Gita Ralleigh's 3 favorite reads in 2023

We read for many different reasons: to be entertained, to learn about the world, to walk in another person’s shoes. When I’m having an overwhelmingly stressful time, I want to escape into a book – as if I’d opened the cover and stepped inside. Impossible Creatures was the perfect choice for an escape.

Katherine Rundell’s exquisite writing spans children’s fiction, academia, and non-fiction. In her first book of fantasy, we enter a world both familiar and strange – familiar to us because the titular ‘impossible creatures’ who populate the world are the stuff of myth and legend – and strange because in this world, impossible creatures really exist.

References to classic children’s literature don’t slow the pace of Rundell’s storytelling, and her fierce girl hero Mal, accompanied by a boy from our world, Christopher, animate this story afresh for both old and young readers.

This is a book you will love or hate. I loved it and found it frighteningly relatable despite being originally published in Italy in the 1950s.

Forbidden Notebook, newly translated into English, is an intimate, almost claustrophobic, account of how our protagonist, Valeria, begins writing her thoughts and feelings in a notebook, which she keeps hidden. Only in the act of hiding it does she realize that she has nowhere of her own in the shared family apartment, and only by writing does she gain a sense of her own self after years devoted to her family.

To quote the poet Muriel Rukeyser, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." And for Valeria, it does.

There are times when I crave a book that makes me laugh. The Bandit Queens tells the darkly funny, madcap adventures of a group of women in a small Indian village.

Geeta, our protagonist, is rumored to have murdered her husband – and now the other unhappy wives in the village want her to do the same for them. Serious issues of misogyny and violence against women, as well as caste and religion, are handled lightly.

Nothing goes as planned, but in the end, Geeta, along with a lovable cast of lively women friends, somehow triumphs over the obstacles stacked against them. I listened to this on audiobook, and the delightful narrator really brought the characters to life.