What was your favorite book of 2023? New Yorkers weigh in

If there’s one thing many of us love, it’s a good book.

And it’s the time when many media outlets release their “Best Books of the Year” lists.

Rather than declare the best books, we wanted to share some of our favorite reads and hear from New Yorkers about the books that stayed with them in 2023.

Alison Stewart, host of WNYC’s “All of It,” and Jordan Lauf, the producer of the show’s “Get Lit” Book Club, discussed some of their selections on a recent episode.

You can listen to the whole conversation here; an edited transcript is below.

Alison Stewart: Let’s start with fiction. First up is “Small Mercies” by Dennis Lehane, the author behind “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone.”

Jordan Lauf: This book is set in Boston, in the midst of the busing crisis – That’s when a court decided that in order to diversify public schools, some residents from majority Black neighborhoods would get sent to schools where there was a majority white population and vice versa.

This, unfortunately, did not sit very well with a certain group of white people in Boston, and this book is set in that white Irish community.

It’s about a white high school girl who goes missing on the same night that a Black boy is found murdered. There are theories and questions about whether those two things might be connected.

The main character of the story is this white girl’s mother, who has been living in low-income housing in the Irish area of Boston for a long time. She decides to take it upon herself to find out what’s happened to her daughter, to do a rogue investigation. It runs her afoul of the Irish mob, the police.

It’s a book that really tackles racism in Boston head-on. Readers should just be aware that there is some very racist language in there and the main character herself is pretty racist, but I think it’s all in service of the larger point of the story, which is examining race relations in that city in that period of time.

Another crime drama you read and enjoyed…