I wanted to preserve my annual year-end lists of all the books I’ve read in the past year. So if you’re looking for recommendations, you can find them all on this page.

As I learned a long time ago, my brain’s ability to absorb other people’s books takes a big hit when I’m working on one of my own. Someone asked me recently to describe, in the vaguest terms possible, the new book that I co-edited with David Fletcher. I said it was “a dramatic legal thriller about a ballplayer coming out of the cornfield to sue his own team, only to win over the jury but then end up in jail for perjury.” All of that is true, but it’s just a fancy way to say I spent a lot of time reading a 300,000-word trial transcript from 100 years ago. Now, you can read it too!

My reading list (non-trial division) was all over the map in 2023 — just like the rest of my life. We began the year living in a small, picturesque apartment on an island in San Francisco Bay and ended up in a nice little place on the far north side of Chicago, where I was finally able to unpack all of our books after 18 months packed away in storage. I missed them. Thankfully, I had plenty of access to reading material with my still-current public library cards (in three different states!) and the Libby app for e-books and audiobooks.

The best book I read this year was Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight on the egregious civil rights violations committed by the U.S. government during and immediately after World War I. The time period is right up my alley, of course, but it’s also starkly prescient for current events today.

I also thoroughly enjoyed Rebecca Makkai’s first novel, The Great Believers, following several Chicago characters through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Her new novel, sort of a send-up of true-crime podcasts (a la the delightful Only Murders in the Building), was a lot of fun too.

I had high expectations for long-awaited novels from two of my all-time favorite authors, Dennis Lehane and Tim O’Brien. Lehane’s Small Mercies (set during the school busing wars of 1970s Boston) took a while to warm up but ultimately was a strong addition to his lineup. O’Brien’s America Fantastica wasn’t quite satirical enough to be entertaining, given how closely his unreliable protagonist resembles real life these days.

David Maraniss is always worth reading and so is Jill Lepore; I always learn something good from those two. Sarah Weinman’s collection of essays on true-crime storylines from 2018 to 2022 was superb. So was Keith Gave’s inside history of the Detroit Red Wings’s Russian stars of the 1990s and Keith O’Brien’s Fly Girls on Amelia Earhart and her lesser-known but just as talented aviatrix peers of the 1930s. Alexandra Petri is an American treasure, as always. And Kate Larson on Rosemary Kennedy’s tragic life story was eye-opening and righteously infuriating.

I wanted to like Louise Penny’s Detective Gamache novels more than I did. Same with Bill Bryson’s At Home and Stephen King’s Fairy Tale. Oh well.

Without further ado, here’s my full reading list for 2023:

• Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, by David Maraniss
• Paper Towns, by John Green
• The Russian Five: A Story of Espionage, Defection, Bribery, and Courage, by Keith Gave
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson
• Fairy Tale, by Stephen King
• Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, by Kate Clifford Larson
• Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History, by Keith O’Brien
• Still Life, by Louise Penny
• American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, by Adam Hochschild
• West with the Night, by Beryl Markham
• I Have Some Questions For You, by Rebecca Makkai
• Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, by Adam Hochschild
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane
• The Midnight Witness, by Sara Blaedel
• Alexandra Petri’s US History: Important American Documents, by Alexandra Petri
• If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, by Jill Lepore
• The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
• The First Season: 1917-18 and the Birth of the NHL, by Bob Duff
• America Fantastica, by Tim O’Brien
• Evidence of Things Seen, edited by Sarah Weinman
• A Fatal Grace, by Louise Penny

And eight years after my first one, here’s my favorite book of 2023:

• Joe Jackson, Plaintiff, vs. Chicago American League Baseball Club, Defendant: The Never-Before-Seen Trial Transcript, edited by Jacob Pomrenke and David J. Fletcher