My Book Of The Year 2023
A Russian Literature Kind Of Year
Hello again!!! And happy holidays!
It’s Christmas Eve, and although I don’t celebrate Christmas, I do enjoy the cakes. Also, I feel very festive, having finally made it through the year. It’s somewhat like how you feel during the weekend, but instead of just two days, it’s a whole week. It feels so nice and relaxing.
I’m going to read A Christmas Carol this week. I make plans to read it every year but somehow I also manage to put it off every year. Not this time, though. I’ve decided enough is enough.
As 2023 moves into its final week, I quite naturally am tempted to pick one favourite book, THE one book I will remember my 2023 by.
However it seems a bit difficult this year because I have two books I absolutely loved: Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
Demons was my second Dostoevsky novel. I’ve only read two Dostoevsky novels so far, but I’ve become a fan of how he explores ideas, and this was no exception. The main idea in this book is political extremism, which I felt is quite relevant in our current time (or maybe always has been?). The novel portrays the chaos and destruction that ensue when extremist ideologies take over society. It also addresses existential void and search for meaning in life, the struggle between belief and non-belief, and also suicide. These are topics I generally spend a lot of time contemplating about, so it makes the book very fascinating to me.
War and Peace, coincidentally is also my second Tolstoy and I am once again struck by how beautiful Tolstoy’s character creation is. His characters always seem so realistic, like real people we know in real life, and this was not exception. Now, this book, I find is about life, unfolding against a backdrop of war and peace. Tolstoy dives into questions about free will, search for meaning in life, and most importantly, of the futility and absurdity of war. The narrative switches between very intimate domestic scenes and harrowing battlefield settings, juxtaposing two sides of life that might seem disconnected, but hardly are. It's almost like being taken back in time and watching a chapter of history unfold right in front of your eyes.
Both are great books of world literature, and rightfully so. With that said, and with the admission that I’m a bigger Dostoevsky fan than Tolstoy fan (thanks to Crime and Punishment), my pick ultimately will be War and Peace.
While I truly admired Demons, I loved War and Peace.
I’m a character centric reader. I move through a book by attaching myself to a character, it doesn’t essentially have to be a ‘good’ character, but it has to be a character I can get emotionally invested in. I could hardly do that in Demons, but it was very easy in War and Peace.
Also, Demons is tightly packed with complex ideas, and while War and Peace, too, has complex ideas, it also has not-so-complex ideas, which offered little breathers.
I read Demons pretty fast, which didn’t allow me to have enough time to process the story. I read War and Peace slow, taking my time. I also started keeping a reading journal while reading War and Peace, which compelled me to think about what I was reading.
Demons was a book, I could tell objectively is good, but when it comes to subjective feelings, it was lacking for my part. I however am confident this is a book I’ll grow to love it more when I re-read it.
I have always been very much into history, especially the history of the Napoleonic wars, so War and Peace already had a different appeal to me. And by spending more time with the book, firstly because of its length, and secondly because of the slow reading, I formed a deeper attachment with it.
So, yes, my book of the year for 2023 is War and Peace, and for a second year, Dostoevsky remains the writer of my second favourite book of the year.
What about you? What was your favourite book you read in 2023? Don’t forget to let me know.
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