David Oppegaard's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Skippy Dies is a darkly comic novel that captures the angst and weirdness of being a teenager (as well as teaching teenagers).

Continuing in a long line of acerbic Irish authors, Paul Murray pulls no punches as he describes life at an Irish boarding school. Skippy Dies pulls you into the lives of its many characters, almost all of whom are hilarious sad sacks trying to work their own perverse angle.

There is one section—in which they try to open a portal to other dimensions and send a toy Optimus Prime into the portal as an advance scout—that I found particularly memorable. Skippy Dies is a big book with an even bigger, darkly comic heart and I enjoyed tucking into it every evening.

Journey to the End of Night is the ultimate in French nihilistic, hedonistic, politically incorrect, epic, historical wandering fiction.

The main character, a Parisian gadabout named Bardamu, is a stand-in for the author Celine. As reliable a human being (and narrator) as a house on fire, the opportunistic Bardamu pinballs through World War I, colonial Africa, and the United States before returning home to Paris.

Almost every sentence of this mid-20th century classic could get an author cancelled these days and almost every page provides both beautiful description and a sentence or two that made me laugh out loud. This is the kind of first-person narrative you will either love or feel a strong urge to fling across the room.

Bardamu would probably tell you to set the book on fire first and then throw it into a crowded train, just so you could watch what happened next.

The Passenger provides what Cormac McCarthy always did best: creating multifaceted characters searching for meaning in what they find to be a harsh and uncaring world. He’s so good at doing this, in fact, that a tight plot is not required to enjoy his work.

Few writers can plunge into the existential darkness of being alive and keep you engaged as a reader quite like him. I’ve always admired the way his prose marches along, driving like a hard rain, daring you to keep turning pages even though you have a bad feeling about how things are going to turn out.

The Passenger gives us Bobby Western, a man enduring a shattering grief so uncompressing it becomes a beautiful horror all its own.