Jennifer Szalai

Since I review only nonfiction, I sometimes get tasked with writing about political memoirs — a number of which are geared toward getting you to believe what their politician-authors want you to believe, if not insisting that you should just shut your mind and let them do all the thinking for you. So it was with pleasure and relief that I encountered some philosophically-minded books this year. Amid all the hard sells and hot takes, these books provided some necessary counterprogramming. Their authors are more interested in opening up new ways of understanding than in telling people what to do.

Sarah Bakewell’s “Humanly Possible” gives you the sense that when it comes to humans, anything is possible — for good or for ill, which is part of what gives this book its undeniable charm. Bakewell, who has also written books about existentialism and Montaigne, is so generous and resolutely open-minded. That she is able to corral seven centuries of humanist thought into a brisk and readable narrative is a real achievement, even if this new book is more diffuse than her previous work. She is honest about the limitations of humanists, who can sometimes prize thinking above action — constantly seeing both sides of a question, even when one side is promoting a cruel fanaticism.

But “Humanly Possible” is full of funny stories, too. We are limited creatures, despite our pretensions to the contrary. Bakewell discusses “On Good Manners for Boys,” in which Erasmus addressed such pressing issues as how to pass gas in polite company. The most fruitful strains of humanism recognize what we share with nonhuman animals. After Bertrand Russell was in a seaplane accident, a journalist asked what his brush with death had made him think about — mysticism, maybe? No, Russell said. “I thought the water was cold.”

As I read Nikhil Krishnan’s “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960,” I wondered how he would pull it off. Here was a scholar, determined to bring to life a school of thought (hard to do) that revolved around finicky distinctions in language (extremely hard to do). The “linguistic” or “analytical” turn in philosophy resisted grand speculations about reality and truth. Krishnan had set out to dramatize an approach that was adamantly undramatic.

Krishnan admits that even he had a hard time warming up to his subject when he first encountered it as a philosophy student at Oxford. Part of what makes his book so winning is that he treats his reader like a partner, presenting a range of ideas with the respect they deserve, so that we feel as if we are thinking alongside him. He recalls his lofty assumption that the most profound ideas were inherently “ineffable,” before recognizing that he was learning something decidedly less lofty yet possibly more profound: how to tell the difference between what cannot be put into words and what can.

That discrepancy is also a preoccupation of one of my favorite books this year, “The Rigor of Angels,” by William Egginton. A humanities professor at Johns Hopkins University, Egginton weaves together philosophy, biography and criticism to explore “the ultimate nature of reality” through the life and work of three figures: the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges; the German theoretical physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg; and the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. This seemingly disparate cast is gathered together here because all three men had something in common: They resisted the temptation to presume that there was a reality, out there, that obediently conformed to our experiences of it.

The only way to tell this story with any clarity is to write, as Egginton does, with elegance and patience. The notion that we create our own reality might sound like license to a terrible arrogance, but that’s only if we stop doing the kind of thinking that Egginton pushes us to do. We humans would do better to recognize what we can and cannot know, he suggests. Our knowledge is always partial and contingent. Instead of decreeing self-importance, he invites some humility.

I continue to think often about these three books, which are quite different but nevertheless seem to be in conversation with one another. A commitment to learning as a dialogue between people, rather than as a lesson delivered from on high, requires an author to do something risky: relinquish some authorial control. As Krishnan puts it so beautifully in his book, “Let no one join this conversation who is unwilling to be vulnerable.”

Alexandra Jacobs

I began the year reviewing Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” and am typing this having just finished Barbra Streisand’s 970-page “My Name Is Barbra” — blots brow delicately with handkerchief — so those are top of mind right now. Like political books, celebrity ones can choke tender fiction sprouts like weeds. But each of these was remarkable, if flawed. Harry worked with J.R. Moehringer, a deeply talented memoirist himself (“The Tender Bar”), which I’ll wager is what gave it a more literary flavor. Barbra — you feel more that it was told to a Dictaphone, and she reads the audiobook, if you have a 48-hour road trip planned any time soon. (So … many … ellipses!) But the long arc of her life and tremendous accomplishments across industries make the book a cultural history as well, and the level of intimate detail is hard to resist.

Another fascinating if flawed book that has taken up permanent residence on my shelf — doubtless partly because of its groovy, period-perfect cover — is Alexander Stille’s “The Sullivanians.” As other reviewers pointed out, it’s repetitive in parts. But I was too mesmerized by the lost world he revives — an Upper West Side commune, devoted to exploding the nuclear family, turned abusive sex cult — to care.

Psychiatric archives were well plumbed this year: See Clancy Martin’s rough but bold and potentially very helpful exploration of suicide, “How Not to Kill Yourself.” I consider Jonathan Rosen’s “The Best Minds,” about his schizophrenic friend Michael Laudor, the absolute best book of 2023: a real genre-bender, complex and moving. In that spirit, I also enjoyed revisiting the tarnished classic “Sybil” on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, even though readers rightly chided me for suggesting that only women have trouble facing that birthday. Mea culpa!

Another revisit, hugely enjoyable, was the new edition of Ursula Parrott’s novel “Ex-Wife.” I had never heard of Parrott, to my shame, and she falls into a very important tradition of women’s writing (and there’s a new biography to accompany it). I’d love to know what Gay Talese thinks of it — hey, he’s still producing bangers at 91 — and I’d also love to know if Talese was ever in a room with George Weidenfeld, the colorful publisher whose biography, “The Maverick,” by Thomas Harding, was an unexpected favorite.

But returning to the land of new fiction, with all its peaks and valleys, I was struck that three of my favorite novels this year — Esther Yi’s “Y/N,” Andrew Lipstein’s “The Vegan” and Isle McElroy’s “People Collide” — all feature characters who change bodies or flit across time zones in some magical way. Could it be that the brutal realities of our current world — war, widening income inequality, climate change — are motivating more fantastical fiction?

I suppose we’ll see in the year to come.

Dwight Garner

In Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, “The Vulnerables,” she presents what is said to be a foolproof cure for writer’s block. The trick, she writes, is to start with the words “I remember.” I plan to take Nunez’s advice for this, my look back at a year’s purposeful reading. The things we remember from books aren’t always the things we think we might — or the things we should. Here’s what some of this year’s titles bring rushing back to me.

I remember, reviewing a volume of Franz Kafka’s unabridged diaries, his obsession with noses. They were how he got a handle on someone’s personality.

I remember, reviewing Priscilla Gilman’s memoir of her father, the critic Richard Gilman, that (a) he had a good Cookie Monster voice and (b) he never got over not being tapped to be a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.

I remember, in Eleanor Catton’s terrific novel “Birnam Wood,” a character’s reason for getting into gardening. It’s the same one that can get a person into reading: “It offered a respite from this habit of relentless interior critique.”

I remember, in Catherine Lacey’s counterfactual novel “Biography of X,” that she allows the poet Frank O’Hara to live after being struck by that Jeep on Fire Island. I also remember making a fool of myself. I wrote in my review that her main character “discovered and recorded a singer who resembles Karen Dalton.” That is true, so far as it goes. What I did not know is that the person she wrote about, Connie Converse, was a real musician, and a very good one.

I remember, in Mack McCormick’s long-awaited book about his 1970s-era search for the bluesman Robert Johnson, a moving scene in which he finally locates a cluster of people who knew Johnson well. He holds a listening party for them. He plays Johnson’s vinyl recordings for people who had not heard the music in 30 years. It was as if, he wrote, he was hearing Johnson’s music for the first time.

I remember, in Henry Threadgill’s memoir about his life in jazz, a moment from his Vietnam War service in the Army. Asked to arrange a medley of national classics for a ceremony at Fort Riley, in Kansas, Threadgill stretched the familiar songs so much, in a somewhat atonal manner that would define his career, that he was fired from the band and shipped into the middle of the fighting in Pleiku, Vietnam. A “musical peccadillo,” he wrote, had earned him a probable death sentence.

I remember, in James Campbell’s book “NB by J.C.,” a collection of his columns for The Times Literary Supplement, his comment that editors were once lionized for issuing banned books such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Ulysses” and “Lolita.” Now, he wrote, “an editor is in danger of being sacked for publishing something that doesn’t fit someone else’s idea of ‘appropriate.’”

I remember Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel “Kairos” as a weeper that I half wept through myself, because I was in the mood. I also recall her observation that certain flowers (pansies) resemble Karl Marx, and that looking inside a stranger’s refrigerator is as good as going to the movies.

I remember, in “Be Mine,” Richard Ford’s final Frank Bascombe novel, a long and electric description of Donald Trump on television that includes the words “pooch-lipped, arms-folded Mussolini.”

I remember, in Ann Beattie’s collection of stories “Onlookers,” the character who mistakes Burt Bacharach for Jeffrey Epstein.

I remember, in Steven Millhauser’s story collection “Disruptions,” the teeny-tiny woman who achieves orgasm by sliding down her lover’s ear.

I remember learning, from a biography of the playwright August Wilson, that he smoked even in the shower.

I remember, in a biography of the artist, mystic and collector Harry Smith, that he liked to collect bandages peeled off fresh tattoos, imprinted with bloody mirror images that he considered more interesting than the tattoos themselves. He also collected “the recorded death coughs of bums.”

I remember, in a biography of Larry McMurtry, that he said he could read and drive at the same time, at least out in the Texas flatlands. Once, stopped for speeding, he explained that he’d been writing in his head and gotten all excited.

I remember, in Werner Herzog’s memoir, that he hoped to direct a production of “Hamlet” and “have all the parts played by champion livestock auctioneers: I wanted the performance to come in at under 14 minutes.”

I remember Jonathan Raban, in his posthumous memoir “Father and Son,” writing about a serious stroke he suffered at 68. He had no patience with some of his caregivers. One asked about his bowel movements, and he found the question to be impertinent and beside the point. Pushed further, he finally replied, “OK, then. Mine are always paragons of their kind.”

Finally, to send out the year, I remember another moment from Priscilla Gilman’s book about her father. At his memorial service, his wife said to the audience of mourners: “Thank you for missing him. He loves to be missed.”