2023 Favorite Books, Movies, TV, and Music

I’ve zoned in on two top favorite genres for reading: biography/memoir, and quality fiction (especially if it’s a really great story from another culture). Here are my favorites for one category at a time.

Fiction

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese was an easy choice because I loved his book Cutting for Stone. It’s a multi-generational story of a Malayali Indian Christian family. I listened to this on audiobook, and it was an incredible read by the author with the appropriate local accent. Verghese is from this community but is a medical doctor in the USA, and I find the way he writes to be astounding. He captures very different perspectives so sympathetically that it’s hard to believe each perspective is not his own, until you read a character with very different beliefs that they are just as sympathetic. His books also reveal new pieces of history and culture to me, and they have touches of cross-cultural missions in them (both positive and negative aspects), which adds to my fascination. I didn’t know when I picked this book up that leprosy was a major plot point, and as I read, I was also myself going through the free WHO training course on leprosy to educate myself after my own daughter’s diagnosis. As a result, the story was extra impactful and personal.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is a funny one, because it’s a great story but the main character is an octopus, so it’s a bit unexpected how clever and sweet and interesting the book is, much like the main character Marcellus. There’s not much else I can say without giving things away, but I just love the characters in this one, and it’s a nice happy ending. Sort of the same level and delight as A Man Called Ove.

Cry, the Beloved Country is one I read in college and reread this year. It’s set in apartheid South Africa, and I found it’s themes powerfully echoed with the situation here in Papua, Indonesia. There is a lot here about faith, racism, development, crime, hopelessness, and power. I found myself underlining a lot.

Memoir/Biography

I feel like Beth Moore’s All My Knotted-Up Life is on everyone’s list this year, and that’s because she’s not only evangelical famous, turns out she’s also an amazing writer. I totally recommend listening to the audiobook because especially for the first part, she allows herself to take on the accent of her childhood in Oklahoma, and later in tender parts you can hear the emotion in her voice and it’s quite powerful.  I really like Beth and I really appreciate her story.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X. So, I’m not well versed in African American writing, and so while some people may be super familiar with this story, I was not. I found it gripping to read his life, and I found it especially challenging to read his thoughts about Christianity. It’s quite an indictment on white American Christianity, and I do not think he’s all wrong, although I do think some of what he believed to be, well, crazy. As I read, I could see his views changing, and that was fascinating. If he had not been killed, how would he have continued to change?

How Far to the Promised Land by Esau MacCaulley. Esau’s last book was also on my favorites list. This one, though, is memoir, centered around family relationships and race in America. I read it right after I read Becoming Me by Viola Davis, also great, but Esau’s book feels closer to my world. It’s interesting to have started the year reading Malcom X and ended with MacCaulley, stories not dissimilar in their childhood and background but widely diverging in where they find hope. That is why MacCaulley’s writing has always deeply encouraged me.

Becoming Elisabeth Elliot/Being Elisabeth Elliot.Jim and Elisabeth Elliot’s story is familiar to me, everyone knows how Jim died and I read Passion and Purity multiple times as a teenager. What Elisabeth Elliot was like after Jim Elliot was what swept me away. I was utterly fascinated first by who the challenges she faced in getting along with Nate Saint’s prickly older sister (which ultimately drove Elisabeth from the field), and then by the cultured and independent writer that Elisabeth became. She wrestled with the culture of evangelicalism, and I found that so relatable. But what was completely unexpected and dismaying was her third marriage (the stage of life she was in through most of her book writing). To be honest I am so captivated by the story and how Elisabeth changed in various stages that I plan to read the other major biography on Elliot that also came out recently, and you may well see it on next year’s list.

Kids Books

My favorites in homeschool this year were Kildee House, Happy Times in Noisy Village, and Red Sails to Capri. All sweet stories that had me laughing and tearing up at various times.

Personal Learning

Although I read them much more slowly, I try to read a few books a year that have to do with my various areas of responsibility and the life stage I’m in, and at least one good history book. I’d recommend these three.

Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition. This is about the partition of India and Pakistan. I have close family in Pakistan and got to visit family there years back. As a result, this history was super interesting and sad to read.

Third Culture Kids: A Gift to Care For. This was recommended at a missionary member care conference I attended last year. I work in member care for our organization, and I found this book to be a bit of a handbook of TCK issues and stages. It’s not so much one to read straight through unless you work in the field like I do. But it’s one you can pull off the shelf and read as you face a stage or event or issue, and the chapter will not only have wise perspective but also a hands-on activity that can be implemented to help TCKs and families process.

Prayer in the Night by Tish Harrison Warren. A few years back her book Liturgy of the Ordinary was on my best of the year list, and this one was my favorite Christian book of the year. It’s a book about prayer but it’s also about walking with God in a broken world, and the problem of theodicy. I found myself highlighting a lot.

TV

I feel like I should give a caveat here. If you are picky about the tv you watch, if you don’t like language or dysfunction or sexuality, you may not appreciate all of these.  

Fauda.

I actually can’t remember if I watched it this year or last year, but I have thought about it so much during the war in Gaza that I thought it should be on here regardless. Watching Fauda gave me a much greater sense of this area and the conflict there. It’s not a true story, but now that I follow the news of the war I see how much of it is based on the truth of the situation there. It follows an undercover Israeli unit that goes into Palestinian areas. Through it I started to understand some of differences between the PLO and Hamas, the West Bank and Gaza, all stuff that was totally hazy for me before. I need to rewatch, honestly.

The Bear.

This one is really well-made but is not necessarily fun to watch, it captures working life in the food industry and the stress and anxiety of life in this day and age. It’s so familiar to me, though, because it’s very Chicago and very much the chef world, and I worked in kitchens and catering companies in Chicago for five years. I couldn’t NOT like it.

The Crown.

I watched the last few seasons of the The Crown and you know, I really love that show. Some of it is so fascinating because it’s true and the truth is crazy, and some of it a real reach and very fictionalized. I find it has some profound insights into humanity and some really amazing acting and storytelling. And it’s one that is generally a safe watch for a pickier group.

The Diplomat.

This is a new political thriller on Netflix that I really enjoyed. It’s a little too soapy to be the top fav, but Keri Russell is great and I’m in for the next season.

All the Light You Cannot See.

I loved this book and so I was eager to watch the show too. You should read the book too, but it was a good watch.  

Movies

RRR. This is a Bollywood hero war movie and musical that is… so strange and really great at the same time. I mean, imagine Braveheart as Bollywood and that’s sort of what it’s like? It actually has Tarantino vibes with the stylized violence and absurdity. It’s upending the colonial narrative and the British are the very, very bad guys in this one.

Jesus Revolution. I have multiple older friends or acquaintances who were in the Jesus movement of the 60’s and said they went to see this movie and it reflected their experiences. It skips some of the later and more complex parts of Lonnie Frisbee’s story, but the story that is told is told well, with respect to the genuine faith of most people involved.

A Man Called Otto. Fredrick Backmann is one of my favorite modern authors, and I loved his book A Man Called Ove. If you read, just read the book. But if you’ve read the book, you should watch the movie too! It’s such a great story. There are changes between the book and the movie but the heart of the story is the same and well… Tom Hanks.

American Symphony. This is a documentary on Netflix centered around Jon Batiste, who I love. I was amazed, though, to see what suffering, anxiety, and love was going on beyond the very public events of the year of all of his Grammy wins. I think the film should be renamed Life Symphony, because the core is about that, about the contrasting joy, love, suffering, and struggle of life. Batiste reminded me of what I’d just read in Annie Dillard’s strange little book, Holy the Firm, in which there is an ongoing metaphor of a moth that flew into a candle and then the body absorbed the wax and became the candle, burning for hours.

“What can any artist set on fire but his world? What can any people bring to the alter but all it has ever owned in the thing towns or over the desolate plains? What can an artist use but his materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut… Held, held fast by love in the world like the moth in wax, your life a wick, your head on fire with prayer, held utterly, outside and in, you sleep alone, if you call that alone, you cry God.”

Music

New in my playlist is Sammy Rae & Friends (American jazz rock) , more John Lucas songs, and more worship music by The Worship Initiative and The Porter’s Gate.

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I found the Gray Havens album Blue Flower at the very beginning of the year and something about it really hit me with where I am at, as it has left me in tears repeatedly. It’s based on the themes in C.S. Lewis’s book Surprised by Joy (which I had just finished when I first listened). That image of internal longing for something transcendent, and that something ultimately being the kingdom and person of God, is beautiful. There is a combined joy and longing. “Have you ever missed somewhere you’ve never been before? Like there’s a memory there except you don’t remember anymore. I feel the weight in the silence and when the night starts getting cold, and it’s been that like that for a long, long time.” The songs “Endless Summer” and “Paradise” just get me.