Our Favourite Writers’ Favourite Books in 2023
As 2023 comes to a close, the Liminal editors have been thinking about the best books we’ve read this year. We were also curious to find out what our favourite writers have been reading, too.
Here is our year in reading!
Cher Tan | Editor | Read Cher’s “Main Character Energy” in the Liminal Review of Books
One of my favourite things to do is to read profiles and/or reviews of authors and books I'm not familiar with in order to receive a recommendation. And sometimes, like how I found Sara Suleri through Noor Asif's tribute in Parapraxis, it really does lead me to literary discoveries that will end up influencing my life and work. Titled Meatless Days, Suleri's memoir (originally published in 1989 but reissued in 2018) is told through her observations of and interactions with the various people in her life—with particular attention paid to the women in her family—while growing up during the consolidation of the then-newly created nation-state of Pakistan. What's remarkable about this memoir is that Suleri doesn't stoop to explication: we're simply thrown into her life; chronology and the centering of her self be damned. It helps, as well, that her hypnotic prose is honed as though through a whetstone—her uncertainty, anguish and joy painfully apparent throughout as she oscillates between ambivalence and love for the people in her life during a time of destabilisation. About a quarter into the book, Suleri writes: “We knew there was something other than trying times ahead and would far rather hold our breath than speculate about what other surprises the era held up its capacious sleeve.” This is exactly the shape that Meatless Days takes.
A more recent favourite is Hiroko Oyamada's The Factory. Translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, it follows—over a long period of time, possibly up to 15 years—the perspectives of three people working at different departments in an Alphabet-esque mega-corp: one shreds paper, another works as a proofreader, the third is tasked as a “moss specialist”, to study the moss ostensibly growing on company grounds. Even though their job scopes all vary, ultimately we glean that none of that work is useful as each job eventually becomes increasingly confounding and almost nightmarish. This is a slim novella that packs a strong anti-work ethic, especially in a era where work—as a concept, as an instrument towards the accumulation of capital—holds less and less meaning.
Leah Jing McIntosh | Editor | Read Leah’s review of Anam in The Age
There are those books you live alongside for a while, and this year, André Dao’s Anam was one of them. I was asked to both review Anam and to interview André at the Wheeler, so the book sat in my brain for a couple of months. I am glad to have had so much time with it, and for the chance to think about André’s work so deeply; he opens up new ways of writing and thinking the self. Another book that I can’t stop thinking about lately is Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. In light of the nonsense at Frankfurt Book Fair, I was curious to read Shibli’s work. Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, Minor Detail is a slender book; Shibli’s prose slices right through, each line careful. Minor Detail is a book that changes its reader. I’ll admit that I am also partial to a beautiful cover, so I was happy to find the New Directions copy at Paperback Books, designed by Oliver Munday.
Brian Castro | Read Brian’s nonfiction piece for our Haunt series
Writers seldom give away the embers that kindle a creative revival, but a book I enjoyed this year was published in 1942. The great Danish writer Martin A. Hansen died in 1955 after a long period of migraines during which he took the super-drug of the time, aspirin, in doses which wrecked his kidneys. His novel The Liar tells the story of Johannes Lye, a school-teacher on a lonely island off the coast of Denmark. It is a wonderfully rhythmic novel, measured by the human heart and taking its cue from the name of its protagonist, very postmodern for its time. Unlike many books I’ve read this year, The Liar managed to move me, which is unusual, to say the least.
Eda Gunaydin | Read Eda’s introduction to our Synthesis series
For me it's hard to go past The Jakarta Method and Parable of the Sower, two books that are not quite related except as pertains to the current conjuncture. The former should inform everyone's analysis of how anti-communism undergirds the entirety of the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, and the latter is a prescient spec fic classic that realistically nails how societal decay might unspool itself in a context of massive wealth inequality and climate disaster.
Hasib Hourani | Read Hasib’s review, ‘Everything Come Alive’ in the Liminal Review of Books
As always, most of my favourite reads this year were fiction. Elena Knows by Claudia Piñero (trans. Frances Riddle) was so refreshingly paced. The narrative is condensed to one single day and its arc is unexpectedly rewarding in a strange, imperfect way. I also loved Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. It's really difficult to nail politic and craft at the same time and Hammad surprised me with it. The book is rife with historical references to art and resistance in Palestine but it's so organically done that if you didn't have prior knowledge, you might miss them completely.
Vidya Rajan | Play Vidya’s ‘Real-Time Cancellation Adventure’ from our Taste series
The Memory Police—Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
You can dash it off in an afternoon, but you'll feel like you've spent days in a dream. Set on an island where people stop seeing things once they've been declared to disappear, this fable-like book from 20 years ago still feels potent. A deceptively gentle warning about surveillance, the policing of memory, and the loss that follows.
The City Inside—Samit Basu
Satirical sci-fi, it's a little bit cyberpunk meets fascism but in the Delhi of tomorrow: a world of reality-controllers, spiritual technocrats and deep inequality. I enjoyed it as a fun romp but equally, for the way it contextualised the present: Basu's writing understands that this genre's strength can lie in mourning, in this case for a version of nationhood that feels increasingly fragile. Personally, I probably liked it so much because of the artistic complicity I felt while reading: a lot of Basu's style and thematics around technology, empire, and globalist Indian identity are similar to pre-occupations in my own writing. I'm finding quite interesting at the moment actually, that there's a lot of work you could broadly term subcontinental futurism coming out - I'm in the middle of The Immortal King Rao at the moment - and am finding huge resonances in my writing there too. Yes, there's a dystopic tinge to a lot of these works, but... it's cheering to find these echoes of shared thought and imagination.
The Great Derangement—Amitav Ghosh
Beautiful writing on how we're all deranged and climate change. No notes!
Mirandi Riwoe | Read Mirandi in conversation with Sonia Nair
I read so many fantastic books this year. I found André Dao's Anam both stunning and profound, and Rebecca Kuang’s Yellowface cheekily recognisable and a great read. I was in Ireland earlier in the year on a writer’s residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and immersed myself in brilliant Irish writers such as Claire Keegan, Louise Kennedy and Sebastian Barry. Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower is truly powerful and makes the ground shift beneath your feet, while Krissy Kneen’s Fat Girl Dancing is moving and compelling. At the moment I’m reading Trust, by Hernan Diaz, which unfolds so beautifully and intriguingly. I can’t put it down.
Tara Kenny | Read Tara’s ‘Searching for ‘Our Schapelle’ in the Liminal Review of Books
Bliss Montage—Ling Ma
From predicting the workplace fall out of the pandemic with eerie accuracy, to writing a compelling short story about a woman forced to get about with her unborn baby’s hand hanging out of her vagina, Ling Ma really can do it all! Funny, original, crushing, tense: no notes!
The Shards—Brett Easton Ellis
Crazy, sexy, demonic, privileged teen hedonism in 1980s Hollywood! What more could one want? Consumed it in a fugue state then trawled Reddit for answers afterwards. Did not help that a headless pigeon turned up on my doorstep shortly after finishing this (iykyk).
Bryant Apolonio | Read Bryant in conversation with Hassan Abul
The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata—Gina Apostol
Framed as the memoirs of a Filipino revolutionary, the real story’s told in the footnotes. A translator, psychoanalyst and historian squabble over their interpretations and misinterpretations of the counterfeit text. It’s an older novel of Apostol’s and one I read in anticipation of her new book releasing in Australia as a paperback. Still waiting!
Book of Numbers—Joshua Cohen
Joshua Cohen (author) ghostwrites the memoirs of Joshua Cohen (sinister tech billionaire). IRL, Joshua Cohen (author) helped write Edward Snowden’s memoirs. A grandiose, ecstatically self-conscious book. Very fun if that’s the kind of thing you find fun.
Jon Tjhia | Read Jon’s introduction to the Mirror series
Two wonderful, experimental books that have stayed with me this year are by Lebanese writers: Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020), and Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Live audio essays (Primary Information, 2023). Of different generations and diasporas, both of these writers broach the world’s enigmatic poetics while grappling with the evidence – in light and sound – of living and dying.
‘Private ear’ Abu Hamdan’s book compiles and transposes performance lectures and other presentations of his projects that forensically investigate recordings and archives, in which he regularly excavates incredible implications from collective testimony. Meanwhile, Adnan’s testimony is her own. Shifting the Silence addresses her own imminent death in trance-like strings of elegiac rumination. ‘The universe makes a sound — is a sound,’ she writes. ‘In the core of this sound there’s a silence, a silence that creates that sound, which is not its opposite, but its inseparable soul. And this silence can also be heard.’
Chris Tse | Read Super Model Minority by the New Zealand Poet Laureate
I want to mention two wonderful books with connections to both Aotearoa and Australia. First up is Burnt Tongue by Daley Rangi (Te Atiawa), an artist and poet whose ferocious words collide at the intersection of queer ecstasy and colonial pain. Rangi’s poetry is a quest to obliterate and reconstruct the self by challenging the structures that have bound the poet to unsustainable ideals. What is Māori? What is Takatāpui? What is poet?
Grace Yee’s genre-bending and innovative Chinese Fish is similarly subversive, using poetry and found historical material to tell the story of a Chinese family adjusting to life in Aotearoa between the 1960s and 1980s. Yee’s use of multiple voices often presents a blunt but honest rendering of what life was like for Chinese women who had no choice but to follow and chase others’ dreams.
Elizabeth Tan | Read Elizabeth in conversation with Robert Wood, here.
The very first book I read in 2023 was Siang Lu’s funny, perceptive novel, The Whitewash. Lu nimbly voices a sprawling cast of gossipy characters, weaving together real and fictional film histories in this riotous story of the ill-fated production of a Hollywood spy thriller with a Hong Kong actor as its star. Nothing else I picked up this year could quite match The Whitewash's energy and charm.
Panda Wong | Read Panda’s expanding love poem in our Here: Eros & the Like series
I have been reading slowly, erratically this year, the result of my brain becoming one-celled soup. A friend gave me Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, which I tore through on the 1 or 6 tram. I love this book for its queer weirdness, proliference of anthropomorphic crocodiles and its palimpsestic use of diary, vignettes, satire, fragments. Miaojin is also so good at lush, rich writing—making the book feel liike a pretty cinematic experience. In terms of poetry, which is what I mainly read, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars is a a book that is incredibly alive to the universe and the stars that live within it. While I tore through Notes of a Crocodile, I read and re-read A Treatise on Stars in a slower, more stretched out spiral of time. Reading it feels like what I imagine receiving light from a star feels like…
Kim Lam | Read Kim’s introduction to our Lucky series
One of life’s greatest satisfactions is recommendation uptake (I am what I love, therefore, love what I love = love me). A Best Book is one that also happens to have been uptook by the most pals. This year my most requited book-love goes to The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler’s debut speculative thriller about consciousness and cephalopods. At the time of writing it has directly reached 6 different friends, as well as an offshoot of 6 degrees of recommendations (ie, [friend x 6] + [friend ^ 6]). If acquiring online, you’ll have not one, not two, but three completely different cover directions to choose from, and I did buy this one for the (blue) cover knowing little else about it at the time. I experienced a physiological quickening of the diasporic kind, upon discovery that it is predominantly set in the Côn Đảo archipelago in Vietnam with a ‘someone like me’ protagonist: marine biologist Dr Hà Nguyễn (Vietnamese, and almost a veterinarian!). Stunning in form beyond the cover: bite-sized chapters with epigraphs that could each be a book-world of their own; explorations of developmental complexity, language, culture and human-non-human-animal relations; an unforgettable writerly voice of quiet gravity; and a fascinating, vivid world I still find myself exploring.