READING LIST · LISANNE SWART
Best Books of 2013
2013 was a quietly strong year for nonfiction. No single book dominated the conversation the way some years have a defining title, but there were half a dozen that have stayed relevant long after the year ended — books about courage, power, identity, and what it costs to tell the truth. One of them is on my personal bookshelf. The rest belong there too.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Nonfiction & Memoir · Updated June 2026
I Am Malala
Malala Yousafzai was fifteen years old when a Taliban gunman shot her on her school bus in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. She had been a target because she refused to stop going to school and refused to stop speaking about why girls should be allowed to learn. This is her account of her childhood, the Taliban’s takeover of her valley, the attack, and the recovery that turned a local activist into a global one. She is not sentimental about any of it.
What stays with me about this book is not the drama of the shooting — it is the portrait of ordinary life before it. The way Malala writes about her father, about her classroom, about the specific texture of growing up in a place you love that is being destroyed around you. The courage in this book is not the big cinematic kind. It is the daily kind: getting up and going to school knowing what the risk is. That is harder to write about, and she does it without flinching.
Read my full recommendation → Find it on Amazon →Men We Reaped
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young Black men from her community in DeLisle, Mississippi — including her brother. This memoir moves between those losses and her own childhood, working backward through each death to understand the forces that made them possible: poverty, race, a geography that offers young men almost no way out. Ward is primarily known as a novelist, and the prose here carries that weight. It is not reportage. It is grief given form.
Ward does something rare in this book: she holds structural analysis and personal devastation simultaneously, without letting either flatten the other. She never lets the reader reduce these men to statistics or symbols. Each one is specific, irreplaceable, mourned on his own terms. It belongs in the same conversation as I Am Malala — both are books about what it costs to live in a place that treats your life as expendable.
Find it on Amazon →Going Clear
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright spent years researching Scientology — its founder L. Ron Hubbard, its structures of belief and control, its relationships with Hollywood, and its treatment of members who tried to leave. The result is the most thorough account of the organization ever published. Wright does not argue a position. He reports what he found and lets the reader arrive at conclusions. What the reader arrives at is not reassuring.
This book is a study in how institutions built around belief operate when accountability is absent. The psychology of why intelligent people stay inside systems that harm them — and what it takes to leave — is the real subject beneath the Scientology frame. It is relevant far beyond its specific subject matter, and it is one of the most rigorous pieces of long-form journalism published that year.
Find it on Amazon →The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
George Packer traces the collapse of the American social contract through the lives of several ordinary people — a factory worker in North Carolina, a political operative in Washington, a businessman in Silicon Valley — over three decades. The book moves between these portraits without editorializing, letting the accumulation of specific, documented lives do the work of argument. It won the National Book Award and remains one of the clearest accounts of how a society loses its center without anyone deciding to lose it.
The Unwinding belongs alongside the best narrative nonfiction of the last twenty years. Packer’s method — following individuals over decades, resisting the temptation to explain — produces a portrait of structural change that statistics cannot. You understand what happened to the American working class not because Packer tells you, but because you have spent three hundred pages living alongside people it happened to.
Find it on Amazon →Infidel
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, raised across several countries, and escaped an arranged marriage by claiming asylum in the Netherlands where she later became a member of parliament. This memoir covers her childhood, her gradual departure from Islam, her collaboration with Theo van Gogh on the film Submission, his murder by an extremist, and her life under permanent security protection. It is one of the most contested memoirs of its era, and one of the most important.
Whether you agree with Hirsi Ali’s conclusions or not, the experience she is writing from is real and her account of it is unflinching. As a portrait of what it means to leave behind an identity that was never fully chosen — and the price of doing so publicly — it reads alongside I Am Malala and Educated as one of the great memoirs about the cost of becoming yourself. Note: published in 2007 but reached a far wider audience in 2013, which is why it belongs on this list.
Find it on Amazon →The Courage to Be Disliked
Written as a Socratic dialogue between a philosopher and a young man, this book introduces the psychology of Alfred Adler through a series of provocations: that all problems are interpersonal problems, that trauma does not determine your life, that the desire for approval is the root of most unhappiness. It was a phenomenon in Japan and became one when the English translation arrived. The dialogue format makes ideas that would be dense in essay form feel like a conversation you are having.
This is the book on this list most directly in conversation with how I think about meaning, autonomy, and the work of becoming yourself. Adler’s framework — particularly the idea of “separation of tasks” and living without seeking validation — is one of the most practically useful things you will encounter in a book about psychology. The Japanese original is 2013; if you can only access the English translation, it is worth it.
Find it on Amazon →Lost Girls
Five young women who worked as escorts disappeared on Long Island between 2007 and 2010. Their remains were found on a stretch of beach. The killer has never been identified. Robert Kolker’s book is not a whodunit. It is a portrait of five lives — who these women were before they disappeared, what brought them to where they were, what their families lost. Kolker refuses to let them be defined by how they died. That choice makes this one of the most morally serious true crime books ever written.
What distinguishes Lost Girls from most true crime is its insistence on the living person behind the case file. Kolker does the work of restoring specificity to women the media had already reduced to types. In that sense it belongs alongside Men We Reaped — both are books about people made invisible by the systems that were supposed to protect them, written by someone who refuses to look away.
Find it on Amazon →Where to start with this list
If you want the one that has stayed most relevant since 2013
→ Read I Am Malala. The conversation about girls’ education and the courage it takes to demand it has not dated. It has become more urgent.
If you want the best writing on this list
→ Read Men We Reaped. Jesmyn Ward writes memoir the way she writes fiction — with precision and sorrow and no sentimentality whatsoever.
If you want something that will change how you think about your own psychology
→ Read The Courage to Be Disliked. The Adlerian framework it introduces is one of the most practically useful things you can carry from a book.
If you want the most rigorous journalism on this list
→ Read Going Clear. Lawrence Wright does what great reporting does: he goes where the story leads and does not flinch when he gets there.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2013
What are the best books of 2013?
The strongest books of 2013 were I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, Going Clear by Lawrence Wright, and The Unwinding by George Packer (National Book Award winner). On the fiction side, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt won the Pulitzer Prize and The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize. The seven books on this list are the nonfiction titles that have held up best.
What was the best nonfiction book of 2013?
Several strong contenders defined the year. Going Clear by Lawrence Wright won the most critical attention for investigative journalism. The Unwinding by George Packer won the National Book Award. Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward was widely cited as the most powerful memoir of the year. I Am Malala became a global phenomenon and remains the book most people associate with 2013. Which is “best” depends on what you are looking for.
When was I Am Malala published?
I Am Malala was first published on July 4, 2013, by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK and Little, Brown and Company in the US. It was co-written with journalist Christina Lamb. Malala Yousafzai was sixteen years old at the time of publication. The following year, in 2014, she became the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
What books from 2013 are still worth reading today?
All seven on this list have held up. I Am Malala and Going Clear remain definitive accounts of their subjects. Men We Reaped has only become more relevant as conversations about race and structural inequality have deepened. The Courage to Be Disliked, though its Japanese original is 2013, reached most readers via the 2018 English translation and continues to find new audiences. The Unwinding reads like a preview of everything that happened in American politics in the decade that followed.
Is there a fiction book from 2013 worth reading?
This list focuses on nonfiction, which was the stronger category in 2013. On the fiction side, notable 2013 titles include The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Pulitzer Prize winner), A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, and NW by Zadie Smith. Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries also won the Booker Prize that year.
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From the bookshelf
“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.” — Malala Yousafzai
If this list resonated with you, you'll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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