In something of a secular little miracle when surrounded on all sides by such perfidy and sacrilege, the US book world of 2023 managed to produce an array of amazingly good books on a wide span of topics. These were the best of them:

10 Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

This list begins on one of the most ominous notes imaginable: Shapiro not only describes with merciless accuracy the all-pervading power of digital information in our world but also its incredibly vulnerability to actors of ill intent. The book is the story of a handful of famous 'hacks' but it's also an evolutionary lineage of the rot that might blight all our futures.

9 Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz (Simon & Schuster)

It's still tempting to think of the Internet as a largely inane collection lies, hot takes, and cat videos, but in reality it's been an enormous and multi-faceted business for well over a decade, as Lorenz conveys in these pages with her usual expert readability.

8 If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why it's So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First by Wendy Dean MD (Steerforth Press)

Even though this book indulges in the kind of ridiculously overwritten subtitle that's near-ubiquitous in nonfiction publishing, the book itself gets right down to its grim subject with sharp clarity: the many ways medical professionals at all levels are hampered or thwarted in their duties by the malevolent extent to which medicine has become a cash business.

7 The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal by Laine Nooney (University of Chicago Press)

Far more than a simple narrative history of the Apple computer, this steeply intelligent and invigorating book is a study of how the Apple II computer changed the way ordinary consumers thought of computers in general, because the Apple II tailored the experience from coding complexity to simple, pragmatic usefulness. Computers have spawned hundreds of histories and sociological studies, and this is one of the best that's ever appeared.

6 Writing Black Beauty: Anna Sewell, The Creation of a Novel, and the Story of Animal Rights by Celia Brayfield (Pegasus Books)

In this fascinating book, Brayfield goes far beyond a simple biography of Anna Sewell (as interesting and overdue as that would be) and instead tells the broader story of the writing of Black Beauty and the seismic changes it wrought on the fledgling animals rights movements of the 19th century.

5 Losing Music: A Memoir by John Cotter (Milkweed Editions)

In this story of the partial loss of his hearing, John Cotter describes not only the unpredictable day-to-day reality – sometimes a dull muffle, sometimes an irritating static, sometimes the bawling of an unruly mob – but also the maddening shortcomings of the American medical community (in chapters that are angering but also droll, Cotter is prescribed everything short of leeches), and through it all, he never insults the reader with bathos, never spares them heartache, and consistently rivets them with some of the best prose on this list.

4 The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner (Princeton University Press)

Here Turner moves from her sumptuously rich biography of Chaucer to a wonderful, scintillating look at Chaucer's most famous fictional creation, the Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales. Like all great fictional characters, the Wife has enjoyed a life of her own, and it's sparklingly chronicled at last.

3 Trust the Plan: The Rise of Q Anon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America by Will Sommer (Harper)

Spectators around the world have noted the increasingly obvious fact that large chunks of the American populace have lost their minds, but never until this snide and insightful book by Sommer have they had a natural history of one of the main vectors of that insanity, the Q Anon conspiracy that's now the abiding faith the country's fascist core.

2 Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food by Fuchisia Dunlop (WW Norton)

It's difficult to pin down precisely the peculiar charm of this history of Chinese food and its place both in Chinese culture and in the broader world, but that charm is evident on every page here, filling that story with memorable characters, lively historical insights, and of course some mouth-watering descriptions.

1 Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

It's the happiest of all coincidences that this list gets to end on such a weirdly, stirringly uplifting book as this new one by poet and translator Christian Wiman. The book, a series of largely unconnected reflections on life and literature and family and the news, resists easy characterization – except the easiest of these: the best book of the year.