What I read in 2023

37 of the 39 books I finished in 2023, all photographed in my hand, against the sky.

Past 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.

1. Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
2. Blake Crouch, Dark Matter
3. Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
4. Megan Hunter, The End We Start From
5. Josh Bazell, Wild Thing
6. Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London
7. Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
8. Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle
9. Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle
10. Alice Wong, ed., Disability Visibility
11. Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline
12. Gabrielle Zevin, The Hole We’re In
13. Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting
14. Jen Gunter, The Vagina Bible
15. Margaret Atwood, The Testaments
16. Nell Zink, Nicotine
17. V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
18. Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women
19. Blake Crouch, Recursion
20. Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here
21. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
22. Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts
23. Andrew Sean Greer, Less is Lost
24. George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
25. Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You
26. Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown
27. David Lodge, Deaf Sentence
28. Jo Walton, Lent
29. Temi Oh, Do You Dream of Terra-Two?
30. Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek
31. Harry Turtledove, Three Miles Down
32. Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
33. Geraldine Brooks, Horse
34. Tade Thompson, Far from the Light of Heaven
35. Alice Wong, Year of the Tiger
36. Ryka Aoki, The Light of Uncommon Stars
37. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Velvet Was the Night
38. Ernest Cline, Armada
39. Terry Miles, The Quiet Room

Tags: books, covidisnotover