3 Great Nonfiction Reads from 2023
It’s the end of the year, which makes it a good time to reflect back on this year’s best reads. Of all of the nonfiction books I read in 2023, here are the three that I find myself talking about most often to family and friends in the real world.
Note: This review contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. If you use them to purchase books from Bookshop.org, I’ll earn a small commission. Read more about why I decided to use affiliate links here.
For Everyone
By Jason Reynolds
Atheneum Books for Young Readers. April 2, 2019. 112p. $7.99 (paperback).
Middle Grade & Up — Jason Reynolds originally performed For Everyone at the Kennedy Center as part of the unveiling ceremony for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.
Now available in book form, this lyrical, inspiring, book-length poem reminds us that dreams take time. Dreams take struggle. Dreams are accomplished in stages, so be patient, be persistent, and keep going, even if you have a little fearful voice in your head whispering that it’s too late.
RECOMMENDATION: A perfect gift for graduates or anyone in the midst of a career or midlife transition. Would make a good read-aloud in any graduating (8th grade and up) class.
The Robin Makes a Laughing Sound: A Birder’s Observations
By Sallie Wolf
Designed by Micah Bornstein
Charlesbridge Publishing. February 1, 2010. 48p. $11.95 (hardcover).
Middle Grade & Up — One of the students at the public middle school library where I worked last spring found this book in our newly revamped nonfiction section, and the title was so wonderful I couldn’t help checking it out for myself when they finished it.
Reading it was a delight, even if the content is hard for me to describe here. Is the book about birds or is it about the wonderful swirling meditative mix of poetry, lists, sketches, and snippets of thought that make up a daily habit of journaling?
Reading the book and scanning the lists of birds and the months they were there made me miss the Chicago area, where the author is from and which is the scene of an amazing bird migration every year.
RECOMMENDATION: Recommended for anyone who enjoys journaling, bird watching, or who draws inspiration from nature.
The Accommodation
By Jim Schutze
Foreword by John Wiley Price
La Reunion Publishing. September 28, 2021. 272p. $30 (hardcover).
Adult — Originally recommended to me by my brother, this is possibly the one nonfiction book I’ve spent the most time thinking about this year. It tells the checkered history of civil rights in Dallas from the perspective of a journalist who spent his career reporting on Dallas politics for the Dallas Times Herald, The Dallas Observer, D Magazine, and the Houston Chronicle. The book, originally published in 1987 but quickly suppressed, wove together a lot of threads about things I observed while I was growing up there but didn’t fully understand. I remembered many of the players from reading the Dallas Morning News in high school, and found myself pausing this book at several points to look up some of the others.
When I was done, I handed a copy of this book to my daughter full of sticky notes about our family’s intersections with it (my dad was part of the software engineer migration down to Dallas in the 1980s, Ross Perot’s company awarded me a scholarship that partially funded my undergraduate studies at Rice, etc.).
RECOMMENDATION: A good pick for readers interested in reading a career political journalist’s take on a side of Dallas city history that literally didn’t make the news (after being pulled in 1987, this book remained out of print for decades), or simply curious to understand why Dallas wasn’t the scene of more civil unrest during the 1960s and 1970s.
Related Links
- Making our nonfiction section more accessible (Caterpickles)
- What did Dallas learn from rediscovering a suppressed book? (Los Angeles Review of Books)
- More Book Reviews on Caterpickles
- Introducing the Caterpickles Bookstore and a word about affiliate links on Caterpickles (Caterpickles)
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