These 23 new books from 2023 are worth giving this holiday season

Every Christmas season, stubborn readers — myself included — frustrate their loved ones and further one of their greatest problems by asking for more. More words, more books, more hardcover and paperback dominoes for their to-read pile. Give us little else.

Thankfully, each year also yields a treasure chest worth of great writing. And in 2023, the gift-giver's possibilities remain almost limitless. Here are just 23 books from 2023 worth wrapping up and addressing to your favorite reader.

For those who need a good whodunit

S.A. Cosby's "All the Sinners Bleed" is violent and smart, tense and sometimes maddening. In short, it's a perfect thriller. Here, Cosby follows Titus Crown, the first Black sheriff in his Virginia county, as he wrestles his backyard past — and each next moment — on the search for a serial killer.

If "All the Sinners Bleed" is heavy rock 'n' roll, "Crook Manifesto" moves like slinky R&B. The latest in brilliant novelist Colson Whitehead's books about family man/small-time fence Ray Carney easily finds the pocket and immerses readers in the feel of 1970s Harlem. "Crook Manifesto" isn't as much a whodunit as a who's-going-to-make-it as Whitehead's characters face increasingly sticky situations.

Innovative works of fiction

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah only keeps earning praise and prizes for his debut novel "Chain Gang All-Stars." The book deftly pulls social subtext to the fore, examining a world in which incarceration is explicitly mined for sport and entertainment. The author has more than earned the tag of "new and necessary American voice" from his contemporary, novelist Tommy Orange.

University of Missouri alum Jennifer Maritza McCauley brings a poet's touch and an everyday philosopher's questions to her story collection "When Trying to Return Home." McCauley's characters grope for and kick against home as a place, trying to find it within themselves and one another.

Bearing perhaps the best title of the year, Lorrie Moore's "I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home" is the funniest ghost story and the creepiest romantic comedy you'll read this year. Ultimately, a tale of passages and portals, Moore follows two ill-fated lovers on their path back to each other — and, inevitably, to very different states of existence.

With 2011's "We the Animals," Justin Torres wrote one of the rawest and most self-assured debuts in recent memory. A dozen years later, Torres' second novel, "Blackouts," earned the National Book Award; a work of historical fiction, the work wrestles with the psychological and social shadows projected onto queer people in the early 20th century.

Laugh your way through these funny pages

Among our most endearing comic voices, Gary Gulman turns over language to uncover its most refreshing and absurd properties. And Gulman draws real humanity and resonance from the universal specifics of his childhood and tussles with mental health. "Misfit: Growing up Awkward in the '80s" promises to unite all that makes Gulman one of our most needed — and welcome — storytellers.

"How to Stay Married," from writer Harrison Scott Key, is hilarious and harrowing. Subtitled "The Most Insane Love Story Every Told," the book might actually deliver on that loaded promise, underlining the ludicrous, heartbreaking, ultimately transforming moments in a story of marital betrayal and one-step-forward, two-or-three-steps-back reconciliation.

Necessary doses of reality

A voice always worth heeding, Naomi Klein's "Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World" takes a longer, closer look at issues related to identity, technology and political divides through a strange-but-true funhouse mirror image of herself Klein encountered.

A work of erasure poetry, Nicole Sealey's "The Ferguson Report" delves headlong into Department of Justice documentation, losing legalese and other unfruitful language to gain a truer, soul-level knowledge of a people and place — right here in Missouri — that for too long has gone mistreated and misunderstood.

Novels that shore up the soul

With "Sun House," his first novel in more than 20 years, David James Duncan ("The Brothers K") delivers a sprawling spiritual odyssey. Duncan traces, then tethers the "eureka" moments that transform a wide cast of characters with different tales and traumas but the same burning hopes. Sometimes "Sun House" reads like a grad-level course in religion and philosophy, but Duncan's writing remains sentence-level beautiful and his underpinning ideal — that people might still summit spiritually together — is worth absorbing.

"The Eyes & The Impossible" from Dave Eggers isn't a human story, but ties readers back to their humanity. Eggers casts his lot in with Johannes, a free-range, park-dwelling dog who serves as a visionary leader for his fellow animals. To a degree, Eggers transmits his hopes through the animal kingdom in much the same way Duncan does with his own characters.

"The Heart of It All" is the latest in a series of quiet revelations from novelist Christian Kiefer. A book we think we already know — fingering the frayed ends of a small Ohio town in the shadow of the 2016 election — takes a more delicate shape as seemingly small gestures heal deep cuts and bind once-distant neighbors together.

Poems for the well-rounded reader

Perhaps the finest collection of the year, New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp's "An Eye in Each Square" enters a dialogue with the late painter Agnes Martin, considering the ways we make meaning through gesture and the marks we leave on this world. Camp's work is endlessly soulful, its lines slipping between emotions, memories and scenes to show how each is made up of the other.

"Aisle 228," from poet Sandra Marchetti, coaxes the inherent romanticism from baseball in pieces that underline the game's traditions, present-tense rhapsodies and the relationships it both creates and cements.

A do-it-all writer who explains us to ourselves through works of history and poetry, Clint Smith's latest collection, "Above Ground," perceptively documents all the tripping, falling — and falling in love — of new fatherhood while lyrically and painstakingly revealing the interior life of a Black man raising his child in 21st-century America, a wondrous and fraught endeavor.

Tantalizing tales for music lovers

Michael Azerrad revisits one of the truly great Nirvana texts in "The Amplified Come As You Are." Here, the author dives back into his 30-year-old band biography, creating "a truly unique book-within-a-book featuring hundreds of extensive new essay-like annotations that deepen our understanding" of Cobain, Grohl, Novoselic and Co., according to a publisher's description.

Rob Harvilla's "60 Songs that Explain the '90s" is the definitive 1990s music podcast, a truly hilarious, often moving essay-istic series that rightly handles nostalgia, reveling in it and asking better questions of the past's echoes. Harvilla's companion book promises to satiate listeners and compel those who've yet to hear his voice.

At age 93, Sonny Rollins remains one of our last living jazz priests. With "Saxophone Colossus," author — and practiced horn player — Aidan Levy pulls back the curtain of Rollins' excellence through more than 200 interviews and a sifting of the legend's personal artifacts.

Wilco bandleader Jeff Tweedy continues to pass down musical insight on the page, this time with "World Within a Song." The book models close listening, sitting with 50 songs that shaped Tweedy's taste and artistry. You'll read about (and, no doubt, start humming) tunes by the likes of Mavis Staples, Joni Mitchell and Dolly Parton.

Voices you'll want to hear over and again

Among our keenest set of eyes, Roxane Gay's "Opinions" is notable for its scope and spirit: gathering a decade's worth of favorite pieces that both observe what is shaping America and have shaped America themselves.

Poet Maggie Smith always applies her luminous voice in service of empathy and understanding; in "You Could Make This Place Beautiful," Smith is also the receiver of such empathy. A memoir of parenthood, creativity and divorce, Smith knows no one book can honor this personal history. But she sounds the truth as she knows it, while leaving room for the most intimate, unknowable mysteries.

"Butts: A Backstory," from writer and "Radiolab" contributor Heather Radke, goes beyond its, well, peachy cover to comprise a survey of the many ways our very human posteriors reveal something about cultural ideals and how we express them.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter/X @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: 23 from '23: New books worth giving this holiday season