Best Books of 2023 and a short victory lap

Happy New Year’s Eve—and, no, that’s not a typo. As we prepare to enter 2025, I’m sharing my favorite books from 2023. If you read all the way to the end of last week’s more-appropriate Best Books of 2024, I mentioned I had forgotten to send out my favorite reads last year, so I’m doing so now as a final entry in the year-end flood of such lists.

One of the oddities of writing books is that you’re normally working a year—or several years in advance—this year’s research becomes next year’s published books. The list below is a good indication of that, in that my reading across 2023 largely reflected the work I published this year, so I hope you’ll indulge me with a bit of a year-end professional victory lap as well.

I read very narrowly in 2023, as I was scrambling through finishing a total of three books in a single year—my November 2023 book on UFOs, as well as two books that came out in the first half of this year: WORLD ON THE BRINK, which I coauthored with Dmitri Alperovitch, about the geopolitical struggle between US and China and the looming showdown over Taiwan. Amazingly, WORLD ON THE BRINK was just named to The Economist’s own Best Books of the Year list, which said, “The Washington consensus is that China represents the pre-eminent threat to America. This jargon-light book neatly sketches the China Challenge and makes a number of sensible prescriptions”! Having a book called “jargon-light” and “sensible” by The Economist feels like a real literary accomplishment, to be honest. Then my own WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE: AN ORAL HISTORY OF D-DAY came out in June for the 80th anniversary of Operation Overlord. I’ve been super excited to see in recent weeks the D-Day book pop up on several other best-of-the-year lists, including:

• An Amazon Best History Book of the Year

• Barnes & Noble’s Best History Books of 2024

• Goodreads Choice Awards Nominee: Readers' Favorite History & Biography

But it was really the audiobook of the year — which is a complete masterwork, if you’ve not listened to it, that brings together dozens of voices to tell the oral history with a full cast, original audio, and an incredible Winston Churchill! — that won the year. The D-Day audiobook hit the trio of the biggest best-of lists and was named an Audible Best Nonfiction Audiobook (“This remarkable oral history truly shines in audio”), a Barnes & Noble Best Audiobook (“This oral history of June 6, 1944, was made to be heard”), and an AudioFile Best Audiobook (“This moving history, which makes it seem like one is hearing from the actual participants, is difficult to pause.”)

Lastly, in the annoying-2024-victory-lap department, the third season of my history podcast LONG SHADOW earned a spot on several year-end lists, including two particularly meaningful ones:

• Audible’s Best Podcasts of 2024: Long Shadow examines how history continues to ripple into our present moment. The third season, hosted by journalist Garrett Graff (who is also honored in Audible's collection of the best nonfiction of 2024 for his excellent oral history The Sea Came Alive), examines the uniquely American issue of guns: the ownership, the violence, the politics. If you wonder how America arrived in this era of mass shootings and whether there’s anything to be done about it, this podcast will give you some much-needed hope.

• The Atlantic’s Christmas Eve list of best podcasts of 2024: Long Shadow’s previous seasons investigated the circumstances surrounding September 11 and the rise of the American far right. Season 3, In Guns We Trust, explores how guns came to be such a central part of our national culture. The host and journalist Garrett Graff, himself a gun owner, contextualizes the past quarter century of mass shootings by laying out the political and legislative maneuvers that have eroded gun-control laws over the previous 50 years. These sometimes esoteric actions had palpable effects: The so-called gun-show loophole, for example, allowed the private sale of firearms without a background check—which enabled the Columbine High School shooters to indirectly obtain their guns. Listeners who are all too familiar with Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde might nonetheless find illuminating Long Shadow’s examination of the political backdrop to these tragedies.

As 2024 wraps up, I’m hard at work now on 2025’s projects, including my next oral history book about the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb, out in August for the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the war with Japan, as well as the fourth season of LONG SHADOW, which will be launching in late spring. More to come on all that—and some other interesting projects for 2025 that I hope will help you navigate the time ahead.

With that all of the way, here’s the main event — my year-late favorite reads of 2023, in no particular order:

1) THE SHORT END OF THE SONNENALLEE by Thomas Brussig — Once a year when I’m in New York City, I try to find my way to McNally Jackson, the amazing indie bookstore, which I think has the best “recommended” tables in the front of the store that I’ve found anywhere in the country. Those tables encapsulate to me the magic of indie bookstores: They’re filled with little gems of books that I never would find or hear about otherwise, often books from foreign authors in translation that would be all-but impossible to discover in any sort of algorithm (cough cough). You have to discover them because some human with exquisite taste found them and told you about them. I end up buying 4-5 of these “small” books, like 200-page things, and then sprinkle them into my reading over the course of the year. Brussig’s novella about the absurdity of life in East Berlin and the German Democratic Republic was last year’s stand-out winner of my “best little book.” You can read it in a single airplane right or evening and be transported deep into its satirical look at adolescent life behind the Berlin Wall—we often forget how recent a divided Germany still existed and how its memory still shapes so many people. Last year’s haul, by the way, also included excellent and haunting Éric Vuillard’s also-160-page AN HONORABLE EXIT, about the fall of French colonial Vietnam, long before the US ever entered the war there.

2) IT. GOES. SO. FAST. by Mary Louise Kelly — I picked this up after one of my colleagues at the Aspen Institute recommended Mary Louise’s talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival. This book proved one of the most influential books in my life. The premise is not altogether groundbreaking—parenting goes by quickly and you should cherish it as it happens—but Mary Louise’s recounting of her own struggles to parent while pursuing a high-octane career will stop you short. There’s a story she tells about being on a Black Hawk helicopter in Baghdad, traveling with the secretary of the defense, when she gets a call from her kid’s school nurse back home that I still, two years later, haven’t been able to retell without getting choked up. The day-to-day reality is that parenting mostly really sucks. It’s hard. It’s exhausting. It doesn’t let up. There’s a certain monotony to it — the same routines and rhythms, the repeated reading of the same books, the endless diaper changes, the daily battles over what to eat. It’s easy many days to feel like the chores of parentings are what you need to get out of the way to do the other things in life — work, sleep, fun. But a big part of her theme is about how, as a parent, you never know when you’ll have the last treasured moment with your child as they grow up — when will be the last time they ask you to sing a song at bedtime, when will be the last time you snuggle on the couch and read a certain long-prized book, when will be the last time they ask you to check for monsters in the closet, when will be the last time they demand a bowl of “cheerweeos” for breakfast. It’s easy as a parent to be focused on what comes next — when I finish this godforsaken bedtime routine I can get on with enjoying my evening! Let’s get breakfast over with so we can start our day! — but when those moments go by, you will never get them back. Today’s annoyance and frustration is tomorrow’s fond never-to-be-repeated memory of youth, innocence, and connection. It goes so fast. Reading this book changed every single day of parenting for me — when my son insists on reading yet another book at bedtime when I’m eager to wrap things up and get on with my day, or my daughter asks to do some activity I dread when I have some project or chore hanging over my head, I literally channel Mary Louise and repeat to myself in my head “It goes so fast — someday there will be a day where he’ll never ask again and after that day, I will miss this time right now.” There’s at least once a day that I remind myself “This is a It-Goes-So-Fast moment.” Simply reminding myself that this-right-here-right-now is the moment to cherish gives me patience and grace to enjoy and treasure that umpteenth reading of DRAGONS LOVE TACOS. There are very few books — probably if I am honest, maybe even zero other books — that I have ever read that have made every day of life richer and made me a better human. This book did.

3) FREEDOM’S DOMINION by Jefferson Cowie — This book “beat” me for the Pulitzer Prize last year, so obviously I had to read it. Reader, let me tell you: It deserved to win. Cowie is an elegant writer and great researcher, and he dives deep into the history of one very specific place, Barbour County, Alabama — the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace — to trace the long-running battle over race, white supremacy, and the rights of Black Americans in the American story. I learned so much from this book—the subtitle promises “a saga of white resistance to federal power,” and that’s exactly how it build its case: through the longevity of its view, from the 19th century to the 20th, it underscored more than almost anything I’ve read how much the story of white supremacy is the same story through America’s history, from plantation days and Reconstruction to Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement and how deep our nation’s shame should remain over the abandonment of Reconstruction.

4) BODYGUARD OF LIES by Anthony Cave Brown — At the time of its original 1975 publication, this now long out-of-print book was the first to delve deeply into the covert deception campaigns, encryption efforts, feints, and clandestine operations that surrounded the allied invasion of Europe in 1944. While some of the book has proved inaccurate with subsequent declassifications, it’s an incredible read and reminder of the audacious scope of the allied invasion and the depth of thinking that went into almost every aspect of Operation Overlord. Purely as a research product, I was fascinated to see how much Brown uncovered anew in his effort back then and how hard so much of the research must have been to piece together an era of paper records with no aid of the internet.

5) BAND OF BROTHERS by Stephen Ambrose — Somehow, I had never read this war-classic-of-all-classics, but it was an obvious stop as part of my D-Day book research. It’s also a book that’s as good as everyone says. It’s an incredible tale of a single unit, Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, as they battled across Normandy. It has a certain Forrest-Gump-esque quality to it, in that this unit, and its now iconic commander, Dick Winters, are at the center of seemingly every battle, from heroic exploits on D-Day to the brutal winter conditions of the Battle of the Bulge and then finally patrolling Hitler’s own Eagle’s Nest at war’s end. It’s an incredible reminder of the high cost of freedom and how war is won not by armies but by individuals fighting for their friends.

6) WHITE HOLES by Carlo Rovelli — One of my mantras and firm conclusions from my UFO book research, one hardly unique to me, is that the world is surely much much weirder than we imagine it is and that we surely grossly overestimate how much of the world and universe around us we understand. Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist with a unique ability to explain complicated topics — his book SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS was one of the most fascinating and profound books I’ve ever encountered — and I picked this up as soon as it came out and read it while I was on my own UFO book tour in November 2023. The book is about black holes and Rovelli’s hypothesis slash thought experiment about what happens at the end of a black hole — does time … bounce? I’m 100 percent certain I did understand this book completely (maybe I’m even summarizing it wrong?!) but it stretched my imagination about just how strange the universe might really be.

7) SURRENDER by Bono — I listened to this on audiobook, it was produced by Scott Sherratt, the audio genius who did both of my oral histories, THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY and WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE (as well as, notably, Prince Harry’s SPARE!), and Scott had full reign to pull from U2’s collection and recordings to assemble this book. Gosh golly gee whiz was it terrific. It’s organized around 40 chapters, each one of 40 songs in Bono’s career, and each mixed together with incredible music and performances. It’s like the world’s easily-digestible 40-part best podcast. I was not U2 superfan beforehand, but Bono’s story is an incredible tale of not just music but the Troubles in Ireland, lessons in business and power, and his incredibly advocacy career on issues like AIDs. Listen to this and treat yourself to an experience like none other you’ll find.

8) G-MAN by Beverly Gage — For a while, I’d hoped to write a biography of J. Edgar Hoover and as soon I heard Beverly Gage was tackling one, I dropped my own interest. I knew I’d never be able to top her — and indeed I’m sure now that no one will ever write a better biography of the FBI founding director than she did. The book won the Pulitzer for biography, and as someone who has read just about every biography of Hoover yet published, I still learned something fascination in every chapter—including her revelatory research on Hoover’s white supremacist fraternity. Hoover is arguably the most powerful public figure in the United States in all of the 20th century — certainly no one came close to his half-century reign of power in the federal government — and he created and shaped major epochal moments like the Red Scare and the Civil Rights Movement. The FBI he perfected by the 1960s was as close to a secret police as the United States has ever had, a bureau that routinely abused the civil rights and civil liberties of ordinary and powerful Americans alike and, particularly, anyone he personally deemed insufficiently patriotic. It’s a valuable warning to us about, in this moment, about why the director of the FBI needs to be someone deeply rooted in the Constitution.

9) YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US by Kashmir Hill — I’ve followed Kashmir’s career with awe for more than a decade and on more than one occasion in chapters past failed to recruit her to work with me. This book, about facial recognition and a company called Clearview AI reads similar to BAD BLOOD. I blurbed it, saying, “Kashmir Hill all-but invented the tech dystopia beat, and no one is a more exuberant and enjoyable guide to the dark corners of our possible future than she is. Reaching deep into the past to paint a terrifying portrait of our future, Kashmir’s thorough, awe-inspiring reporting and compelling storytelling paints a fascinating tale of tech’s next chapter. This is the most fun you can have reading a real-life nightmare.”

10) PRESIDENT GARFIELD by C.W. Goodyear — I had the privilege of reviewing this biography for the Washington Post, and was totally surprised and charmed by it. As I wrote, “It’s not immediately evident why anyone should write an ambitious, thorough, supremely researched biography of James Garfield, the first such effort in nearly a half-century. The nation’s 20th president served just 200 days in office, 80 of which he spent dying after being shot by an assassin’s bullet, and seemingly the most interesting part of that abbreviated tenure — the assassination — was recently told in rollicking form by Candice Millard’s DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC. In the hands of a talented debut biographer like C.W. Goodyear, though, Garfield’s life becomes a fascinating national portrait of an imperfect union struggling across its first century to live up to the promise of its founding. PRESIDENT GARFIELD: FROM RADICAL TO UNIFER is ultimately not just a careful study of Garfield but a portrait of a nation in transition — from its wild youth, where Garfield emerges, the last president born in a literal log cabin, through its awkward, violent adolescence with the Civil War, where Garfield becomes the Union’s youngest general, and onward as it heaves through Reconstruction and the Gilded Age toward adulthood as an industrialized economic empire.”

11) CONTACT by Carl Sagan — I read very little fiction in 2023 and this rare exception was actually part of my UFO book research, but man was it a good read! It’s the only full-length fiction written by the famed astronomer—you may know it later as the Jodie Foster movie adaptation—and it has quite the tortured literal backstory, as it started as a joint project with his wife before their divorce, and if you know about Sagan’s life you’ll find a lot of great easter eggs throughout. The protagonist of this exploration of how Earth might someday make contact with alien civilizations is a thinly veiled remake of the real-life Dr. Jill Tarter, one of the founders of the Search for Extraterrestrial Life.

12) FIRE WEATHER by John Vaillant — I have been a fan of John Vaillant since I discovered him when he spoke at a narrative journalism conference probably fifteen years ago. His books THE TIGER and THE GOLDEN SPRUCE are superlative — his nature writing have to rank in this generation’s best. (Seriously, forget this list of best books—go read THE TIGER and GOLDEN SPRUCE!) FIRE WEATHER made almost every best of 2023 list, including as a Pulitzer finalist and National Book Award winner, and it’s hard not to understand why. He mixes the dramatic telling of a major wildfire storm in Canada, a telling so good that it will rank alongside YOUNG MEN AND FIRE in fire literature, with the story of climate change, the business of oil, and how it all collided in Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016.

13) THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY by Tim Alberta — Tim is an old friend from POLITICO and this is his intensely personal memoir of his faith, his family’s church, and how Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has corrupted and merged with the modern evangelical church across the country. I highly recommend it to help understand where we are as a country right now and the dangerous drift of mainstream Christian faith in the country.

14) THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY AND THE MIDDLE KINGDOM by John Pomfret — I read this 2016 book as part of my research for WORLD ON THE BRINK (as well as the book that follows below), and I’m astounded as to why this isn’t a better-known book. It’s an authoritative and elegant joint history of the interaction and development of China and the United States, from 1776 to the present, and as such covers an enormous amount of ground. Pomfret was a Washington Post correspondent in China and he brings a ton of history and personal knowledge to bear on what is surely the most important geopolitical relationship of the first half of the 20th century. If you have the slightest interest in understanding China, make sure this book is on your reading list.

15) CHIP WAR by Chris Miller — Much like the biography of James A. Garfield, you surely don’t think that you want to read a history of the semiconductor chip, but trust me that you do. Chris Miller assembled a fascinating book that weaves together a geopolitical thriller, a business school case study, several tech figure biographies, and a how-to science book into a narrative that explains not just how semiconductor chips became so critical to the modern economy but also the very geography of how they came to be assembled in the precise places where they are today. As you come to understand the fragility of the supply chain of this most-critical of components, you can recognize why the west and China are locked in a particularly fierce battle over semiconductors right now—and, how, if geography is destiny, why Taiwan is so likely to be a flashpoint over the next decade.

Anyway, I hope you have a great start to 2025 and will see you right here next year! Given all that it about to unfold for our country, and the huge uncertainty ahead, I can’t think of a year in my life that I have entered with more trepidation than 2025. But until we crack spacetime and figure out whether Carlo Rovelli is right about what happens to “white holes,” there is only ever onward—and so onward we go….

GMG

PS: What book is topping your 2025 reading list? What book did you receive as a gift this holiday that you’re reading right now as the quiet season wraps up?

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