Goodreads’s Best Books of 2023 Released, Great Gifts for Readers This Holiday Season

As the holiday season quickly approaches, consumers are still scrambling to find gifts for their loved ones. And for those of you with avid readers in your lives, that means books. But scouring your nearest Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore can be a challenge when you aren’t sure if the book you choose will suit a person. You may know which genres they prefer or subjects they are interested in, but that doesn’t mean every book will be one they devour and add to their list of favorites. Worst case scenario, it ends up collecting dust on the shelf and only halfway finished.

Luckily for you frantic shoppers, Goodreads has just released the results of their 2023 Choice Awards for the Best Books of 2023 list! Gathering votes from nearly six million of their site-users, Goodreads has collected a list of both fiction and nonfiction titles that their users have deemed the best of 2023. From science fiction to romance and memoirs to history, Goodreads has something for anyone to enjoy on their list. You can even check out the nominees that didn’t win in each category if you want even more gift ideas for readers. 

Scrolling through Goodreads’s social media accounts may highlight the discourse between readers as they argue which book may have been more deserving to win a particular category than others. This is normal considering the subjectivity of art and the wide-range of taste and preferences amongst readers, so don’t fret over buying a book someone else may call ‘boring’ or ‘trash’ (especially if they mention that they didn’t even read it). What someone else hates, your reader may enjoy! If you choose to scroll through their Instagram or Tiktok, you may want to take note of these comments. Not only could you potentially get a better idea of what certain books are about, but you may just get great recommendations! 

Some titles that may be popular gifts this holiday season seemed almost destined to win first-place in their respective categories. Yellowface and Fourth Wing, for example, were immensely popular on bookstagram and booktok this year, so it seems no surprise that they won by such large margins. There were a few interesting outcomes, however. Interestingly, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which was named the 2023 Barnes & Noble Book of the Year, came in fourth-place in its category for historical fiction, losing to the first-place winner Weyward with almost 30,000 votes. Barnes & Noble determines the winner of their prestigious title by inquiring their booksellers to nominate the titles they feel are particularly remarkable and would recommend to a consumer. This explanation, provided in one of their blog posts this past November,, is rather vague. Meanwhile, Goodreads allows their list to be determined as a sort of popularity contest. A voter isn’t required to have read every book in each category in order to cast their vote, so they merely choose the books they have read and enjoyed to determine who they vote for. This is not necessarily bad, per se, as Goodreads pools together a large group of readers, allowing many different perspectives, interests, and preferences to come together and let their voices be heard. If some books win by large margins, perhaps it’s because a majority of readers believed it deserved to win. 

Lists such as Goodreads’s Best Books of 2023 gives us a great insight into the minds of readers and which books or authors have really made an impact in the publishing world. However, just because one book wins doesn’t mean its fellow nominees in the category are any less enjoyable. Yellowface may have won with over 200,000 votes (with second-place lagging 140,000 votes behind) in the fiction category, but the titles it competed against, such as Hello Beautiful (second-place), Maame (eighth-place), or Evil Eye (thirteenth-place) are also incredible books that you should absolutely check out. If the reader you’re shopping for hasn’t read the book that won in their preferred genre, then you should definitely check it out to see if it’s something they would be interested in. That being said, check out all the nominated books in that category! Even if a book didn’t win, it could be a gem that your reader loves!

The Woman in Me, Spare, and Celebrity Memoirs Humanizing Celebrities

In 2021, the world was captivated by Britney Spears’s story as she spoke out against her father and her management as the result of their abuse and for keeping her under involuntary conservatorship. The world applauded for her as the conservatorship was terminated. Now the world applauds her memoir, The Woman in Me, for reclaiming and humanizing her story. The book highlights the importance of Spears reclaiming her independence by sharing her story as a woman within the music industry fighting against the men in her life that sought to control her. 

Published on October 24, the memoir narrates a story that is described on the Gallery Books website—the publisher and a division of Simon & Schuster—as “a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.” Gallery Books reports that the memoir sold 1.1 million copies in its first week in the U.S, with the combined figure composed of sales of print books, e-books, pre-orders, and audiobooks. The publisher has also announced the memoir is going for a fourth printing, bringing the number of hardcover copies in print to about 1.4 million, making it the fastest selling book in Gallery’s history. The Woman in Me now joins other celebrity memoirs such as Spare by Prince Harry, The Promised Land by Barack Obama, Becoming by Michelle Obama, and Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump in selling over a million copies in their first week of publication.

What these numbers reflect is the support for the #FreeBritney movement that began in 2020 when rumors and personal accounts of the conservatorship and the effects it had on Spears’s mental health began to be uncovered. The internet has come out in droves to support Spears before the full extent of the situation and the implications of what that meant for the pop star’s life was even fully revealed. Of course, this also means that people have eagerly awaited for more news concerning Spears’s career under the authority of her conservatorship and what effects this had on her. And perhaps that reveals the harsh truth: the obsessive curiosity audiences possess when it comes to knowing and understanding the ugly and humane realities that lie beyond the persona celebrities present to the world. An almost desperate need to know that these larger-than-life figures possess larger-than-life issues that ground them back into reality and bring them to equal footing with us, humanizing them to us.

Another celebrity memoir that did exceptionally well was Prince Harry’s Spare, which was published earlier this year in January and sold 1.6 million copies in the U.S. during its first week. Spare followed the announcement that Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, would be leaving the royal family. Like Spears’s memoir, the success and reception of Spare could be attributed to the memoir’s debut following a huge news story.

The near-instant success of celebrity memoirs such as The Woman in Me following the dramatic revelation of such imperfections in these people’s lives seems to suggest readers crave these tragic stories that explore every human emotion that hides behind the smiles and carefully-crafted persona portrayed in public. Readers want to know the details hidden behind closed doors that humanize celebrities. In a sense, a memoir like The Woman in Me is the closest we can get to an honest portrayal of a human who has been placed on a pedestal.

Nonfiction Books That Will Change Your Life

For many readers, nonfiction can be an intimidating genre to break into.  However, nonfiction can often help people to change their habits, or keep them informed  on past, current, and future issues. Here, I have collected some nonfiction books I have loved and that have affected the way I think, act, and interact with others. So dive in. I promise, these books will change your life.

1. The Sweetness of a Simple Life by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Diana Beresford-Kroeger draws on her life as a botanist and scientist to teach a better way of life in her 2013 novel, The Sweetness of a Simple Life. Beresford-Kroeger is a Canadian citizen who grew up in Ireland learning ancient Celtic wisdom. She applies these principles of natural connection, language, and kindness to modern-day life with a series of guidelines for how to live a “simple life.” This book includes tips on a wide range of  things, including how to build a bird’s nest, how to use leftover meat bones to fertilize a garden, and even  how to reduce the chance of a heart attack with food. Beresford-Kroeger’s other works, The Global Forest and To Speak for the Trees, expand on her love of nature and Celtic wisdom.

2. Radical Curiosity by Seth Goldenberg

While the market of pop science books is endlessly diluted by excess, this 2022 book was a standout in its emphasis on curiosity as society’s biggest kept secret. Seth Goldenberg makes the argument that curiosity is in short supply in the modern day, but harnessing its power could radically change the way we view our impact on society. As a more recent release, this book draws on the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst for “looking at the system in a fundamentally new way.”

3. Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall

Hood Feminism is a breakthrough in feminist texts that reframes the conversation towards marginalized groups that created it in the first place. Mikki Kendall outlines the feminist movement as it was developed by and then shunned from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) women. Each essay in this collection reflects on how BIPOC women have continuously been left out of the mainstream white feminist movement, and how to change this. Kendall shows how the combination of racism, poverty, and hypersexualization of BIPOC women has been at the forefront of this divide, and how intersectionality is a more complex issue than mainstream feminists realize. 

4. How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

As deceiving as the title may seem, this book does not teach you how to do nothing. Instead, it teaches you how to slow down, look outside your window every now and again (or even go for a walk in the park), and distance yourself from what Jenny Odell labels “the attention economy.” Odell makes the argument that in modern society, it has become too easy to get swept up in “the attention economy” of today, with social media, the Internet, and technology at the forefront of our lives. Throughout the book, Odell develops an action plan for taking back our time that does not ignore the complexities of modern-day life and the importance of technology. Instead, Odell shows how we can disconnect from the negative effects and turn the rest into positive action.

5. Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Trick Mirror was one of the most popular books when it was released in 2019, and for good reason. Expanding on previous essays and adding new ones, journalist Jia Tolentino gives a complex picture of the last two decades through a series of social and cultural questions that many people can relate to. In one essay, Tolentino focuses on the idea of “always optimizing,” wherein people, especially millennials, are constantly trying to find the best use of their time instead of taking a moment alone (similar to Odell’s theory in How to Do Nothing). In another, Tolentino tells the story of a falsified 2014 Rolling Stone article of a sexual assault case that happened at her alma mater, the University of Virginia. Tolentino covers a lot of ground in these essays, but ultimately does a great job of tying together underlying themes of social and cultural touchstones.

6. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Similar to The Sweetness of a Simple Life, this 2013 book serves as a part-memoir and part-instruction guide on how to live a more environmentally-friendly life. Botanist and Potawatomi scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer draws on a lifetime of studying plants, indigenous culture, and her own personal story of motherhood. Wall Kimmerer’s love of nature is infectious, and with each page, she manages to inspire the reader to do better. Her argument for a renewed bond between people and nature relies on a reciprocal culture of gratitude, in which people understand that they are indebted to the natural world in the same way as it is to them.  

Happy reading!

-Hannah Eaton, CambridgeEditors Team

Conquering the Writer’s Block

When you’re a writer, there are few worse feelings than the dreaded writer’s block. It’s that friend that loves to drop by unannounced and far too often, just to whisper in your ear: “What do you mean you’re trying to write? You’ve got nothing left to say. Let’s watch 30 Rock.”

Now, I’ve heard some people say that they don’t believe in writer’s block. These people are somehow blessed with the self-discipline to sit down in front of their computer or notebook at a certain time every day (probably before noon, too), and stand up a few hours later having produced a considerable amount of decent, solid material. I imagine that these people also actually floss after every meal and remember to change their Brita filters however often people are supposed to do that.

However, I do believe in writer’s block, and not just because there’s a Wikipedia page on it. No, fellow writers and readers, I’ve been there. Whether it’s an essay due in 4 hours or a certain story that just won’t come out, I’ve definitely had those moments where I start to wonder if repeatedly hitting my head on the keyboard might be more productive.

Whenever I get that feeling while trying to begin some creative writing, I usually turn to the internet for some inspiring, (and most importantly) free prompts, and I thought I would share some of what I’ve found. Kathy Steffen over at The How To Write Shop wrote an article a couple of months ago about getting over that “getting started” hurdle, and here are some of the prompts she came up with, for either fiction or nonfiction:

1. Write about waiting for a baby to come
2. Write about a birth
3. Write about being a child at the turn of the century. Next, a child in 1920. 1930? 1940? 1950? 1960? You get the idea…
4. Write about going to school for the first time
5. Write about a teen-age fan and the icon they adore (person, character, movie, etc.)
6. Write about a dance in a gym
7. Write about a first date
8. Write about a first kiss
9. Write about a party
10. Write about a graduation (high school, college, beauty school, driving school, etc.)
11. Write about a wedding
12. Write about a marriage
13. Write about a breakup
14. Write about a divorce
15. Write about a family reunion
16. Write about waiting for death
17. Write about fighting death
18. Write about a death
19. Write about the morning of a funeral
20. Write about a family ritual

The life events listed above tend to be changing points in a person’s life, moments full of drama and urgency, and as such writing about them can imbue your prose with the same qualities. Write about yourself or a character of yours, and don’t get tangled up in concerns about whether it’s the beginning of something larger or if it’s going where you want it to; just keep writing! Because when you’re a rich and famous author, you can always pay someone to buy your Brita filters for you.

From Cambridge Editors,

Katie