Well this is embarrassing. As I started to pull together the top books I read in 2024, I noticed that I hadn’t ever posted about my #1 book of 2023! In fact, I hadn’t posted anything on this blog since March! For the few of you who read this, my apologies. I can’t promise I’ll do better in 2025, I will at least try to get my favorite books of 2024 out there. And in the meantime, here is my top book of 2023!
#1 – My Rock ‘N Roll Friend by Tracey Thorn (2021)
Still riding high on my women in rock memoirs, the talented Tracy Thorn came in at #3 with Naked at the Albert Hall. Ms. Thorn also topped my list of books read in 2023 with her outstanding work, My Rock ‘N Roll Friend. This is certainly quite a feat for any author, especially one who is mainly known for being the lead singer and songwriter of the band Everything But The Girl, who, incidentally, released their first album in 23 years last spring.
Accomplished singer/songwriter and frontwoman for the band, Everything but the Girl, impressed me greatly with her first memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star. With her latest work, My Rock ‘n Roll Friend, Thorn not only writes a compelling and fascinating memoir about her friend, Lindy Morrison, drummer of the Australian 80’s band, The Go-Between, but she also chronicles their nearly 40 year friendship, and most startling of all, she writes an insightful, intellectually scathing feminist showcase about how women are systematically erased from history. Tracey is a writer to be cherished. Her prose is casual, self-reflective, yet immediate and powerful. Her voice is singular, and unique… unexpected even for those who only know her through her work as a pop star. Her ability to bring her subject to larger-than-life reality, whether you know a little, a lot or nothing about her is remarkable, and certainly makes you want to know more. I also hope Tracey continues to document her observations about life, feminism, friendship, relationships, and life.
And for those keeping track, here is the complete list of my favorite books read in 2023:
- My Rock ‘N Roll Friend – Tracey Thorn (2021)
- Stolen – Ann-Helén Laestadius, Rachel Willson-Broyles (Translator) (2021, 2023 in the U.S.)
- Naked at the Albert Hall: The Inside Story of Singing – Tracey Thorn (2015)
- Rat Girl – Kristin Hersh (2010)
- The Unfolding – A.M. Homes (2022)
- The Museum of Failures – Thrity Umrigar (2023)
- Girl in a Band – Kim Gordon (2015)
- Stories I Might Regret Telling You: A Memoir – Martha Wainwright (2022)
- Swim Home to the Vanished – Brendan Shay Basham (2023)
- The Emperor’s Children – Claire Messud (2006)
- TNight Sky Mine – Melissa Scott (1996)
- The Memory of Animals – Claire Fuller (2023)
- You Only Call When You’re in Trouble – Stephen McCauley (2024)
- Chapter and Verse: New Order, Joy Division and Me – Bernard Sumner (2015)
- Boys in the Trees: A Memoir – Carly Simon (2015)
Ann-Helén Laestadius is a lauded author from Sweden, of Sámi and Tornedalian descent: two of Sweden’s national minorities, and in tackling this multi-faceted novel, she barely misses a step while addressing the bigotry, cruelty, and casual indifference that plagues a community. Sadly, the novel is based on hundreds of police reports the author reviewed. The story revolves around Elsa and her family, of Sámi descent, and reindeer herders by profession. When Elsa is just a young girl, skiing to their reindeer corrall on her own for the first time, she stumbles across on of her own reindeer calves, slaughtered by a man from a neighboring village. Caught in the act, the man threatens Elsa for her silence. Despite reporting the murder of their property, Swedish law only considers this kind of slaughter as theft and do very little to investigate. This dark scene kicks off a decade long struggle that Elsa, her family, and her fellow Sámi villagers face time and time again as their livelihood is destroyed, and their reindeer are tortured and butchered unlawfully. 
I don’t think there’s a better memoir writer than Everything but the Girl’s Tracey Thorn. Ironically, the second of her three books (and the third that I read) focuses on the skill that she is better known for, and that’s singing. In Naked at the Albert Hall: The Inside Story of Singing, Thorn focuses on the the physical requirement of singing, the relationship between the singer and the listener, and the tools that a professional singer might use to enhance or alter their singing ability. Along the way she includes stories about her life as both lead vocalist for Everything but the Girl, and the struggle she has had since 2000 when she sang her last public concert. Included in the book are brief interviews with other singers, such as Linda Thompson, Kristen Hersh (author of my #4 book, Rat Girl) and the marvelous Alison Moyet, asking the to provide their points of view of how singing impacts their lives. She talks about many of the singers she admires and her relationship with them as a listener. 
Another great entry in my new favorite genre: the rock ‘n roll memoir by women. Kristen Hersh details a year in her life; modified entries in her diary, just as her band, Throwing Muses was about to take off. Along the way, there’s a bipolar disorder, a friendship with an icon of the golden age of Hollywood, and a pregnancy. This is what I look for in a rock ‘n roll memoir: reading about life as a working musician, while commenting on the larger world and the personal idiosyncrasies that make up a personality. Hersh’s observations about life and her unorthodox childhood are abstract, atonal, and whimsical, reminiscent of her music, but the deep bonds of friendship between her and her bandmates shines through.
A.M. Homes fascinates me as a writer. Her novels are usually heavily satirical, and rarely tackles subjects I would predict would be interest to me. Yet her sharp-eyed take, often on middle America is often bold, insightful, and entertaining. In her latest novel, The Undoing she focuses on a singular moment of a behind-the-scenes power broker for the Republican Party known as the Big Guy. It’s election night 2008, and things definitely go as planned. Shaken to the core as Obama is announced President of the United States, The Big Guy and his family experience the upheaval in radically different ways, with our wealthy, rich patriarch setting in motion a super secret cabal of similarly wealthy, aging, white Republican that will secretly and slowly return America to it’s former greatness over the coming decades.
Thrity Umrigar knows how to write powerful upheavals in characters’ lives. In her latest novel, Remy returns to the city of Bombay where he grew up both to look into a possible adoption for he and his American wife, and also to check on his estranged mother, whose health, he discovers, has taken a turn for the worse. Already there are two issues that Remy must deal with rife with potential family drama, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Family secrets, a harsh look at both Indian and American social systems, misogyny, pride, religion… all of these and more play a part in one man’s sudden need to reevaluate his life and nearly everything he has believed.
As merely a casual fan of Sonic Youth (big fan of “Kool Thing” ever since it was included in the Hal Hartley film, Simple Men), Kim Gordon’s memoir was perfect for my recent reading list of female rockers’ memoirs that Tracey Thorn’s books steered me toward. While not the accomplished writer that Thorn is, Gordon’s insight’s and life experiences as an artist and musician, part of the New York art scene in the late 70’s and 80’s, and half of one of post-punk’s most notable couple made for fascinating a compelling reading. Her writing style was straight-forward and engaging, and despite a cool exterior, the moments when she opened up to her strong feelings or challenging emotional conflicts were powerful.
Another enjoyable celebrity bio in the rock & roll vein. Martha Wainwright has a fascinating career and life in her own right, but as she mentions more than a few times in this book, she also comes from music royalty, with her mom, Kate McGarrigle, her dad, Loudon Wainwright III, and her older brother, Rufus Wainwright. Martha was always struggling to keep up creatively with her famous parents and brother, and arguably succeeded, even though she often felt inadequate. She also led a sometimes wild, rock & roll, partying lifestyle that makes for entertaining reading. She’s definitely a heart on her sleeve kind of woman, and doesn’t hold back. It was a quick, fun read, that doesn’t shy away from some of the darker and sadder part of life as well. Sometimes it reminded me of Sarah Polley’s recent book of essays, Run Toward the Danger, in the quirky, matter of fact way she told some disturbing stories. It certainly made me want to go back and listen to more of her music!
Brendan Shay Basham has constructed a novel exploring grief with such poetry, and such visceral imagery, that it’s hard to shake. Damien is struggling with the loss of his younger brother Kai, who was swept away by a river and drowned. Damien’s odyssey takes him from the Pacific Northwest, through the dessert, to an isolated fishing town under the iron-rule of a family of brujas (witches.) As his journey progresses, he is slowly being transformed into a fish.