Nicole Kimberling's 3 favorite reads in 2023

This author always excels at depicting the hilarious pitfalls of navigating a labyrinthine, centuries-old bureaucracy. But for me, Zhao Yulan is the apex of her protagonists, who are charged with protecting the world on a low government salary.

He drinks on the job, chain-smokes, and devotes considerable on-the-clock time and resources to hitting on a hot, gay university professor named Shen Wei, all while attempting to solve a simple murder.

This story unfolds layer after breathtaking layer until lovers (Zhao Yulan always gets his man) are finally fighting a battle that shakes the pillars of creation. This book makes you want to dream bigger than you ever have before and fight hard for love.

In the 20th volume of Yoshinaga’s slice-of-life/cooking instructional manga, the protagonists, Shiro and Kenji, a gay couple living in Tokyo, talk about their friends’ weddings, aging, promotions, and other day-to-day challenges—all while making dinner.

The recipes in this manga are easy to follow and, because they’re simple, always work. And, since the characters are always making a full meal, it’s easy to see what dishes make up a whole, modern Japanese homestyle meal.

The pleasure of this manga is ghosting along like an invisible guest at these meals, listening to everyday concerns as if you were a member of this small and private group of characters.

Overflowing with warmth and humanity and cozy in the best possible way, this series helps when I need to recenter on how good small, everyday pleasures really can be.

Some real history is too weird to be made up. The same goes for real food. But once you get into historical food, the sky is the limit for total strangeness.

You can open this book to any page and end up picking up some choice bit of knowledge to enliven your dinner conversation or historical recipe to enliven dinner itself. Did you ever want to be able to say, “You know this lamb stew? It’s the same kind that was served at a Babylonian annual spring festival where the main event was a priestess walloping the king straight across the face so hard he wept.”

I personally love being able to bust out trivial like this, and Tasting History is chock full of fun, true facts as well as actual recipes for historical dishes that have been adapted to modern measurements.

Well-researched and funny, you can enjoy this book even if you never so much as enter the kitchen—but I recommend you do so that you, too, can say something like, “These edgy new ice cream flavors are nothing new—they were making parmesan ice cream in 1789. Anyway, I made some…want to try it?”