Books for fall 2023: Our 75 top picks for serious reading season — and there’s plenty of light stuff here too
Am I the only one who thinks it’s weird that we keep treating the seasons as clearly delineated stretches of time? I love fall, and particularly that lineal moment right before fall gets chilly, that promise of fall. But this is the fall book preview, and though I should be excited to tell you of weeks of incredible titles coming — Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk, Zadie Smith on historical fiction, Sly Stone (!) on himself — climatologists warn that summer may linger until Groundhog Day.
You know the saying: So many books, so little time? What follows are way too many books to read before Groundhog Day, never mind Thanksgiving. To make matters worse, Chicago keeps opening new bookstores. Fall was already too short. Fall never needed to be shorter. Fall, the most overstuffed of reading seasons, the time of the year when it is said that we become serious readers again, already felt like some melancholy art installation of a season, designed to remind you that life is short and art is long. Yet fall, I fear, will soon become more of a state of mind than roughly eight weeks on a calendar.
The good news, for now, isn’t so terrible:
Look at all this new stuff to read.
For the armchair criminal
Surprise: We live in a golden age of crime writing. Exhibit A: Harry MacLean’s absorbing taxonomy “Starkweather” (Nov. 28), a history of the murderer whose nihilism inspired generations of responses, from Springsteen’s “Nebraska” to the media’s embrace of crime itself. “Holly,” another great occasional reminder that Stephen King is a master of dime-store procedurals, is about octogenarians with a secret too ugly to hint at. (Hint: It’s tasty.) The crime book of the season, though, is Library of America’s “Crime Novels of the 1960s,” a definitive nine-novel box set that argues for the decade as the moment when crime writers embraced the mind (Chester Himes, Patricia Highsmith) even as they got lean and mean (Ed McBain, Richard Stark).
For the Chicago know-it-all
begs a pressing question: Do we need another one of these? Yes — when it’s this cleanly told, alternating familiar anecdotes with a smart focus on the uneasy class and moral questions that later defined a smoldering city. As for the gaps in our local history: bills itself as the first true biography of the most consequential proponent of the Chicago school of economics, and it’s hard to imagine a more readable, extensively researched portrait of the Hyde Park institution, whose teachings brought on the Reagan years and probably razed more of Chicago than any single fire ever could. I’m not sure this title, is quite right. (They changed how we about movies.) Either way, Matt Singer’s book is a pleasant, reverential history of the making of an important TV show, though less revealing on the personalities, aesthetics and history of the critics.
