, Lonesome Dove. This is a read that is long overdue. What surprised me most about this book was how realistically bleak it was. It took me a long time to finish, not because I wasn’t enamored with the characters, the writing, and the deep, human themes, but because it felt both too real, and too true. Life itself is often bleak and devastating and there are no real happy-ever-afters or cute, quick solutions to problems like books usually have. McMurtry captures that real bleakness of the world and life in a way that I wasn’t expecting. It was hard to go from a day at the hospital, seeing sad, heavy stories play out, back to this book, where realistically sad, heavy stories also play out. 

For hundreds of pages you journey with a character along their messy, complicated roads—the only kinds of roads that life seems to offer. You get to know a character intimately, deeply, fully, their inconsistencies, their brokenness, their irrational rationalizing of the things they encounter and then, they just die, and there are no final words, there is no beautiful, transcendent redemption, and there is no coming back from that death. 

There is an incredibly intense irrationality in the characters, just like real people. They all have a deep lack of insight into their own personalities and existence that also feels jarringly real. Clara’s story, in particular, was harsh and real. Her husband is injured, and in a storybook, that poor man would just die, and Clara could get together with Gus, an intellectual match for her, if not a match in other ways. But this isn’t a storybook (or at least it’s not written like one), this is real life. Clara has to care for her husband and we see the awful pain and ugliness of that as her caregiving drags on and on and on, and the body of her flawed husband, slowly passes, a long time after the mind and person who he once was has disappeared into the void through which we all must pass. This was riveting and awful and so true to what actually happens, it left me broken. 

The line from Lonesome Dove that sticks with me the most, all these months after finishing the book, was spoken by Po Campo. 

“I don’t sing about myself,” Campo said. “I sing about life. I am happy, but life is sad. The songs don’t belong to me.” 

“Well, you sing them, who do they belong to?” Pea asked. 

“They belong to those who hear them,” Po said.

As something of an artist at heart, this struck me. Every piece of art we create in life will speak to someone else, but certainly not to everyone. It is just for those who hear it. Each piece of art or work of fiction will only speak to certain people. Those who’ve had an experience, or are having an experience, or feel and think a certain way, will recognize something of their own soul there when they look at a picture or open a book. No work of art is for everyone, it’s for those that hear it. And for them, that one piece of art can be incredibly life-altering. 

This brings me to the second book on the list of most impactful reads: No Home for You Here by Adam Theron-Lee Rensch. It is a story about growing up in the US in a poor family somewhere in Ohio, and finding class-consciousness after that upbringing. I read this book because I too grew up in rural America, on a farm with almost more mouths to feed than there was food to go around. Certainly there was no excess for many of the things more privileged children get to have. That connection with the author’s story was part of why this book resonated with me. 

The struggle and darkness that Theron-Lee Rensch experienced, the devastating horror that engulfed many of the people he knew, including his own father, also resonated with me because I work at a small, rural hospital in the US, and I knew the people he described. I take care of them every day. I know how complicated and beautiful these people can be, and how ruthless and devastating and cruel our capitalist system, in particular our capitalist system of healthcare, can be for them. This book is gut-wrenching, and real, and timely. It was humanizing for a huge subgroup of people that are too often dehumanized in our media. I highly recommend you read it. I think the honesty and authenticity with which Theron-Lee Rensch writes is what makes it so painfully, beautifully gripping. It’s a book that will leave you thinking for a long time after you finish it, and treating others differently, and looking at our world and our country differently as well. You may be left longing for the revolution that will end the extreme inequality in our nation and world, and longing to be a part of that fight. 

At the beginning of Theron-Lee Rensch’s book there is a quote, pulled from Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. I am ashamed to say I was not familiar with Thomas Wolfe’s work before 2023. I had seen his name on lists of prominent American authors of the early 1900s, but I had never read anything of his. When I opened Theron-Lee Rensch’s book and saw those words, I was smitten, pulled completely in, and I instantly needed more of this man’s writing. Here was a person singing a song that I could hear, singing my song, I felt that keenly. 

So the third, and final book that impacted me this year, was the great Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. Indeed, after finishing it, I could not bring myself to read anything else for a long time because I needed to sit with the words of Thomas Wolfe.

It’s hard for me to express what about this book resonated so much. The absurdity, perhaps, the hilarious, real absurdity of all the characters portrayed. For even in all their absurdity, and perhaps because of all their absurdity, these characters—and real people like these characters—are beautiful. Wolfe seemed to look directly into the soul of people and write them so truly and so realistically. It was such a journey, following the lead character as he grew, and learned, and changed, as we all do, though we are so often unaware of it while it happens. I laughed, really laughed, while reading this book. The end, those last few words, left me misty-eyed, as I reflected on how we can’t go home again, and perhaps, it is better that we can’t. Perhaps we shouldn’t go home again. But that notion that you can’t go back, you can only keep going forward, is only one of the many transcendent ideas that Thomas Wolfe lays out in his book, and I encourage you to pick up some of his work this year, if you haven’t before. 

I hope that in this coming year, you find many books that can belong to you, as Po Campo said, books that are singing a song you can hear. I leave you for now, with all my best wishes, and the beautiful words of Thomas Wolfe, as you start 2024: 

“To lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.” 

With gratitude and in solidarity,

Amelia Maria Vergara