The most interesting things I read in 2023

Most of them are not from 2023

This is not a best of 2023 list. Instead, it’s a “here’s some of the most interesting writing I came across in 2023” list.

If you’re wondering why I only included two history books below, despite being a historian: the truth is, I was burnt out on reading history this year because I spent much of my time writing it. The result is Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, a book I’m super proud of and one whose release date (January 14, 2024) is now getting surprisingly close. A lot of the most interesting things I’ve ever read in historical archives are contained in it. So if anything in the list below speaks to you, it’s a good bet that Tripping on Utopia might, too.

On to the list!

Novels

• Hernan Diaz, Trust (Knopf, 2022)

He experienced most of what happened in New York through the newspapers—and, above all, through the ciphers on the ticker tape.

An extraordinarily well-written and ingeniously structured novel about finance, mental illness, 1920s New York City, history, gender, and the nature of reality. I’ve read a lot of writing from the period this novel is set in. Diaz brilliantly evokes both the surface level — the prose style, the settings — and the darkness lurking beneath. There was something haunted and mysterious about the years dividing the two world wars. This novel captures it better than any other I’ve read.

• Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light (2020)

Now the season changes. Each brightening day is made up of other days he has known. He sees a flock of chaffinches rise like flying roses from a still pool. His hawks watch dust motes as they flitter against a wall, as if the sunlight is a living thing, their prey.

Despite all her awards, I think Hilary Mantel is still underrated. I’ve never read anyone who is better at conveying the paradoxical feeling of distance and familiarity that you get when you read early modern texts. The tiniest of details in Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy (her fictional, mostly historically-accurate chronicle of Thomas Cromwell’s life) ring true to me. And yet she invented almost all of them. In my opinion, this series is a work of genius.

• Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (1973)

“People who travel a great deal lose their souls at some point. All these lost souls are up there in the ozone. They get emitted from jet aircraft along with the well-known noxious chemicals. There’s a soul belt up there. People who travel talk about nothing but travel. Before, during and after. This is the world’s worst soap, Bucky. Shit, you come into my apartment and live here and go out shopping and bring back absolute crap in the way of amenities for the body.”

Why don’t more people talk about the fact that Don DeLillo’s third novel is narrated by Bob Dylan during an extended mental breakdown? And that the plot (such as it is) centers on a drug that “debilitates the language centers of the brain”? I exaggerate slightly — the character of Bucky Wunderlick is clearly based on Dylan, but is at least nominally fictional. And of course people do talk about Great Jones Street. The part I’m not mentioning is that almost nothing happens here, plot-wise, so don’t expect a Netflix adaptation anytime soon. But if you’re looking for virtuosic writing, cults, and a very strong dose of 1970s paranoia, this is the book for you.

• Herman Wouk, The Winds of War (Little Brown, 1971)

Madeline toiled for five hours to finish the script. She turned it in, messy though her work was, hoping it would not end her radio career then and there. At the employment office she learned she was starting at thirty-five dollars a week. It seemed a fortune. She took her aching back to the drugstore, made a quick dinner of a chocolate drink and a bacon and tomato sandwich, and walked back to CBS. Over the tall black Madison Avenue buildings, checkered with gold-lit windows, a misty full moon floated in a sunset sky. This day when Hitler’s war began was turning out the most delightful in Madeline Henry’s life.

I’ve been enjoying this family saga of World War II immensely. Wouk (who lived to the age of 103) was born in 1915 to Russian Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, worked in the Golden Age of Radio in 1930s NYC, then served in the US Navy before becoming famous as an author with The Caine Mutiny (1951), which won a Pulitzer. There’s vivid sense of realism here — a feeling that this is a direct feed of an unusually perceptive person’s actual experience of the late 1930s and 1940s, albeit filtered through a series of artificial, action-packed plot devices.

Biography

• John A. Farrel, Nixon: The Life (Vintage, 2018)

He was taking Equinal for his anxiety, and Dexamyl, an amphetamine then prescribed for depression and anxiety, and Doriden to sleep. ‘In the evening if I have two or three drinks I feel good,’ he told the doctor. ‘Do you think that should be knocked off or reduced?’

I read this alongside another great biography, Fredrik Longevall's JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956. The original goal was to get some background for the sections of Tripping on Utopia on how World War II transformed the cultures of the South Pacific, an event that fascinated Margaret Mead and also one that both young JFK and young Nixon participated in (they were among the thousands of American GIs who served in the the New Guinea and Solomon Islands region). Once I learned that Nixon’s first choice of career was “concentrated orange juice entrepreneur” — how perfect is that as a villain origin story? — I got sucked in and read to the end.

• Sylvia Jukes Morris, Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce (Penguin, 2014)

[Diego] Rivera, hearing about the encounter, urged his wife [Frida Kahlo] to paint Clare herself, even without a fee. “You will get a chance to speak with her. Read her plays … it may be that they will suggest to you a composition for her portrait.” Knowing about Clare from Covarrubias, he added, “Her life … is extremely curious; it would interest you.”

Diego Rivera was right. Clare Boothe Luce’s life really was extremely curious. I found this biography’s sequel, The Price of Fame, to be disappointingly surface level — lots of affairs, little in the way of psychological depth — but this book is packed with interest. CBL was the daughter of a con man, the wife of an alcoholic and abusive 1920s millionaire, a Broadway playwright and enemy of Dorothy Parker’s, a member of Congress, a close friend of Richard Nixon, and an enthusiastic early proponent of psychedelic therapy (it’s in this guise that she appears in Tripping on Utopia). Few other people lived the twentieth century in such a multifaceted way.

• Beverley Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking, 2022)

‘If I had a son, I’d swear to do one thing: I’d tell him the truth,’ Hoover wrote. ‘No matter how difficult it might be, I’d tell my boy the truth.’ The advice is surprising, coming from a man who spent his adult life avoiding the exposure of uncomfortable truths about himself and the institution he created.

Noticing a trend in my biography reading? In some ways J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI seem to me like a skeleton key for understanding a wide swathe of 20th century history. The rise of the era of big data, the origins of the surveillance state, the Cold War, the polarization of American political life… all are surprisingly reducible to the inscrutable figure at the center of this magnificent book. I could not believe how much work it must have taken to research and write this. One of the best biographies I’ve ever read.

History

• Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (Macmillan, 1962)

‘General Gallieni, dining in civilian clothes at a small café in Paris on August 9, overheard an editor of Le Temps at the next table say to a companion, ‘I can tell you that General Gallieni has just entered Colmar with 30,000 men.’ Leaning over to his friend, Gallieni said quietly, ‘That is how history is written.’

An imperfect, opinionated, even at times an obnoxious book. Also a brilliant one — and a page-turner, to boot. The material, which is about as grim as it gets, is offset by Tuchman’s gift for irony and dark humor. And the opening vignette is a tour de force. (A related Res Obscura post from earlier this year: Historical maps probably helped cause World War I).

• Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024)

No quote for this one, because it hasn’t been published yet - I read an advance review copy. Marcy Norton is one of the most creative and perceptive historians of the early modern world, and her new book — which follows her first book Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, on the history of tobacco and chocolate in the Atlantic world — is outstanding. Moving fluidly between different perspectives and sources of evidence, this is an example of the kind of history I like the most.

Articles and blog posts

• Angie Wang, “Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?” 2023 (The New Yorker)

The world is racing to develop ever more sophisticated large language models while a small language model unfurls itself in my home.

A beautiful, witty, and wise illustrated story about parenting a toddler in 2023. Nothing I read this year resonated with me more.

• Rachel Aviv, “Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self,” 2023 (The New Yorker)

She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal. “Well, I don’t know what to say about the journal because it represents work that I didn’t revise,” she told me.

• Emily Witt, “The Future of Fertility,” 2023 (The New Yorker)

Her daughter’s generation will likely freeze their eggs early, have babies in their forties or fifties, and anticipate living into their nineties. “It will feel completely arcane and mind-boggling for her that any generation before just simply went into menopause like it was an unavoidable thing,” she concluded.

• Danielle Carr, “Tell Me Why It Hurts,” 2023 (New York Magazine)

Throughout the weeklong retreat, it sometimes seemed as if no event was too geopolitically vast or historically complex to be apprehended through trauma.

• Bill Atkinson, “The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard,” 2020 (Mondo 2000)

In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone... This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.

• J. B. Haldane, “On Being the Right Size,” 1926

In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale. But yet it is easy to show that a hare could not be as large as a hippopotamus or a whale as small as a herring. For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form.

Newsletters

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Doug Mack / Snack Stack

I’ve been thinking about this for more than a year. I found that photo in September 2022 and did a ton of research at that point, and then on and off since then. My notes file kept getting longer and longer, but I felt no closer to a definitive satisfying answer to the question of why RC Cola is popular in Tajikistan.

•

Noted

by Jillian Hess

Hess, a professor of literature at CUNY, runs what might be my favorite Substack newsletter. I love the simplicity but also the infinite malleability of the concept — she writes about and displays the notes of interesting or important historical figures from the past.

•

Age of Invention, by Anton Howes

Always interesting, often provocative, and consistently well-informed, this is one of the best newsletters by a practicing historian that I know of. I wish there were more (and please get in touch if you write one).

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Kyle Chayka Industries

by Kyle Chayka is great in part because of its meta nature, both commenting on and demonstrating the algorithms that shape our society. Chayka is one of the most thoughtful writers working today when it comes to thinking about how technology changes our daily lives. And, as it happens, he also has a book coming out on January 16 — Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.

Wikipedia pages

• The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)

After her father’s death, making her an orphan at the age of 17, Webb found that: ‘on the winding up of his affairs that it would be necessary to do something for my support. I had written a strange, wild novel, called the Mummy, in which I had laid the scene in the twenty-second century, and attempted to predict the state of improvement to which this country might possibly arrive.’

• List of Citogenesis Incidents

In 2008… an American student’s arbitrary addition to Coati, ‘also known as....the Brazilian aardvark,’ resulted in many subsequently citing and using that unsubstantiated nickname as part of the general consensus, including published articles in The Independent, The Daily Mail, a book published by the University of Chicago and another published by the University of Cambridge—ironically in a passage discussing naturalists uncritically copying other writers' errors.

• Merseburg charms

Each charm is divided into two parts: a preamble telling the story of a mythological event; and the actual spell in the form of a magic analogy (just as it was before... so shall it also be now...)

• Thunderbird and Whale

In the 1980s, geologists found evidence that an earthquake, powerful enough to send a tsunami all the way to Japan, hit the American Pacific Northwest in 1700. Some ethnologists believe that ‘Thunderbird and Whale’ is a description of that disaster.

Have other reading suggestions from the past year? Please leave a comment below.

And a special final note — Res Obscura is fast approaching 3,000 subscribers (which is super encouraging considering I started on Substack with ~750 subscribers five months ago). If you would like to support what I’m doing, please consider sharing this newsletter with friends who you think might be interested. Thank you for reading.