Best first reads, 2023

I read 101 books in 2023. Here are my favorite first reads (pre-2023 releases only).

The top twenty are organized chronologically (I restricted myself to one per author). The rest are organized by authors’ last names.

Top twenty:

The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins (1860)
Roderick Hudson, by Henry James (1875)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy (1891)
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James (1904)
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton (1905)
The Listener and Other Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1907)
The Subjugated Beast, by R. R. Ryan (1938)
Native Son, by Richard Wright (1940)
The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long (1946)
Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil (1947)
The Road Through the Wall, by Shirley Jackson (1948)
Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin (1956)
The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever (1957)
The Collector, by John Fowles (1963)
Julia, by Peter Straub (1975)
The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978)
The Ceremonies, by T. E. D. Klein (1984)
Soul/Mate, by Joyce Carol Oates [as Rosamond Smith] (1989)
Paradais, by Fernanda Melchor (2021)

Other standouts:

Poetics, by Aristotle (335 BCE)
Inner Experience, by Georges Bataille (1943)
Weird Mysticism: Philosophical Horror and the Mystical Text, by Brad Baumgartner (2021)
Tender is the Flesh, by Agustina Bazterrica (2017)
The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1906)
The Lure of the Unknown: Essays on the Strange, by Algernon Blackwood (2022)
Drop City, by T. C. Boyle (2003)
The Hungry Moon, by Ramsey Campbell (1986)
The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares (1940)
The Wapshot Scandal, by John Cheever (1964)
Falconer, by John Cheever (1977)
Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi (2019)
A Short History of Decay, by E. M. Cioran (1949)
The Vet’s Daughter, by Barbara Comyns (1959)
The Juniper Tree, by Barbara Comyns (1985)
Americana, by Don DeLillo (1971)
The Names, by Don DeLillo (1982)
God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, by Vine Deloria Jr. (1972)
The Lost Daughter, by Elena Ferrante (2006)
The Magus, by John Fowles (1965)     
Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill (2005)                
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh (2016)
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, by J. Jack Halberstam (1995)
Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris (1981)
Last Summer, by Evan Hunter (1968)
The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson (1949)
Hangsaman, by Shirley Jackson (1951)
The Bird’s Nest, by Shirley Jackson (1954)
Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing, by Stephen King (2000)
The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle (2016)
The Moral Essays, by Giacomo Leopardi (1832)
Hieroglyphics and Other Essays, by Arthur Machen (2022)
Burnt Offerings, by Robert Marasco (1973)
The Beetle, by Richard Marsh (1897)
A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, by Jonathan Newell (2020)
A Garden of Earthly Delights, by Joyce Carol Oates (1967)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates (1993)
The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art, by Joyce Carol Oates (2003)
Jack of Spades, by Joyce Carol Oates (2015)
The Anthrobscene, by Jussi Parikka (2014)
Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, by Paul Schrader (1972)
EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (2013)
The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, by Clark Ashton Smith (2014)
Motley Stones, by Adalbert Stifter (1853)
Marriages, by Peter Straub (1973)
Koko, by Peter Straub (1988)
Sides, by Peter Straub (2007)
After Life, by Eugene Thacker (2010)
Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles (2021)
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, by Kathryn Yusoff (2018)