Littwin: It was a long and trying year. I needed overtime to produce my list of the best books I read in 2023.

For those many readers who have been clamoring to know what has happened to my annual Best Books Mike Littwin Has Read in (fill in year) column — there have been, at last count, as many as four queries — I deeply regret that my 2023 best-of list didn’t show up until the first week of 2024.

For the delay, I blame Lauren Boebert. And also, of course, Donald Trump. But what else is new?

I planned to have the column ready for December 24th, but that week the Colorado Supreme Court kicked Trump off the state primary ballot, and what’s a poor Colorado political columnist to do? 

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I wrote about it. Of course I did.

Things were still OK, though. I would have the column ready for the next Sunday, on New Year’s Eve, still 2023, if barely. And then Boebert announced she was dumping her gobsmacked 3rd Congressional District constituents and moving to the 4th CD in a desperate attempt to hold on to her phony-baloney job. So, I had no choice but to write about it. I mean, it’s my job.

So, here we are in 2024, looking back at 2023, which, for the most part, is not exactly a pretty sight — see: The Tattered Cover bankruptcy, just as one example. But if you look closely at my bookshelves, you’ll see a different story. I have read a lot of really good fiction this year because the truth, as I’m sure you’ll agree, was just way too real. 

And then there were the books I was so glad I didn’t read — especially any book about Donald Trump, though I was tempted by “Divider,” written by the formidable wife-and-husband team of Susan Glasser and Peter Baker. But for the first year since 2015, it was a Trump-book-free year for me, although, sadly, I did read and/or write approximately one million Trump pieces in 2023. Like I said, it’s my job.

But onto the good stuff:

“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store”

By James McBride

If I had to pick a single favorite book of the year, this would be it. McBride — who won the National Book Award for “The Good Lord Bird,” a brilliant, seriocomic take on the very serious abolitionist, John Brown — takes his singular brand of compassionate wit to Depression-era Pittsburgh and a community called Chicken Hill, where Blacks and Jewish immigrants live, sometimes uneasily, side by side.

McBride’s characters tend to be wildly outrageous and yet somehow very much true to life. The circumstances in his novels, as any reviewer must note, run toward the Dickensian. The combination, though, is all McBridean. As a Black writer whose mother was a Polish-Jewish immigrant, McBride is writing what he knows, but also telling a story — which centers on an orphaned deaf Black boy who may know a secret the white leaders in town are determined to suppress — that circles around itself in a dizzying account of life and, of course, death.

The book is that good. It’s that funny and also that serious. There’s a mystery at the heart of McBride’s novel, which begins years later when a skeleton is discovered. But the real mystery is all about the heart and how it can survive when class is set against class, when religion is set against religion, when race is set against race, but when there are those who somehow manage to rise above all that. 

“The Bee Sting”

By Paul Murray

I want you to read this book. I need you to read this book. And, if you’ve already read it, I need you to write to me with your take on Murray’s also uproariously funny story — you can see already that I needed some serious laughs to counter the calamity that was 2023 — of a well-off Irish family in 2008, the year of the worldwide economic crash. 

If you think I have a thing for Irish writers, it’s because I do. Murray is one of the more adept practitioners of the dark Irish humor that is born of centuries of tragedy. In this case, it’s a family of four — a prominent car dealer who can’t live up to his dead brother or begin to deal with his many secrets; a local beauty, though raised in that particular kind of Irish poverty, who loved the dead brother but married the living one, to her sometimes regret;  the teenage daughter who is smothered by the living ghosts of both parents and who longs to escape; the younger son caught in a confusing world, some of it online, that he needs someone to help guide him through.

In other words, it’s like every other family, only moreso, with secrets piled upon mysteries. Oh, and did I mention Murray also deals seriously with climate change and, in some hilarious stretches, the specter of environmental apocalypse? The family business is collapsing, the economy is collapsing, the environment is collapsing, lives are collapsing over 600-plus pages, and, if you’re anything like me, you cannot stop reading.

“The MANIAC”

By Benjamin Labatut

I have long been fascinated by the difference between brilliance and genius, and just as fascinated by the lines between genius and madness. In Labatut’s novel, he explores both angles and more in his based-in-fact-but-somewhat-fictionalized — there has been rigorous debate about where the fictional parts begin and end — life of John von Neumann, otherwise known as the smartest man who ever lived. What I mean is, I read that by the time he was six, von Neumann could multiply two eight-digit numbers in his head and was fluent in ancient Greek. Then, he just got smarter.

Why von Neumann particularly matters today is that his work was critical in the modern development of AI and foretold the possibility of machines teaching themselves more than man can know. It was also critical in the development of game theory, which he used in developing the Cold War strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction. He was at Los Alamos and later played a key role in creating the hydrogen bomb. His design for a computer, dubbed MANIAC, advanced scientific enterprise everywhere. And all this doesn’t even begin to summarize the breadth of his work.

But Labatut, who gives us lessons in everything from quantum mechanics to the ancient game of Go, is more interested in the madness that lies beneath the scientific exploration and in the question of what can be lost when scientific geniuses like von Neumann, so obsessed with gaining knowledge at whatever cost, sacrifice morality in their quest. It’s a question Labatut explored earlier in another well-received, fact-based scientific novel, “When We Cease to Understand the World.”

Labatut tells von Neumann’s story through fictionalized observations from friends, lovers, enemies and competitors. But just as interesting is the book’s coda, which moves years forward from von Neumann’s death in 1957 at the age of 54, in which a computer is matched against the world’s best Go player. Computers had already beaten chess masters, but Go is a game —an art form, we’re told — with nearly endless possibilities. A computer would need something like intuition to beat the masters, which, as you might have guessed, it does. Labatut quotes one of von Neumann’s observers — and this may be the book’s central point — in speaking of unchecked scientific advances: “The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”

“American Prometheus”

By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

and

“The Passenger”

By Cormac McCarthy

“American Prometheus” is the ultimate biography of another genius, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the basis for the hit movie “Oppenheimer.” I picked up the book to learn more than the movie, which is quite good and also quite true to the source work, could offer. I searched for the important parts — like the detailed story of how he lost his security clearance, a story of politics versus science that resonates today, and how his work leading the development of the atomic bomb left, he said, blood on his hands — and was hooked. Oppenheimer, by the way, played key roles in von Neumann’s story.

Cormac McCarthy, who died this year at age 89, is considered, of course, one of the great American novelists. He published “The Passenger” — along with a shorter companion book, “Stella Maris” — in the last year of his life. They may not be the equal of, say, “Blood Meridian,” but it is still McCarthy working at a very high level. He tells the story of two brilliant scientists whose father worked on the atom bomb at Los Alamos with Oppenheimer and von Neumann. The father’s role in the destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki haunts them. The son Bobby leaves the world of physics and is now a deep-sea salvage diver. The daughter Alicia, a true genius who suffers from schizophrenia, commits suicide. The loving relationship between the siblings is central to the story. And so are the brilliant set pieces in which Alicia hallucinates long, involved, hilarious conversations with a dwarf known only as The Kid.

“Crook Manifesto”

By Colson Whitehead

The knock on Whitehead used to be that he was a very good novelist of great promise who hadn’t yet fulfilled that promise. But then he wrote “The Underground Railroad,” the first of consecutive Pulitzer Prize winners — “The Nickel Boys” followed — and the matter of greatness was settled. But what would come next?

If you have read “Harlem Shuffle,” you already know. Whitehead would take on crime fiction, set in ’60s Harlem, detailing the life and times of a furniture store owner/petty crook named Ray Carney. And make literature of it. Hilarious literature. Knowing literature. Whitehead has now written a sequel, “Crook Manifesto,” set in the ’70s with largely the same set of characters. In this one, Carney tries to go straight, only to get unstraightened when attempting to score Michael Jackson tickets for his daughter. Which totally figures.

The second novel may not be quite as fresh as the first, although it is still as wonderfully written. And maybe even more importantly, the two books offer an incisive look into late-century Harlem and the African-American culture it spawned. There’s a third book coming, we’re told, that will cover Harlem in the ’80s, presumably with Carney as the lead. I can’t wait.

“A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them”

By Timothy Egan

Egan’s frightening tale of how a lying, corrupt demagogue could use a platform of bigotry and hate to capture millions of all-too-willing followers while threatening democratic norms is not a story about Donald Trump. But it could be. When you read Egan’s book on the takeover of Indiana by the Klan in the 1920s, led by a con man named D.C. Stephenson, you can’t help but note a certain resemblance.

It is astonishing to read how mainstream the Klan would become in the decade — a fraternal-order-like organization, except one featuring hoods and vigilantes and bribery and kickbacks on the robes they sold by the millions — as members signed up throughout the Midwest and the South and, of course, as we have learned, even in Colorado. The Klan originated during Reconstruction with its night riders and its terrorizing of former slaves. But the revived 1920s Klan was a different beast, one made for a con man like Stephenson — one reviewer called him a “malign Henry Hill” always looking for the main chance — who studies Mussolini’s speeches and learned, as Egan writes, that “small lies are for the timid.” 

Egan — a great reporter whose book about the Dust Bowl, “The Worst Hard Time,”  won the National Book Award — notes how quickly and completely Stephenson and the Klan would come to own Indiana: “Cops, judges, prosecutors, ministers, mayors, newspaper editors — they all answered to the Grand Dragon.” But almost as quickly, the Klan fell. And in Egan’s telling, much of the credit goes to a 25-year-old woman whom Stephenson viciously raped — he was known to tear at women’s breasts with his teeth — for speaking out against the Grand Dragon. There would be a trial, leading to Stephenson’s fall. But the Klan fell everywhere in quick order in the ’20s. Somehow, the fever broke. The demagogues lost, at least for a time. I guess it can happen.

“Gangbuster: One Man’s Battle Against Crime, Corruption and the Klan”

By Alan Prendergast

A longtime, standout investigative reporter at Westword, Prendergast tells the Klan story from a Colorado perspective, where it is just as frightening. The little-known history of the Klan’s brief dominion in Colorado came to the fore in 2018 when Walker Stapleton was running for governor. We learned that his great-grandfather, Benjamin Stapleton, the powerful five-term Denver mayor for whom airports and neighborhoods would be named, was elected with Klan support and with Klan muscle, which he later conveniently repudiated. The Klan added a governor and a number of local and state officials to a roster of hate and corruption.

Prendergast’s book is not just about the Klan, though. As stunning as it is to learn about the Klan’s reign in Colorado, it may be even more surprising to learn that Denver was, at the same time, a notorious crime center where the Big Con was played in slightly darker colors than we saw in “The Sting.”

There’s a hero to this tale, too. The gangbuster in the title was Denver District Attorney Philip Van Cise, who would take on the Denver mob and then turn his sights on the Klan. Prendergast tells Van Cise’s story — the gangbuster lasted only one term — with engaging detail and, again, with themes that cannot be overlooked today.

“Tremor”

By Teju Cole

If you like high-end intellectualism in a novel with little plot — but filled to bursting with wry and incisive observations on art, on theft, on invisibility, on photography, on J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting, “Slave Ship,” on colonialism and its all-too-visible shadow — then you should grab “Tremor.” If there is little traditional plot, there are wonderful set pieces, told in a way that readers of the late, great W.G. Sebald will surely appreciate.

“Tremor” comes 12 years after Cole’s previous novel, “Open City,” in which a medical student walks the streets of post-9/11 New York and uncovers bits of the city’s violent past. As one reviewer put it of Cole: His “work makes an art — and a necessary virtue — of close looking.” In “Tremor,” the story of a Harvard professor (like Cole) from Nigeria (Cole was born in Michigan but grew up in Nigeria), we take close-looking tours from a Maine antique shop to a fine-arts museum in Boston to a lecture in Lagos. And what does Tunde, the novel’s professor, see? Here’s a taste: 

“In the West a love of the ‘authentic’ means that art collectors prefer their African objects to be alienated so that only what has been extracted from its context becomes real. Better that the artist not be named, better that the artist be long dead. The dispossession of the object’s makers mystically confers monetary value to the object and the importance of the object is boosted by the story that can be told about its role in the history of modern European art.”

“The Fraud”

By Zadie Smith

Here’s a novel with plot, lots of plot, all in service of Smith’s brilliant retelling of a true story from the 1870s of an English butcher living in Australia who lays claim to a British title. The trial was a sensation, in all senses of the word, that captivated the country for months upon months. That would seem to be plenty for a novelist, but not for Smith, who also explores 19th-century British literature, colonialism and the slave trade, along with an examination, most relevant today, of how truth and misinformation intersect. OK, I said I didn’t read any Trump books last year, but is every book now about Trump?

Telling the story is Eliza Touchet, a widow and cousin to a popular but now forgotten British novelist named William Ainsworth. He was popular enough — although endlessly lampooned, to hilarious effect, by Smith — to be a rival to Dickens, who makes several appearances in the story. In a twist, Dickens is drawn by Smith as an opportunist who happens to write, well, brilliant Dickensian novels.

Touchet, a so-called modern woman of the time, joins Ainsworth’s second wife, who is barely literate, in viewing the trial. Thus the reader is given a multi-purpose courtside view of the proceedings, in which the Claimant, as he’s called, swears he is, in fact, Sir Roger Tichborne, who was thought to have been lost at sea. Touchet takes a notebook with her and thinks of writing about the Claimant, himself barely literate. But she becomes more interested in the story of Andrew Bogle, a former slave who strangely supports the Claimant’s story. The mystery is why. In looking for the answer, you first have to understand the power of narrative and the even greater power that comes with being the one who gets to tell the story. 

OK, it turns out you can run out of room even in cyberspace when the editors beg you to finish. But I’ll just mention two more books in brief. “Furrows,” by Namwali Serpell, an astonishing book about grief and its mysteries. “The Slowworm’s Song,” by Andrew Miller, another novel about Ireland and “the troubles,” but explored from the haunted memories of a British soldier caught in the hell that was Belfast. 

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.

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