The FXBG Advance’s team of reviewers have selected their favorites for 2023. More favorites will be in next week’s edition of “Books and Culture”.
Penny A Parrish
When asked to choose my favorite book from this year, I looked at the list and realized I’d reviewed 35 books in 2023. I also realized I could not choose one favorite. So, I whittled it down to three.
What’s Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, how Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork by Witold Szablowski Paperback $20.00
This fascinating book takes you from the days of the tsars to Lenin, Stalin, and Putin. You learn about feasts and famine. And how food is still being used as a weapon today.
The Last Lifeboat by Hazel Gaynor Paperback $14.71
This novel is based on an incident from WWII, when parents in England sent their children overseas to Canada or Australia to avoid the bombing in Britain. One boat was hit by a torpedo, sending several children and adults into a lifeboat. The story of their ordeal and eventual rescue is powerful.
Condemned for Love in Old Virginia by Jim Hall Paperback $23.99
The lynching of a black man in Fauquier County because he dared to love a white woman is told by local author Jim Hall. We need to know and learn from our history.
Martin Davis
River by Fred Chappell Paperback $3.00
This year, I’ve focused less on new ideas, and more on the power and beauty of language itself. And no writer’s words have moved me more than Fred Chappell’s.
As a poet, Chappell is probably not well-known to the general public; poets don’t tend to have mass followings that make them cultural icons (The Great Poet, Robert Frost, excepted). In my native North Carolina, however, where Chappell was raised, he is our great poet. That’s because his verse drills deep into the Southern soul.
In “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet,” Chappell explores his family’s uneasiness with “shadow cousins” – those people that families don’t talk about.
“What,” Chappell asks his grandmother, “do [families] talk about?”
Generals,
And the damn Civil War, and marriages.
Things you brag about in the front of Bibles.
There is no finer a synopsis of the Southern persona, as well as its hypocricy, than these lines. The ties we choose to talk about, as opposed to those we don’t – the horse thieves, the murderers and the murdered, and the insane.
Try as we might to rid ourselves of shadow-cousins, and raise ourselves above it all, Chappell’s grandmothers reminds us that admit it or not:
Nothing new gets started without the old’s
Plowed under, or halfway under. We sprouted from dirt,
Though, and it’s with you, and dirt you’ll never forget.
The question for Chappell and each of us, do we have the strength to explore it?
In a year that has forced me, as a journalist, to confront our shadow-cousins, Chappell’s poetry has been a steady plow, turning over the past so that we can sprout anew.
Drew Gallagher
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray Paperback $18.90
I reviewed this expansive novel and urged readers to bet on The Bee Sting to win the Booker Prize before they announced the winner at odds of 7 to 1. Given my history with predicting literary awards, it was not in the least bit surprising that it did not win. I reviewed this book for The Washington Independent Review of Books and offered this summation for their end of the year Best Book list: When I finished this expansive novel, I wanted to buy Paul Murray a pint of Guinness and embrace him as a brother while tears gently rolled down my cheek. Then, after finishing our warm embrace and my pint, I wanted to smash my glass over his head for his sense of an ending. The unforgettable ending left questions, but none larger than “How did this novel not win the Booker this year?”.
Ashley Riggleson
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Paperback $18.00
I have read many amazing books this year, but none has struck me more than Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars. This novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, follows several people in a near future dystopia where prisoners must literally fight to the death for viewers’ entertainment. Of course, Chain-Gang All-Stars is an extremely suspenseful novel, and many readers were surprised to see the National Book Awards recognize what they considered to be a piece of genre fiction. But, I found, instead, that Adjei-Brenyah’s novel is a very smart text that weaves true events from the past (in footnotes) with a terrifying but believable dystopian future. Taken together, these elements comment on the dangers of the privatized prison system.
Although many of the characters in this novel have done terrible things, Adjei-Brenyah makes it difficult for readers to completely condemn them. Instead, a beautiful queer love story unfolds, and it is truly a romance for the ages. Part literary fiction, part romance, and part mystery, this utterly devastating yet compulsively readable novel has something for every reader.
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