As determined, arbitrarily and capriciously, by me. I don’t have an objective standard upon which I’m rating the 52 books I reviewed over the course of 2023 to choose the five best, and I’m not using a decision matrix to rank them based on quantitative and qualitative factors. These are, subjectively, at the time of this writing, my five favorite books that I read in 2023.
This is never an easy list to make, even if this is only my second year documenting it for the site. I read a lot of books, and usually a great many of them are books that I could easily justify putting on a list like this one. That’s a good problem to have, but it does mean that, inevitably, some truly excellent pieces of literature won’t make the cut. I limit the list to five, but I encourage you to look back through our entire catalogue of reviews to see what else could have made the cut.
Still, these are the five that I chose, and I think they are worthy of their places on this list. They are the five books that I am most likely to recommend to someone else from the past year’s reading, and I am glad to recommend them to you.
5. Laurus
Reviewed on November 29th, 2023
Lying somewhere between historical fiction and realistic fiction, Laurus proved a deeply immersive, engaging, and finely written book that effectively captures a time and a place in a way few books can. Maybe it’s because of my own effort at “historically adjacent fantasy,” or maybe just my fascination with history, but this was one of the more memorable books I read this year. It also has one of the best treatments of real world religion, and historical religiosity at that, that I’ve ever read.
4. Grant
Reviewed on June 22nd, 2023
Not that I’ve done extensive comparisons, but Chernow is far and away my favorite biographer, past or present. His treatments are always thorough, broad, and relatable. He enables you to come as close as is probably possible to knowing a historical figure, and he does it with a generosity of perspective that is refreshing in its openness to what the historical record conveys, rather than attempting to advance a specific narrative. It is treating his subjects as real people, and not just as historical figures, that helps make Chernow biographies so exemplary, and Grant is no exception.
3. Two treatises of Government
Reviewed on May 25th, 2023
In the entire corpus of “Western” literature, there are certain pieces which are particularly foundational to our modern mores, governmental systems, and way of life. Assumptions we make are, in many cases, assumptions we are able to make because of foundational pieces of political philosophy like John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. The second treatise in particular is a splendidly articulate derivation of the role of government and the right to political self-determination. Asserting various rights as “fundamental” is all well and good, but I argue it amounts to little more than idealistic moralizing if it is not supported by argument from first principles, which is exactly what Locke does. Anyone who cares about governance should read these treatises.
2. Tress of the Emerald Sea
Reviewed on September 7th, 2023
Despite its place in my heart, it can be difficult for modern speculative fiction to make the cut for this list when you consider the competition it’s up against from some three thousand years of literary history. Tress of the Emerald Sea, though, was easily one of my favorite books of the year, and one of the best Sanderson novels. It reminds me most of Warbreaker, which has long been my go-to novel for gifting, and Tress joined it in that role this year. Reminding me of why I love fantasy, and why I love reading in general, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Even if you don’t like epic fantasy like Mistborn or Way of Kings, you should read Tress of the Emerald Sea.
1. Diné Bahane’
Reviewed on January 26th, 2023
No book that I read this year was more perspective broadening than Diné Bahane’, the Navajo creation story. Zolbrod does a fantastic job with the monumental task of immortalizing an oral tradition in a drastically different language into an approachable English text. This embodies what I was attempting to do with my grand tour of ancient world literature, and its very foreignness to a typical English reader is part of what makes it so valuable a read. I remain convinced that the best way, and perhaps the only way, to become truly immersed and thereby to approach an understanding of an ancient culture is through their stories which endure, and I hope you’ll experience that with the Navajo soon.
There you are: my top five books for 2023, which I read and reviewed, and which I most highly recommend you read soon (assuming you haven’t already). For reference, some of the books that didn’t make the cut for the top five included Paradise Lost, Relativity, The Clan of the Cave Bear, and Euclid’s Elements, so you can see that this is not an easy exercise. Still, I think it is worthwhile, and a fine annual tradition. You can find 2022’s edition linked at the bottom of the post. If you still need more ideas for your reading list, I suggest that you check out out Books to Read page. For now, I’ll let you get back to reading.
IGC Publishing 
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