December is usually a pretty busy month for crafting, I guess, but I don’t make a lot of gifts in December–if they’re not made by Thanksgiving they’re not getting made. However… I made a crocheted tote from a bag of “bonbons” (mini skeins for trying new yarn in new colors), lined with an old flannel pillowcase. I’m working on making some dyeable clothes for the Fun-a-Day LA show in early 2024–so, light or pale cottons, wools, silks, etc. I am mixing materials and leaving a lot of room for dyeing disasters or surprises, because I like the suspense. 😉 Daughter visited for Christmas–hooray!–so I mended a few things for her. And we had a chalk Angel Gabriel for about half the month, wishing happy birthday to people with mid-December birthdays.
Archive for January, 2024
December 2023
January 1, 2024What I read in 2023
January 1, 2024Past editions of this list: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008. This list is also available in pictorial format at Pinterest, and I often post photos of books on Instagram too.
It was a very good year for reading here! Almost forty books finished. I stop reading books without guilt, and go through spells where I don’t finish any books, for weeks at a time; so you can assume I also didn’t finish a dozen or so titles, and it probably wasn’t any fault of theirs. I have continued to enjoy audio books through Libby and cloudLibrary and Hoopla. I get most of my paper-and-ink copies of books from PaperbackSwap; I used to get more from thriftshops, but I don’t do that so much now (or any other indoor shopping, because #covidisnotover). Reading (by ear and by eye) has improved my daily early morning walk, and given me some mental space to roam beyond my house’s four walls.
Notes: Just because I read a book and listed it here doesn’t mean I liked it or would recommend it. By my count (corrections welcome), 21/39 books listed are by female or non-binary authors this year. 35 are novels (including science fiction, fantasy, historical), 4 are memoirs, nonfiction, or essay collections. Some are classified as YA, but that’s not something I always notice.
These are numbered in more-or-less chronological order (sometimes I read more than one book at a time), from January to December.
- Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
- Blake Crouch, Dark Matter
- Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
- Megan Hunter, The End We Start From
- Josh Bazell, Wild Thing
- Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London
- Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
- Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle
- Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle
- Alice Wong, ed., Disability Visibility
- Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline
- Gabrielle Zevin, The Hole We’re In
- Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting
- Jen Gunter, The Vagina Bible
- Margaret Atwood, The Testaments
- Nell Zink, Nicotine
- V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
- Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women
- Blake Crouch, Recursion
- Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here
- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
- Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts
- Andrew Sean Greer, Less is Lost
- George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
- Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You
- Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown
- David Lodge, Deaf Sentence
- Jo Walton, Lent
- Temi Oh, Do You Dream of Terra-Two?
- Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek
- Harry Turtledove, Three Miles Down
- Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
- Geraldine Brooks, Horse
- Tade Thompson, Far from the Light of Heaven
- Alice Wong, Year of the Tiger
- Ryka Aoki, The Light of Uncommon Stars
- Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Velvet Was the Night
- Ernest Cline, Armada
- Terry Miles, The Quiet Room