Books 2023

Instead of an overview, I decided to focus on two books that captured some of the social unease of 2023. (Albeit with additional recommendation of short story collection How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa.)

The Survivalists, by Kashana Cauley, is a novel centred on Aretha, a young Black lawyer. Near the start, she goes on a date with the handsome Aaron. She doesn’t go into the date with high hopes, but she and Aaron really hit it off. However, this is not a romance novel.

Aaron is a coffee entrepreneur—he sources, roasts, and brews high-quality beans. He works out of his home, a mansion that he shares with two other people. Their focus is not so much on coffee. Brittany and James are more into protein bars, bunkers, martial arts, go bags… and guns. They are survivalists.

Aretha finds this out only gradually, learning some of the alarming details only after she moves in with Aaron. Aaron is frequently away, hunting down beans, leaving Aretha trying to make the best of it with her odd roommates. Meanwhile, her career prospects, which she has banked her entire future, seem in increasing jeopardy as a new hire consistently outshines her. The prospect of working on survival gradually takes on more of an appeal, much to her best friend’s dismay.

It’s definitely uncomfortable taking this journey with Aretha, whose choices at many points are… not the ones I would have made, let’s put it that way. And that made be the reason for the rather polarizing reviews of this book. But I was really drawn into this story, and I felt it was saying something about today’s society, and its risks, and how much we can protect ourselves from them.

Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein, is a more personal work of non-fiction than this author has produced in the past. Over the years, Naomi Klein has been confused with Naomi Wolf, author of (most famously) The Beauty Myth. This became something of a problem during the pandemic era, as the previously liberal and feminist Naomi Wolf came to embrace anti-vaccine, pro-gun, conspiratorial, right-wing beliefs.

Klein is alarmed that her name is mistakenly being associated with extremely troubling opinions that she by no means shares. She discusses how this damages her online “brand”, not being at all sure what to do about it, and the fact this is even a concern is something of an irony for the author who first came to fame with No Logo.

Klein then becomes very curious about the question many were asking: what the heck did happen to Naomi Wolf? Klein researches Wolf’s past, revisiting some of her past work, noting some of its limitations, and pointing out areas where her data is weaker. And also traces the history of her declining influence in leftist circles, which culminates when Wolf’s confusion about the phrase “death recorded” as indicating execution when it meant the opposite, led to the cancellation of her book Outrages.

In contrast to the mocking engendered by that, Wolf was truly embraced by the right, receiving the kind of acclaim and popularity she hadn’t had in years. Stuck at home during the pandemic like the rest of us, Klein became somewhat obsessed with following Wolf’s trajectory—even to the point of becoming a devoted listener of Steve Bannon’s podcast (shudder), where Wolf is a frequent guest.

The book looks into the wider questions of how the right has been so successful in garnering attention and enthusiastic followers. “They get the facts wrong but the feelings right.” Klein notes the missed opportunities on the left to fight the government for policies such as school ventilation upgrades, debt cancellation, and permanent paid sick days for all. (But also the difficulty in doing so when everyone is, by necessity, separated.)

It also examines the predecessor anti-vaccine debates and their effects on the autism community, along with a fascinating but appalling history of approaches to treatment of autistic children. (Klein’s son is autistic.) It covers the lost opportunities on climate change. And using the point that both she and Wolf are Jewish and have made stances related to that, it also includes what turned out to be a very timely chapter on Israel and Palestine.

It’s all a bit of an unsettling journey, through the personal and the political and back again. Klein concludes that we need to continue fighting for what we believe in, as a group effort. But with no illusions that it’s going to be easy.