It’s that time of year again: time to crank out the “best of” lists. In this case, as I’ve done in the last several years, I’ve listed some of my favorite reads for 2023. I love reading these kinds of lists myself to discover a book, movie, or album I hadn’t heard about, and hopefully you’ll find a few books here that spark your interest.

Most of these titles date from 2023, and they’re presented roughly in the order I read them.

Sovietistan by Erika Fatland — A writer and anthropologist from Norway, Fatland has won an international readership in the last several years for her travel writing. In her first major book, 2015’s “Sovietistan,” she trekked through five Central Asian countries, such as Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, that had been part of the Soviet Union until its breakup in 1991.

Fatland’s observations of this somewhat obscure part of the world are funny and illuminating. She describes how the totalitarian state of Turkmenistan glorifies its first president (well, dictator) with a giant statue that’s continually rotated to face the sun. In Kyrgyzstan, she meets women victimized by the country’s tradition of bride snatching. In Kazakhstan, she looks at the grim legacy of nuclear weapons testing from the Soviet era.

I tried not to be annoyed when I read that the author speaks eight languages, including Russian. But knowing Russian certainly helped her traverse a region where Soviet heritage lingers on in many ways, from government to education to culture.

The Deluge by Stephen Markley — There’s dystopian fiction, and then there’s “The Deluge,” a novel that portrays a near-future in a U.S. that’s ravaged by increasingly destructive climate disasters, political trench warfare, and economic despair. Sound familiar?

Told through the perspectives of multiple characters over about 25 years, “The Deluge” also paints a frightening picture of how technology, especially AI, is co-opted by governments worldwide in the interests of “security,” leading to growing authoritarianism and state violence. It’s not a pretty picture, but it seems an all-too-plausible one.

Jamie MacGillivray by John Sayles — Sayles directed his last movie in 2013 and published his last screenplay in 2018. But in the last three years, he’s published two excellent novels, including this year’s “Jamie MacGillivray,” a meaty story that ranges from Scotland to England to Colonial America in the 18th century.

At the book’s center are two Scottish characters, Jamie MacGillivray and Jenny Ferguson, both sent as indentured servants to the American colonies, where their lives play out against the turmoil in the New World, including the French and Indian War.

With rich portraits of Native American characters, and some real-life figures like George Washington, the novel, the New York Times says, “manages to be both sweeping and intimate ... deliver[ing] the tides of political history but also a moving and internalized portrait of two young people swept along on these tides.”

American Midnight by Adam Hochschild — I’ve enjoyed a number of Hochschild’s narrative histories, but this is my favorite, a panoramic look at the U.S. during World War I and the early 1920s, a bleak era marked by horrific violence against African Americans, government-led attacks on unions, and widespread media censorship.

Thousands of anti-war protesters and union workers were imprisoned without trial, often after arrests made by violent, self-appointed vigilantes. President Woodrow Wilson, who fancied himself a brilliant statesman who could bring lasting peace to war-torn Europe, turned a blind eye to the destruction of civil liberties at home — and encouraged it in some cases. An ugly, ugly time.

A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan — As Egan’s account of the revival of the Ku Klux Klan shows, ugly social and political strains in the U.S. continued well into the 1920s, an era too often viewed through rose-colored glasses called “The Roaring Twenties.”

Membership in the KKK, started in the South after the Civil War, swelled to over four million White Protestants in the 1920s, all united by a hatred of Blacks, Jews, Catholics and most immigrants. Nowhere were their numbers higher than in Indiana, where a violent Klan kingpin named D.C. Stephenson exerted increasing power in state politics before he was finally taken down. Egan’s book makes for a taut historical page-turner.

Half American by Matthew F. Delmont — This searing account of African Americans who served in the military during World War II makes for the third part of a rough trilogy with “American Midnight” and “A Fever in the Heartland,” in that it examines the same curse of racism that defined much of 20th century America.

As Delmont notes, Black soldiers willing to fight for a country that treated them like dirt were typically shunted to menial jobs and non-combat positions — cleaning, cooking, loading ammunition, driving supply trucks — and many were posted to Southern military bases, where they faced unrelenting hostility and violence from local white citizens and police who could not abide Black men in uniform.

Though some men got a chance to fight and distinguished themselves, like the Tuskegee Airmen, a decorated fighter plane and bombardment unit in Europe, most felt they were fighting one war abroad and another at home. Delmont’s book rewrites the tired story line that Americans of all stripes “pulled together” to win World War II.

Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo — Another historical page-turner, this time about an enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, who escaped from Georgia in 1848 by posing as a sickly young white man (Ellen) and her Black servant (William). Outwitting slave traders, railroad officials, military officers, and others, they made their way to the free states of the North.

Yet the couple, whose journey made them national celebrities, eventually had to flee to Canada and then Great Britain to escape slave traders determined to drag them back to Georgia — and as such, Woo’s gripping account shows how far the tentacles of slavery extended in pre-Civil War America.

The Exceptions by Kate Zernicke — As a reporter with the Boston Globe in the late 1990s, Zernicke broke a story about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitting it had discriminated against its female scientists for decades.

In “The Exceptions,” she delves much more deeply into the story, creating strong portraits of several scientists and showing how discrimination — in teaching assignments, research and publishing opportunities, even office and lab space — held many of these women back and limited new female hires. How they overcame those barriers makes for an absorbing read.

The Wager by David Grann — You’ll be glad you never had to serve on an 18th century sailing ship after reading this new book by Grann, author of the bestseller “Killers of the Flower Moon.” His account of a disastrous voyage to South America by a British Navy ship in 1742 reads like a novel: ferocious storms, shipwreck, debilitated survivors hunkering down on a rocky, rain-swept island off the coast of Chile with scarcely any food.

Grann plumbed nearly 300-year-old logbooks, letters, and other archival material to tell a complicated story that included mutiny, murder, and then a courtroom trial in Britain involving the relative handful of men who survived the voyage. I was left feeling that people from that era were just a lot tougher than us soft 21st century creatures.

There Will Be Fire by Rory Carroll — Carroll, the Irish correspondent for The Guardian, revisits the IRA’s attempt to kill Margaret Thatcher in 1984 by planting a bomb in a vintage hotel in Brighton, England, an attack that killed and wounded three dozen people. It also came close to clipping Thatcher — she was in Brighton for Britain’s Conservative Party Congress — and spawned an exhaustive manhunt for the bomber.

The book reads in part like a political thriller, examining the backgrounds of the IRA operatives and the years of violent conflict in Northern Ireland. It also offers a fascinating look at how British police, in an era lacking the high-tech forensics of today, tracked down the evidence to identify and arrest the hotel bomber, Patrick Magee.

I’d also like to give a nod to a number of fine books by area writers that I wrote about in the past year: Queen of the Court by Madeleine Blais; Superbloom by Megan Tady; Waco Rising by Kevin Cook; The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland; and We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.