Back to the Fiction: Summer Reading, 2023
By Randy Kaufman
with research assistance from Dustin Lowman
My love of reading was built on a foundation of fiction. I have vivid memories of reading under a tree in Westchester with one of our family’s many dogs, devouring Gone with the Wind. This love would extend through my travels of early adulthood — to the otherworldly classics of French and Russian literature — and would persevere through many years of reading only prospectuses and deal documents, when my modern favorites surfaced: Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, Isabel Allende, and Toni Morrison, to name but a few.
But over the past few decades, I’ve feasted almost exclusively on history, historical fiction, biography, and psychology books — in a word, nonfiction (many of which I’ve included in my Infinite Library). Perhaps it was a desire to understand an increasingly chaotic world — coinciding as much of this period did with macroeconomic and personal struggles. Or, maybe I just wanted to be a better wealth advisor: to understand more of the world, and more of human behavior, so I could help my clients navigate ever complex lives.
Whatever the motive, I enjoyed a rich journey through the annals of nonfiction (in which category I include historical fiction, hoping, as it does, to tell us something true about a real historical moment).
However, perhaps out of a desire to return to my first love — the trials of the heart and spirit detailed in novels — I lately found myself one-clicking the fiction books on my wish list.
The list below contains some of the most powerful novels (and one short story) that I’ve read recently. For my readers who want an inexpensive trip to new and fascinating places, where fiction is actually stranger (and certainly more magical) than truth, I share below my favorite fictional reads so far in 2023.
A last note: If you’ve read something that you consider unmissable, please let me know.
With grit, grace, growth, and gratitude for my readers and my own love of reading, I wish you a joy-filled, peaceful summer ahead.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Randy Kaufman, formerly a corporate tax attorney and investment banker, is now a wealth advisor who prides herself on focusing on what matters most: clients’ peace of mind, family dynamics, and getting enough, not more. Randy is a passionate student of impact investing, strategic philanthropy, and behavioral psychology (while not a psychologist, she occasionally plays one in the boardroom). She is dedicated to helping the underprivileged and is a proud member of global venture fund Acumen's advisory board. A thinker, learner, and pursuer of overarching truths, she is always eager to discuss big ideas about money, and its off-and-on associate, happiness.