Below are my ten most memorable reads of 2023, fiction and nonfiction, out of my 33 first-time reads.
Actually I’ve thrown 11 chariots into the race, and an honorable runner-up.
For each book, I’ve listed some excerpts, not necessarily the “best” — there are countless great quotes in all of these — but just a few among those that made the deepest impressions.
1. Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor—one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
* * *
He called so loud that all the hollow deep
Of Hell resounded:—“Princes, Potentates,
Warriors, the Flower of Heaven—once yours; now lost,...
Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!”
* * *
long is the way
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light
* * *
Another world, out of one man a race
Of men innumerable, there to dwell,
Not here; till, by degrees of merit raised,
They open to themselves at length the way
Up hither, under long obedience tried;
And Earth be changed to Heaven, and Heaven to Earth,
One kingdom, joy and union without end.
* * *
Wherefore didst thou beget me?
...
Why am I mocked with death, and lengthened out
To deathless pain?
* * *
For though the Lord of all be infinite,
Is his wrath also? Be it, Man is not so,
But mortal doomed. How can he exercise
Wrath without end on Man, whom death must end?
Can he make deathless death? That were to make
Strange contradiction, which to God himself
Impossible is held; as argument
Of weakness, not of power. Will he draw out,
For anger’s sake, finite to infinite,
In punished Man, to satisfy his rigour,
Satisfied never? That were to extend
His sentence beyond dust and Nature’s law
* * *
Then let us seek
Some safer resolution, which methinks
I have in view, calling to mind with heed
Part of our Sentence, that thy Seed shall bruise
The Serpents head; piteous amends, unless
Be meant, whom I conjecture, our grand Foe
Satan, who in the Serpent hath contrived
Against us this deceit: to crush his head
Would be revenge indeed; which will be lost
By death brought on ourselves, or childless days
Resolved, as thou proposest; so our Foe
Shall ‘scape his punishment ordained, and we
Instead shall double ours upon our heads.
No more be mentioned then of violence
Against ourselves, and wilful barrenness,
That cuts us off from hope....
How much more, if we pray him, will his ear
Be open, and his heart to pity incline,
And teach us further by what means to shun
The inclement seasons, rain, ice, hail, and snow!
.... how we his gathered beams
Reflected may with matter sere foment;
Or, by collision of two bodies, grind
The air attrite to fire....
He will instruct us praying, and of grace
Beseeching him; so as we need not fear
To pass commodiously this life, sustained
By him with many comforts, till we end
In dust, our final rest and native home.
What better can we do, than, to the place
Repairing where he judged us, prostrate fall
Before him reverent; and there confess
Humbly our faults, and pardon beg; with tears
Watering the ground, and with our sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.
Undoubtedly he will relent, and turn
From his displeasure; in whose look serene,
When angry most he seemed and most severe,
What else but favour, grace, and mercy, shone?
* * *
I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleased, on me let Death wreck all his rage
2. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas (translated by Robin Buss)
Monte Cristo raised his eyes heavenwards but could not see the heavens: there was a veil of stone between him and the firmament.
* * *
‘Very well,’ said Dantès. ‘Then I, too, shall remain.’ And, standing up and solemnly extending his hand above the old man’s head: ‘I swear by the blood of Christ that I shall not leave you until your death.’
* * *
‘There is no longer any hope,’ Faria replied, shaking his head. ‘No matter; God wants Man, whom he has created and in whose heart he has so profoundly entrenched a love for life, to do all he can to preserve an existence that is sometimes so painful, but always so dear to him.’
* * *
“But – and I say this with pride, Mercédès – God needed me, and I lived.”
3. The Martian, by Andy Weir
“I have some news,” Mitch’s voice continued. “There’s no subtle way to put this: Mark Watney’s still alive.”
* * *
So that’s the situation. I’m stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks I’m dead. I’m in a Hab designed to last thirty-one days. If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I’m fucked.
* * *
“The biggest threat is giving up hope. If he decides there’s no chance to survive, he’ll stop trying.”
* * *
I was left without references and relied on Phobos to guide me. There’s probably symbolism there. Phobos is the god of fear, and I’m letting it be my guide. Not a good sign. But today, my luck finally changed. After two sols wandering the desert, I found something to navigate by. It was a five-kilometer crater, so small it didn’t even have a listed name. But it was on the maps, so to me it was the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Once I had it in sight, I knew exactly where I was.
* * *
But my favorite e-mail was the one from my mother. It’s exactly what you’d expect. Thank God you’re alive, stay strong, don’t die, your father says hello, etc. I read it fifty times in a row. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a mama’s boy or anything. I’m a full-grown man who only occasionally wears diapers (you have to in an EVA suit). It’s totally manly and normal for me to cling to a letter from my mom. It’s not like I’m some homesick kid at camp, right?
4. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“I was there when the Word who died on the cross was ascending into heaven, carrying on his bosom the soul of the thief who was crucified to the right of him, I heard the joyful shrieks of the cherubim singing and shouting ‘Hosannah,’ and the thundering shout of rapture from the seraphim, which made heaven and all creation shake. And, I swear by all that’s holy, I wanted to join the chorus and shout ‘Hosannah’ with everyone else. It was right on my lips, it was already bursting from my breast … you know, I’m very sensitive and artistically susceptible. But common sense—oh, it’s the most unfortunate quality of my nature—kept me within due bounds even then, and I missed the moment!”
* * *
“[T]he idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery, for how can one drop one’s habits, where will this slave go now that he is so accustomed to satisfying the innumerable needs he himself has invented? ..... [T]he way to real and true freedom: I cut away my superfluous and unnecessary needs, through obedience I humble and chasten my vain and proud will, and thereby, with God’s help, attain freedom of spirit, and with that, spiritual rejoicing! Which of the two is more capable of upholding and serving a great idea—the isolated rich man or one who is liberated from the tyranny of things and habits?”
* * *
“Love life more than its meaning?”
“Certainly, love it before logic, as you say, certainly before logic, and only then will I also understand its meaning. That is how I’ve long imagined it.”
* * *
“Even there, in the mines, underground, you can find a human heart in the convict and murderer standing next to you, and you can be close to him, because there, too, it’s possible to live, and love, and suffer!.... Rakitin’s lying: if God is driven from the earth, we’ll meet him underground!
"....And it seems to me there’s so much strength in me now that I can overcome everything, all sufferings, only in order to say and tell myself every moment: I am! In a thousand torments—I am; writhing under torture—but I am. Locked up in a tower, but still I exist, I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, still I know it is. And the whole of life is there—in knowing that the sun is."
5. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament, by Walter Wink
Rebellion simply acknowledges the absoluteness and ultimacy of the emperor's power, and attempts to seize it. Prayer denies that ultimacy altogether by acknowledging a higher power.
* * *
It is a modern bias to single out just the supernatural Powers as if they alone were of significance. For the ancients, heaven and earth were a seamless robe, a single interacting and continuous reality. To read the literature on the subject, one would never have suspected that the spiritual Powers comprised only 15 percent of the uses of the term. We are fascinated with the supranatural forces the ancients described; they seem to have taken them for granted and to have been much more preoccupied with that more amorphous, intangible, indefinable something that makes it possible for a king to command subjects to voluntary death in war or for a priest to utter words that send a king to his knees.
* * *
Unless the context further specifies (and some do), we are to take the terms for power in their most comprehensive sense, understanding them to mean both heavenly and earthly, divine and human, good and evil powers.
* * *
Christian evangelism has all too often been wedded to a politics of the status quo and merely serves to relieve distress by displacing hope to an afterlife and ignoring the causes of oppression. The repugnance with which most liberal Christians regard evangelism betrays their own failure to discern that all liberations involved conversion ....
[S]tructural change is not enough; the heart and soul must also be freed, forgiven, energized, given focus, reunited with their Source....
Too often our social action has been as devoid of spirituality as our evangelism has been politically innocuous...
We have perhaps forgotten how to use our tradition this way, but our sisters and brothers in the black churches or in the Latin American base communities, and many in the disarmament movement, have known this all along or are relearning it fast. That tradition bears within it, neglected but recoverable, a whole vocabulary about the Powers, and models for their confrontation, and wisdom concerning their stratagems.
6. Meeting God In Mark: Reflections for the Season of Lent, by Rowan Williams
A saviour who walks through Galilee and Judaea healing and doing wonders ‘at random’ would not be somebody who invited relationship. Such a saviour might invite wonder, awe, admiration or bafflement – but not necessarily trust. Mark is treading a delicate line here, with much subtlety: he wants us to start from the two basic insights that it is not miracle that is the unique or special thing about Jesus, and that miracle itself, when it occurs, involves trust and relationship. It is never a kind of magic, a display of power and control.
* * *
Mark is saying, ‘If you’re finding this difficult or shocking, don’t be surprised; those who were closest to Jesus found it difficult and shocking too. If you feel stupid and at a loss when confronted with the words and work of Jesus, don’t be surprised. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last.’
* * *
a God whose authority appears only when all worldly and human accompaniments of power and success are stripped away,
7. Go Set A Watchman and To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
“You confused your father with God.... He was letting you break your icons one by one. He was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.”
* * *
I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself, whether he be less fortunate in brains, wealth, or social position; it meant anybody, not just Negroes. I was given to understand that the reverse was to be despised. That is the way I was raised, by a black woman and a white man.
"see if you can stand in Bob Ewell’s shoes a minute. I destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he had any to begin with. The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does. So if spitting in my face and threatening me saved Mayella Ewell one extra beating, that’s something I’ll gladly take. He had to take it out on somebody and I’d rather it be me than that houseful of children out there. You understand?”
* * *
My confidence in pulpit Gospel lessened at the vision of Miss Maudie stewing forever in various Protestant hells. True enough, she had an acid tongue in her head, and she did not go about the neighborhood doing good, as did Miss Stephanie Crawford. But while no one with a grain of sense trusted Miss Stephanie, Jem and I had considerable faith in Miss Maudie. She had never told on us, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives. She was our friend. How so reasonable a creature could live in peril of everlasting torment was incomprehensible.
* * *
“No suh, scared I’d hafta face up to what I didn’t do.”
* * *
Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.
* * *
"I guess Tom was tired of white men’s chances and preferred to take his own."
8. The Marvelous Land of Oz, by L. Frank Baum
“I beg to announce to your glorious highness,” began the Scarecrow, in a solemn voice, “that my Emerald City has been overrun by a crowd of impudent girls with knitting-needles, who have enslaved all the men, robbed the streets and public buildings of all their emerald jewels, and usurped my throne.”
9. Chains, by Laurie Halse Anderson
The stars wheeled above me and inside, deep inside, something turned. I could not name it nor recognize its form. I drew in a cold breath and blew it skyward. The air came out of me in the shape of a cloud. It drifted above the rooftop and dissolved into the stars. Would they let him starve? The stars said not a word.
* * *
“Give him his hat back,” I said. “And a blanket. Is he getting his rations?” He did not answer me. That was an answer in itself. The prison was not a place of shared hardship anymore; it was a hole of desperation.
* * *
“A scar is a sign of strength,” he said quietly. “The sign of a survivor.” He leaned forward and lightly kissed my cheek, right on the branding mark. His lips felt like a tired butterfly that landed once, then fluttered away. I stepped back and touched the cheek. The men were returning to the barricades. Other servants had formed a line for the pump. Grandfather winked and handed me the buckets. “Look hard for your river Jordan, my child. You’ll find it.”
* * *
I laid down one long road of a sentence in my remembery: “For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever.” Way I saw it, Mr. Paine was saying all people were the same, that no one deserved a crown or was born to be higher than another. That’s why America could make its own freedom…
If an entire nation could seek its freedom, why not a girl?
10. On A Sea of Glass: The Life & Loss of the RMS Titanic, by Bill Wormstedt, J. Kent Layton, and Tad Fitch
[H]e found himself drowning. Lightoller was ‘rather losing interest in things’, and was about to give up when the words of the 91st Psalm popped into his mind: ‘He shall give his angels charge over thee.’ Then came a rush of hot air from below which spat him out and sent him sputtering up to the surface right next to capsized Collapsible B, which had no one aboard at the moment. He gratefully grabbed a rope attached to the boat and watched events unfold.
* * *
After the Titanic disappeared from sight, there was a momentary calm punctuated only by a loud, gurgling upwelling of water from where the stern had disappeared. This bubble of air coming up from below was spitting up to the surface large quantities of cork insulation, wood, and other debris. A ‘thin light-gray smoky vapor’ clung a few feet above the water. It reminded one survivor of Dante’s description of Charon and the River Lethe in Hell.
* * *
It was a noise that would forever haunt those who heard it – whether they were in the sea or were listening from the safety of a lifeboat. For those struggling for their lives among the panicked crowd in the water, the situation was horrific. First Class passenger George Rheims was one of these people, and he described the sounds of the cries as ‘atrociously grim, mysterious – supernatural’
* * *
As the occupants of No. 14 began rowing away, Able Bodied Seaman Scarrott noticed how all of the bodies they passed seemed to have perished from cold, as their limbs were all cramped up. Describing their departure from the area, he said: ‘As we left that awful scene we gave way to tears. It was enough to break the stoutest heart.’
* * *
The sheer volume of claims that ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ was played highly suggests that there is at least a kernel of truth to the stories, as it is hard to envision all of the literally dozens of witnesses being wrong, or having fabricated the stories. The proof is not conclusive, but is strongly suggestive.
* * *
After a careful review of the evidence, then, the age-old tale of Thomas Andrews meeting his fate in a state of shock in the Smoking Room, as the ship sank under him, falls by the wayside. It seems to be nothing more than an oft-repeated, if erroneous conclusion based on some very scanty evidence. While there is no way to know for certain, it appears that Thomas Andrews took some time in the Smoking Room to gather his thoughts, probably just before 1:40 a.m. Then he continued doing what he had done for much of the evacuation: assisting the crew, and attempting to save the lives of others. It appears that he kept this work up till the very end, with little regard for his own safety, and only left the ship at the last moment along with Captain Smith.
HONORABLE RUNNER-UP
Ben-Hur, by Lew. Wallace
“[T]his I know—they may reduce Judea as an almond broken with hammers, and devour Jerusalem, which is the oil and sweetness thereof; yet the glory of the men of Israel will remain a light in the heavens overhead out of reach: for their history is the history of God, who wrote with their hands, spake with their tongues, and was himself in all the good they did, even the least.”
- Miriam, the mother of Judah Ben-Hur
**************
[R]ecall her as she discoursed to her son of God and nations and heroes; one moment a philosopher, the next a teacher, and all the time a mother.
**************
The two women are grouped close by the aperture; one is seated, the other is half reclining against her; there is nothing between them and the bare rock. The light, slanting upwards, strikes them with ghastly effect, and we cannot avoid seeing they are without vesture or covering. At the same time we are helped to the knowledge that love is there yet, for the two are in each other’s arms. Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away, but love stays with us. Love is God....
Who shall say how much of the eight years they have spent in that space there in front of the aperture, nursing their hope of rescue by that timid yet friendly ray of light? When the brightness came creeping in, they knew it was dawn; when it began to fade, they knew the world was hushing for the night, which could not be anywhere so long and utterly dark as with them. The world! Through that crevice, as if it were broad and high as a king’s gate, they went to the world in thought, and passed the weary time going up and down as spirits go, looking and asking, the one for her son, the other for her brother. On the seas they sought him, and on the islands of the seas; to-day he was in this city, to-morrow in that other; and everywhere, and at all times, he was a flitting sojourner; for, as they lived waiting for him, he lived looking for them. How often their thoughts passed each other in the endless search, his coming, theirs going! It was such sweet flattery for them to say to each other, “While he lives, we shall not be forgotten; as long as he remembers us, there is hope!”
....Tirzah leaned upon her again, and said, whispering, “Let us—let us die!”
“No!” the mother said, firmly. “The Lord has appointed our times, and we are believers in the Lord. We will wait on him even in this.” ....
“This must be the Messiah!” She spoke not coldly, like one reasoning a doubt away, but as a woman of Israel familiar with the promises of God to her race—a woman of understanding, ready to be glad over the least sign of the realization of the promises....
She arose, and staggered forward.... “O Master, Master! Thou seest our need; thou canst make us clean. Have mercy upon us—mercy!”
“Believest thou I am able to do this?” he asked.
“Thou art he of whom the prophets spake—thou art the Messiah!” she replied.
His eyes grew radiant, his manner confident. “Woman,” he said, “great is thy faith; be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”
