What you should be reading or for that matter eating, thinking, drinking or anything else in 2023 is for you to decide of course, so I offer the following in a spirit of guidance rather than direction (and also in accordance with my New Year’s resolution to be a beacon of generosity and goodwill in a dark universe). Yeah right. 

As the calendar flips over from one year to the next, we’re bludgeoned with lists, recommendations, advice, words to the wise, predictions and a plethora of spurious intelligence from equally spurious experts. Why on earth would I want to add to the deluge?

Well, with books it’s very hard to choose. As an example, the book club I belong to is held in a book cafe in Adelaide called The Mockingbird Lounge, which is a bibliophile’s paradise. As well as selling secondhand books, gifts, coffee, cake and so on, they organise and run book clubs for book lovers of all stripes. Our club meets in a room lined floor to ceiling with books, books on the mantelpiece, the tables and basically everywhere except the floor. Looking around, I’m always confounded by choice. Cover after cover catches my eye and demands to be read.

Bookstores and libraries offer similarly overflowing banquets for the booklover. And then there’s online, an Amazonian universe in itself. Guidance, then, is called for.

Again though, there is a glut. The publish button only just pressed by anonymous fingers everywhere on the “best books of 2022” lists, the internet is heaving again with “most anticipated books of 2023”. Objectivity is at a premium here, as it is with anything bookish. And who’s got time to trawl through every man and his dog’s chart toppers, chosen from (if recent years are anything to go by) a possible field of millions?

Not anyone who has a life, obviously. So that leaves me, and I have trawled through a number with the goal of identifying whether there is any kind of consensus. Not for myself alone, but for you, perplexed reader. (And another caveat: I have no idea whether these various arbiters made their choices based on literary merit, market potential, which dare I say it was likely the case with “Spare” or a combination of both, or for that matter how unbiased they may have been). 

All that aside, here’s the list of sites I surveyed, chosen randomly. There are many more, but I had to call a halt somewhere if this post was going to make it into 2023.  

Goodreads

LitHub

Time Magazine

The Australian

Booklist Queen

Kirkus

Vulture

She Reads

Vogue

Elle

Oprah Daily

BookBub

This is what I found. There’s a reasonable degree of consensus among the 12 surveyed sites, ranging from 7 to 0 books in common. I’ve listed the top hitters below as star ratings in descending order.