Our year end favorites are staff generated. Book links connect to our affliate pages on Bookshop.org or in some cases to our Backroom Gallery bookshop which features many local and signed books. Happy Holidays! Thank you for reading and shopping local.
A more complete list is available on our affilite pages on Bookshop.org:
Favorite Fiction, 2023
Deus X
by Stephen Mack Jones
Soho Books
Detroit ex-cop August Snow puts his life on the line to protect a friend from modern-day Templars sworn to protect the name of the Catholic church at all costs.
Father Michael Grabowski, a Franciscan priest who has tended the spiritual needs of Detroit’s Mexicantown for forty years, has suddenly retired. August Snow, who has known the priest his whole life, finds the circumstances troubling—especially in light of the recent suspicious suicide of another local priest. What dark history is Father Grabowski hiding?
“Jones’s action sequences move at a whip-quick pace, and his observations are endlessly quotable.” – Sarah Weinman, The New York Times
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
Riverhead Books
“A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel . . . Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.” –Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review
“We all need–we all deserve–this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.” –Ron Charles, The Washington Post
From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library: A Novel
by Michiko Aoyama
Hanover Square Press
“A delightful, gentle unfolding of stories that offer hope and joy to those who find themselves in a pivotal moment in life.”—Kirkus
“A comforting read filled with serendipity and simple wisdom, this is a celebration of community, connection, and the transformative power of libraries.”—Booklist
“There’s more to Aoyama’s novel than kindness. There is a subtle, provocative thread about misremembering; a pageant of interesting jobs; and a suite of mature, cooperative relationship. [T]he novel is an undeniable page-turner, its mechanism energized by a simple question, posed again and again by the uncanny librarian, Mrs. Komachi.”—Robin Sloane, New York Times Book Review
The Maniac
by Benjamin Labatut
Penguin Press
“Captivating and unclassifiable, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray . . . Labatut is a writer of thrilling originality. The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty.” —The Washington Post
“Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting.” —Wall Street Journal
From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI…. A work of beauty and fabulous momentum,The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
Satoshi Yagisawa, Eric Ozawa (translator)
Harper Perennial
Translated from the Japanese by Eric Ozawa, this slim novel — first published and filmed in Japan in 2010 — is another heartwarmer about how literature helps open up emotionally constipated people who are not good at expressing their feelings.
Takako, the novel’s plainspoken 25-year-old narrator, is blindsided when a work colleague she’s been seeing for more than a year announces he’s getting married to a beautiful woman in the same Tokyo office. In her grief, Takako quits her job and takes to her bed. Given the choice between returning to her home in Kyushu or moving into the musty spare room above her oddball uncle’s secondhand bookshop in the Jimbocho book quarter of Tokyo, she chooses the latter….
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop draws a strong connection between the empathy unleashed by great literature and Takako’s growing sense of self-confidence and well-being. Reading, she tells us with typical directness in this sweet tale, “opened a door I had never known existed.”
“The unadorned simplicity of Takako’s voice is anything but subtle, but it’s somehow winning in its guilelessness . . . . Days at the Morisaki Bookshop draws a strong connection between the empathy unleashed by great literature and Takako’s growing sense of self-confidence and well-being.” — NPR
“The book’s vibe makes it pleasant company for an afternoon in the park with a snack.” — Los Angeles Times
“A slender book, but one rich in experience, exactly like the tiny, crammed Morisaki bookshop itself.” — New York Journal of Books
Favorite Non-fiction, 2023
Every Man for Himself and God Against All : A Memoir
Werner Herzog, Michael Hofmann (Translated by)
Penguin Press
Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great and self-invented lives of our time, and a singular literary masterpiece that will enthrall fans old and new alike. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.
“The book is nonlinear and exuberantly free-associative, less a narrative than an extravagant demonstration of sensibility . . . Like so many of his films, his memoir is not at home in its ostensible genre. A very thin thread of autobiography runs through an otherwise vibrant tapestry of anecdotes and adventures . . . His melancholic, meditative and theatrically nostalgic way of being is as irrepressible in his writing as it is in his films . . . I feel the same sense of awe when I contemplate the phenomenon of Werner Herzog as I do when I contemplate the pyramids. Amazing, that this fabulous impracticality exists.” –Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
“Of greatest significance, however, are the memoirs that Werner Herzog has now published under the title of one of his films: Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Herzog is a magnificent, seductive narrator. He allows himself to be steered by his own associative thinking without a second of boredom.” –SWR
“Herzog’s book depicts in cool, sparse, poetic language, the primitiveness and magic of the archaic rural conditions in which he spent his early childhood years” —Spiegel
Once Upon A Tome: The Misadventures of A Rare Bookseller
Oliver Darkshire
W.W. Norton & Co.
Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd (est. 1761) to apply for a job. Allured by the smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap, Darkshire was soon unteetering stacks of first editions and placating the store’s resident ghost (the late Mr. Sotheran, hit by a tram).
A novice in this ancient, potentially haunted establishment, Darkshire describes Sotheran’s brushes with history (Dickens, the Titanic), its joyous disorganization, and the unspoken rules of its gleefully old-fashioned staff, whose mere glance may cause the computer to burst into flames. As Darkshire gains confidence and experience, he shares trivia about ancient editions and explores the strange space that books occupy in our lives–where old books often have strong sentimental value, but rarely a commercial one.
By turns unhinged and earnest, Once Upon a Tome is the colorful story of life in one of the world’s oldest bookshops and a love letter to the benign, unruly world of antiquarian bookselling, where to be uncommon or strange is the best possible compliment.
“Witty and heartwarming…. Darkshire’s sunny temperament and respect for the trade will resonate with book lovers and fellow booksellers.– “Publishers Weekly”
“An enchanting billet-doux to an arcane and eccentric world. Every page is a pleasure.–Lindsey Fitzharris, best-selling author of The Facemaker
Peculiarly hilarious!”–William Gibson
“Seeking a Christmas present for that bibliophilic relative who has seemingly read everything? It’s right here.”–Suzi Feay “Financial Times”
“Utterly charming”.–Tom Holland
Cosmic Scholar
John Szwed
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Grammy Award-winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed presents the first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth century art and culture.
He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, had a front-row seat to a young Thelonious Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, was admired by Susan Sontag, and was one of the first artists funded by Guggenheim Foundation. He was always broke, generally intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic. Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, “the only person I met in my life that transcended everything.”
“Szwed is the ideal chronicler for a person worth knowing but so hard to pin down . . . As lively a writer as he is scrupulous, [he] has produced an excellent and engaging biography, the story of an elusive but important and utterly fascinating figure.” –Library Journal (starred review)
“In this vividly detailed biography, music scholar Szwed brilliantly captures the life and legacy of the enigmatic filmmaker, folklorist, painter, producer, anthropologist, archivist, Kabbalist, and alchemist Harry Smith . . . Drawing on extensive research to fill in his subject’s emotional states, Szwed sensitively renders [Smith’s] extraordinary, bizarre, and ultimately tragic life . . . A masterful ode to a ‘strange and singular character’ in American arts.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)