Rachel Lopez picks her favourite reads of 2023

A novel inspired by Fleetwood Mac that follows a fictitious 1970s band through their music, drama and eventual breakup

I don’t need Spotify’s year-end list. I already know that I’ve played Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours all through 2023. Blame Taylor Jenkins Reid. Her 2019 novel, Daisy Jones & the Six, follows a fictitious 1970s band – their music, the drama, the epic final show and subsequent breakup – and is loosely inspired by Rumours. It’s a tale told through interviews; events seen from the points of view of various members of the band. There’s sex, drugs, rock and roll. But there’s also the magic of hitting on a great tune, spinning great lyrics from heartbreak, and finding yourself in the perfect groove. Fleetwood Mac’s history could fuel a soap opera of its own, but Reid’s book draws largely from the romance between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. It’s a powder keg all by itself. I did things backwards. I read the book after the TV show adaptation began streaming on Amazon Prime in March. The book is better, but I can’t take my eyes of Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, who plays Daisy.

Rock & roll and lapis lazuli (Penguin)

Rachel Lopez (HT Photo)

I didn’t make it to Amsterdam to catch the largest ever exhibition of Vermeer’s paintings at the Rijksmuseum this year. As a consolation, I’ve been reading and re-reading books about the 17th century Dutch master. Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (2008), by Timothy Brook, leaves other art books in the dust, simply because it’s not an art book at all. Brook turns each of Vermeer’s 30-odd canvases into a window into the period. How ultramarine, an expensive shade of blue, made its way from lapis lazuli mines in Afghanistan to the headscarf of Girl with a Pearl Earring. Why The Milkmaid is painted to make household work seem like worship. How a quiet glint of silver represents the bustling economic, political and social connections occurring across the world at the time. The hat in the title? A result of French and Native American trade to meet the shortage of beaver pelts in Europe. I won’t see Vermeer works the same way again. He probably wouldn’t either.