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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
November is the perfect month for end-of-year book lists — October feels too early, and by December, you’re cannoning into the roundups of What To Read Next Year.
Given that we have just five weeks of reading left in 2023, my response is Pavlovian: I spend more time and money in bookshops than is sensible while also guilt-reading fiction and poetry I meant to read in the summer, from Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation to Ina Cariño’s sumptuous, tart poems in Feast.
Year-end lists are one of our most democratic reading feasts. Writers and publishers love them (especially, of course, if their books are featured). Readers, including me, seize upon them for Christmas shopping, or browse for the pleasure of noting that the writers we loved, from Zadie Smith to RF Kuang to Salman Rushdie, are cherished by others.
They have a venerable history: seven decades ago, the New York Times noted that “the practice of editors sharing their picks of the year dates nearly back to the beginning of the Book Review in October 1896”. Over time, the lists changed shape — in the 1950s, publications often carried their Books of the Year lists at the end of March, the close of the financial year. By the 1990s, though, most papers, including the FT, took note of the holiday season and moved their lists to winter. Contributors also widened beyond editors to include authors, celebrities and in-house columnists.
About a decade ago, I started to use these end-year lists to journal my own best-of-the-year reading. At first, this was a form of bingo: the faintly silly pleasure of seeing how many of my own personal favourites of the year were shared. A few years in, they had given me something else: a pause at the end of each year to take stock of my reading, to see if I could spot broader patterns, or be surprised by changing tastes and preferences. As readers at the FT’s lively Books Café have observed, our reading lives are rarely static.
Browsing suggestions last week from the FT’s book-loving readers for their favourite titles of the year, I often found myself in agreement with their recommendations. Many chose timeless works such as Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, Sebastian Barry’s moving and unsettling Old God’s Time, and Sarah Freethy’s The Porcelain Maker. And once again, FT readers sent me on a non-fiction buying spree — on their advice, I picked up Lea Ypi’s Free about growing up under communism in Albania, Steven Simon’s prescient Grand Delusion on half a century of American policy in the Middle East and the Monet biography by Jackie Wullschläger, the FT’s chief art critic.
But why track your reading in the first place? For me, the apparently simple practice of paying attention to what I’d read the previous year had unexpected ripple effects. I would have said my tastes run from modern fiction to poetry to food histories, but I noticed over time that I also enjoyed non-fiction on the environment, fiction in translation, and biographies, too, especially of non-celebrities. A fine example — Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief, on the life and crimes of Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole Renaissance and early Baroque art from more than 200 museums, stashing paintings in mother’s house in eastern France because (so he claimed) he loved them.
I also discovered the limitations of resolutions. An ambitious year of trying to read classic texts withered with the discovery that, reader, the ancients can be boring too. But one of mine has lasted: “Read two books every month for pure pleasure, from genres you don’t usually explore.” Things I usually hurry past, from political memoirs to big fat world histories such as Peter Frankopan’s dazzling The Silk Roads, pulled me out of my rut. Sometimes you should lose the map and take the detour instead.
I’ve since made my peace with the thought that I would never read all the books I wanted to. The figures are notoriously tricky, but Unesco estimates that roughly 2.2mn books were published globally by traditional publishers in 2022. That is a wonderfully calming number — once you know you can’t possibly read over two million books a year, it frees you up.
Perhaps the greatest gift of the year-end lists is that, faced with just five weeks in which to read a score of wonderful authors, I am, for once, immune to the siren lure of social media. I have no time for turmoil on X; I feel no need to binge-watch Lupin or Friends reruns — 2023 is about to end. I have books to savour, new authors to discover and applaud. And in 2024 it all starts again.
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