WIRED's Picks for the Best Books of 2023

"Cobalt Red is a grim investigation into the conditions workers experience within “artisanal” cobalt mines; child labor is rampant, and death on the job is commonplace. It’s a call to arms to push companies using these batteries to clean up their supply chains, and for those of us who buy consumer devices to interrogate how they’re made and how we treat those who make them."

"Do You Remember Being Born? follows a 75-year-old poet after she accepts an invitation to spend a week cowriting a poem with an AI trained on her work. A novel about the value of writing must clear a very high stylistic bar to succeed, and Michaels produces some of the most beautiful sentences published this year."

"Ling Ling Huang’s debut novel can achieve a folkloric power in its creepiest moments; it’s a scary story you’d tell in a posh spa’s sauna instead of around a campfire. Recommended for anyone with mixed emotions about the rise of cosmetic Ozempic use."

"I recommended Vaillant’s gripping account of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire as the best thing to read to understand this particular crisis, and that recommendation stands. It’s vital context for how our forests got so flammable."

"Number Go Up is definitely the best book to read for anyone who wants to understand what happened with SBF and FTX; I’d argue it’s also the best book to give any general-interest reader who wants to learn more about why crypto has crashed and burned."

"It’s an important addition to the growing blockchain canon, written with wit and generosity."

"This gorgeously written cultural history isn’t about cryptocurrency at all—I don’t think historian Jackson Lears mentions it once in a nearly 400-page book—and yet I found myself returning to Animal Spirits repeatedly this year while watching the crypto world convulse, because it distills the psychology driving boom-and-bust cycles in tech and finance better than anything else."

"An old-fashioned, occasionally overstuffed throwback of a book. Over 600 pages long, it centers on the love story of Jack and Elizabeth, two artsy students in 1990s Chicago who settle down together and find themselves straining toward happiness in middle age. Long live the social novel!"

The concept of Klein's book, based on the phenomenon of how often she gets mixed up with Naomi Wolf, is an "entry point to dissect the 'intellectual and ideological mayhem' of the Covid era. How wellness entrepreneurs demonize medicine. How the far right appropriates and warps leftist talking points... In all this, Klein writes, there’s a new doubling going on—distortions of what used to be more straightforward realities. It’s a wholly vital work, one only Klein could write."

"Yeebo pulls off something near-magical here. She excavates an overlooked historical narrative as juicy as any true-crime blockbuster, where every detail is both fastidiously researched and completely over-the-top."