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2023 wasn't just a great year for books: it was also a great year for movies — we had movies that were grandiose and intimate, movies that made us yearn and movies that made us cringe (complimentary). For the second year in a row, we wanted to bring you a list of books to pair with your favorite movie from 2023. No matter what flavor you prefer — whether it be stories about summer camp or basketball shoes or creepy children's toys — we've got a book to match.

Happy reading; happy watching!

Days of Distraction

Celine Song’s directorial debut had so many beautiful, indelible moments that brought you into the emotional landscape of Greta Lee’s Nora, a Korean American that finds herself pulled between her American husband and her Korean childhood sweetheart. The movie asks questions about identity, love, history, and the lives we choose to lead — which is why it felt like the perfect book to pair it with would be Alexandra Chang’s Days of Distraction, about a 24-year-old writer who moves from San Francisco to New York to follow the man she loves, all while quietly contemplating her place in the world and exploring her Asian American heritage. I’m so grateful both of these works exist.

Our Share of Night

Talk to Me is probably one of the most unnerving movies I saw this year — an Australian horror about a group of teens who ‘party’ by playing with possession, via a creepy, embalmed hand. It’s no surprise that things get out of control, but it’s the way they get out of control that had me wanting to crawl out of my skin. The brilliant, virtuosic new book from Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night, felt like a perfect book to pair this horror movie with (and not just because the poster and cover rhymed nicely with each other). Our Share of Night is creepy, surprising, twisty, icky, and very much about the lengths you’ll go to, to protect those you love — even if it means going beyond the lengths of this world. Just make sure you don’t read/watch right before bed; this pairing will give you nightmares.

Klara and the Sun

Honestly, I enjoy that M3GAN exists more than I enjoyed watching M3GAN — that viral, creepy dance was great; Alison Williams is always a great addition to any horror movie; all horror should really just have a pleasant amount of silliness mixed in. And robots gaining free will?? Horrific. No thank you. Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest, Klara and the Sun, approaches the relationship between a young girl and her robot friend from a slightly different angle — the world of Klara and the Sun is one where everyone is isolated, options for the future feel oblique and filled with dread, and “humanoid beings” become stand-ins for friends, as a sort of bandaid to get young kids through those lonely, isolated teen years. Not the same tone as M3GAN, by any means, but thematically resonant in my opinion! Even if Nobel laureate Ishiguro might disagree.

White on White

There is so much to love about Kelly Reichardt’s softly told but deeply felt new movie, Showing Up, which was co-written by local author Jon Raymond (Denial). Filmed in Portland, the movie is about a 30-something-year-old artist, Michelle Williams, who finds herself struggling to make art while still managing to live a life where she has to pay rent and spend time with her family. It hit all of my nerves, in a good way, as did Aysegül Savas’s White on White, a novel about a woman who rents an apartment in a new city from an older artist. The two women’s paths intersect occasionally and they fall into conversations about art and life, creation and destruction. The story might feel gentle, but the more you go along, the more you realize that our main character is finding herself increasingly close to the brink, as does Michelle Williams’s character in Showing Up.

Honey and Spice

Yes, the movie poster pairs perfectly with the book cover, but that’s not why I’ve put these two together. Rye Lane is a wildly charming rom-com where two 20-somethings meet-cute in South London. The dialogue is snappy, the romance is romancing, the characters are relatable and frustrating and wonderful. Honey and Spice is also British and also follows a young Black couple — although this story involves a fake relationship, a love-averse lead, and lots of late night conversations. This book/movie pairing is a match made in heaven (in so many senses of that phrase).

The Magical Language of Others

Return to Seoul unfairly flew under the radar this year — a story of a young Korean woman who was adopted as a kid by a French couple and returns in her early 20s to maybe-or-maybe-not find her biological parents. She’s acerbic and closed off and determined to live by her own rules, which often grate against the customs of a country she is uncomfortably unfamiliar with. We return to Seoul with her in the following years, as she changes hairstyles and boyfriends and jobs, and as her relationship to Korea evolves. E. J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, is a perfect chaser to this movie — Koh writes about trying to connect to her family, her heritage, and her language, from her home in California and later Washington state, which feel like worlds away.

The Sense of Wonder

The second local-ish movie on this list! Air sees our favorite moody bro, Ben Affleck, return to the director’s chair. The story about the origin of the Air Jordans is fun, amusing, well told, and there’s a very good scene where Affleck’s Phil Knight loses a fight with a leather sofa. Matthew Salesses’s The Sense of Wonder is also a basketball-adjacent story, but this one focuses on an Asian American basketball star and the ways that Asian Americans navigate a world where every three steps forward comes with ten more steps back. Turns out, being good at basketball means there are just more hoops for you to jump through. (Is that a basketball pun? I don’t know enough about basketball to know.)

Once More with Feeling

The main review I’d heard about Theater Camp before I watched it was “it made me feel so seen as a theater kid.” I wasn’t a theater kid, but it did make me feel seen as someone who was a friend of many theater kids, and always found that culture amusingly lovely. All of the characters in this movie are hilarious and bumbling and (occasionally, often) dumb and selfish, but still, always, well-meaning. If there was a side-plot in this movie about two shy music theater lovers who have their first kiss at the camp, only to go on to become enemies forced into proximity as director and star in a new show on Broadway — well, then you’d have Elissa Sussman’s Once More With Feeling, a fun and sexy new romance set in the world of theater that has as much fun playing in the world of theater as Theater Camp does.

The Book of X

Poor Things is such a strange, delightful riot! Bright and fun and unnerving and just so, so good — Yorgos does it again (he always does). Emma Stone soars as a horny, enthusiastically curious monster, which is about as much as I want to say about this movie — too many details might ruin it. The Book of X is our world seen through a fun-house mirror: Cassie was born with a knot in her stomach, and struggles to contend with an already-difficult world under these exceptional circumstances. Stylish, lyrical, weird, sad, but so so good — The Book of X is exactly what you’re looking for, if you came out of Poor Things craving more.

Mister Magic

A story that preys on your nostalgia; a story with a threat that lurks just around the corner; a story that unsettles you; a story with nightmares that lurk in the most common corners of your house, waiting for the exact right moment to pounce; a story that lingers in that liminal space between nightmare and dream. Oh, you’re talking about Skinamarink? That’s funny, because I’m talking about Mister Magic, the latest horror release from Kiersten White. I don’t want to give away too much, but I will say that this book will have you looking at nostalgic reruns of shows like Barney and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in a different (much more suspicious) light.

America Fantastica

I wanted to include Fast X on this list, but wasn’t convinced I’d figure out how to until a coworker pitched America Fantastica, which, it turns out, seems like an absurdly perfect match — and not just because Tim O’Brien has said that this book is going to be his last, and Fast X finds us quickly nearing the end of this beloved, high-octane franchise. The publisher’s copy for O’Brien’s latest book reads, “Just as O’Brien’s modern classic, The Things They Carried, so brilliantly reflected the unromantic truth of war, America Fantastica puts a mirror to a nation and a time that has become dangerously unmoored from truth and greedy for delusion.” In contrast, Fast X is the funhouse mirror (emphasis on fun!) of a nation and a time that’s dangerously unmoored, all while the world’s absurdity and its heightening of both good and evil serves as a fun escape and highlights how complicated and tangled up our reality has become. Also, most importantly: zoom zoom cars go fast!

Acts of Desperation

I know that Priscilla has gotten mixed reviews, but can I gently ask: how come? It’s so beautiful! It’s soft and thoughtful, slow and measured, infuriating and terrifying in lozenge-sized doses. It’s as beautiful as every Sofia Coppola film promises to be — full of pastels and manicured landscapes and gauzy intimacy — all of which, of course, is undercut by the trauma of Priscilla finding herself in such a controlling, consuming relationship at such a young age, no matter how convinced she might be that she knows what she wants. This is where I introduce you to Megan Nolan’s debut, Acts of Desperation, which is full-to-bursting with that feeling of falling into the orbit of someone you know you shouldn’t be anywhere near, that knowledge that the situation is toxic and escapable but choosing to stay put, choosing to chase after the story of the love, no matter how much it might ache.

Kairos

God, what can I say about May December that hasn’t already been said? It’s an incredibly well done, incredibly wrenching look at a May–December romance, via the actress that shows up in the lives of a married couple who met when the husband was thirteen years old, so the actress can take notes for the biopic she’s starring in about their lives. Kairos by the inimitable Jenny Erpenbeck is also about a May–December romance, this time between a young woman and a much older man, and how that romance shapes the woman’s life as she comes of age in Cold War Germany. Neither stories are easy to read/watch, but both are so deeply, richly told, and so worthwhile. Just, you know, give yourself some time to recover once you finish.

Time's Mouth

This one might not seem like the most intuitive pairing: a time-travel-y slasher about mothers and trying to fix history and continuing to fight even when no one believes you, alongside a time-travel-y novel about mothers and cults and curses? Yes, and hear me out: the part where they’re both time-travel-y and (at least partially) about reconnecting with a mother they’re trying to understand? That’s the important bit. And both are very fun and deftly plotted, too.