What I read in 2023

My goal for 2023, as usual, was to read at least 52 books (one per week). Instead, I read 121, which I think is my third-highest total ever. Many of these were books that I did not really want to read (books from our bookshelves), and I don't know whether that made me read them faster or slower. Roughly 68% of the total were fiction and 32% were nonfiction.

In 2024 I hope to enjoy my reading more, but we'll see. It kind of depends on whether I like the authors I choose to focus on each month.

Here is a review of what I read in 2023, by category.

Children's Books. Except as noted, everything on this list I read aloud to the kids. We are moving away from this category, but sometimes you find a kids' book that's just right for teenagers. Some of these are about teenagers, but I put them in this category because I read them as a kid and they seem more aimed at children.

Although of course I love the Laura Ingalls Wilder and Maud Hart Lovelace books, I think my favorite this year was our Halloween book, Small Spaces. Very spooky and recommended -- but for older kids only (the characters are in middle school).

• No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman
• Jason's Quest by Margaret Laurence (read to myself)
• Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Heaven to Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace
• Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace
• Small Spaces by Katherine Arden

 

Young Adult (YA)/Teen Books. Except as noted, I read these to the kids. Most were a bit disappointing. Things That Are wasn't as good as the first two in that series, Paper Towns isn't the best John Green, Rip Tide wasn't as good as the first book, and the kids HATED The Catcher in the Rye (times have changed too much). I think my favorite was Orbiting Jupiter, even though it was so very sad.

• Things That Are by Andrew Clements
• Paper Towns by John Green
• Rip Tide by Kat Falls
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
• Jackaby by William Ritter
• Whirligig by Paul Fleischman (read w/Teen A for school)
• Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt (read to myself)

 

Books for the Book Group. My beloved book group continues, and as usual we read a completely random assortment of books, some of which I liked and some of which I hated. Sometimes we read nonfiction, but this year it was all fiction. My favorite was probably Pigs in Heaven. I often don't like Barbara Kingsolver, too preachy, but despite some problems with this book, including a way too happy ending, I gave in and let her transport me. 

 

I hated Stolen and The Dictionary of Lost Words, thought Jurassic Park was kind of silly and struggled through The Death of Artemio Cruz. I liked all the others to varying degrees.

• January: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (chosen because Karen went to Costa Rica)
  
• February: The Forgery by Ave Barrera (trans. from the Spanish by Ellen Jones & Robin Myers; chosen because Karen went to Chile)
  
• March/April: Loving Little Egypt by Thomas McMahon (a book from my shelves)
  
• May: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (chosen because Lecia went to Vietnam)
  
• June: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
  
• July/August: Stolen by Ann-Helen Laestadius (trans. from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles)
  
• September: Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver
  
• October/November: The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
  
• December: The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes (trans. from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam)
  

 

Mystery/Thriller. Usually a long list, and this year some came from my project to read books off my shelves. My favorites were probably Windy City Dying, a very strong entry in Eleanor Taylor Bland's mystery series, and Three Bags Full, which I just loved. Now every time sheep show up in something I'm reading, I think, oh, those sheep are smarter than you think (which is probably not true).

• Windy City Dying by Eleanor Taylor Bland
• Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
• Fatal Remains by Eleanor Taylor Bland
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers (again)
• The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart
• The Davidian Report by Dorothy B. Hughes
• Killer in the Rain by Raymond Chandler
• The Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow
• The Thief Taker by T. F. Banks
  
• The Mary Roberts Rinehart Crime Book (The Door, The Confession, The Red Lamp) by Mary Roberts Rinehart
  
• Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann (trans. from the German by Anthea Bell)
  
• The Way of the Bear by Anne Hillerman
• The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers (for the umpteenth time)
  
• Tailing a Tabby by Laurie Cass (found in a little free library, read to the kids)

Supernatural Mystery/Ghost Story. I only read one Phil Rickman book this year (there's one more in the series, but I'll have to request it from Longmont), so this category is a bit thin. The Coates book was good (and gave me a new ghost story author to explore), but Nantucket Hauntings was really scary. Enjoyed it a lot.

• All of a Winter's Night by Phil Rickman
• Wicked Things by Thomas Tessier
• Nantucket Hauntings by Blue Balliett
• Gallows Hill by Darcy Coates

Science Fiction/Fantasy. Not my favorite category, especially not this year. I thought I'd have something good to choose after exploring books in our collection, but not really. I didn't like The Stone Sky as much as the other books in the Broken Earth trilogy (the first book is the best), but I liked it better than anything else I read in this category this year.

• The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin
• The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
  
• The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen
• The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White
  
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Poetry. I like poetry! Why didn't I read more of it? One of my reading resolutions in 2024 is to read more poetry. As for a favorite, I didn't love Leaves of Grass, although some of the poems were wonderful and I'm certainly glad I read it. And I was glad to read Sonnets from the Portuguese, too, but again, didn't love it. So it'll have to be Early English Poems, which I didn't love either, but which was an important reading experience.

• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Early English Poems edited by Henry S. Pancoast and John Duncan Spaeth
• Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

General Fiction. I read quite a bit more general fiction than usual this year, on account of my project to read books from my own shelves. Some of my favorites were There There, Burmese Days, Black Rain, and Cold Earth, to cite four that could not be more different.

• Waterland by Graham Swift (again!)
  
• Bengal Nights by Mircea Eliade (trans. from the French by Catherine Spencer; originally written in Romanian)
  
• Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym (again)
  
• It Does Not Die by Maitreyi Devi (trans. from the Bengali by the author)
  
• Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym (again)
  
• There There by Tommy Orange
  
• A River Runs Through It and Other Stories by Norman Maclean
• True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
• The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (read w/Teen B for school)
• Justine by Lawrence Durrell
• Gigi and Selected Writings by Colette (trans. from the French by various people)
  
• The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Burmese Days by George Orwell
• Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (trans. from the French by Grace Frick & the author)
  
• Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Emperor of Ice Cream by Brian Moore
• Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse (trans. from the Japanese by John Bester)
  
• Phallos by Samuel R. Delany (enhanced & revised edition)
• The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (read w/Teen B and later Teen A for school)
• North Woods by Daniel Mason
• Cold Earth by Sarah Moss
• Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession
• Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith
• The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
  

Christmas Books. This was a funny year for Christmas books. I planned to read some -- I was going to alternate between books from the scifi/fantasy shelf and Christmas books. But all the "Christmas books" I read were not really Christmas books, they were just set during winter or in Greenland or whatever. I wasn't in the mood to read anything sappy, and I didn't have time to seek out any non-sappy Christmas books, which are harder to find. 

 

In the end, the only Christmas book I read was this one, stupid, children's book, to the kids and Rocket Boy. Progress was slow because we had to keep stopping for someone or other to say, "How could a mouse do that?" (It's not a very realistic story.)

• The Great Christmas Kidnaping Caper by Jean van Leeuwen (read to the kids and Rocket Boy)
  

Graphic Novels/Memoirs/Whatever. The first three did nothing for me, but I picked up Going into Town at the library on the next-to-last day of the year and I loved it! I couldn't stop thinking about my wonderful trip to New York for Christmas in 1976. I used to want to live in New York. Don't want to anymore, don't like big cities anymore, but still, great memories...

• Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine
• Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
• The Witch Boy by Molly Knox Ostertag
• Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York by Roz Chast
  

Memoir/Diaries/Autobiography. This year I decided to divide what once was one category (Memoir/Biography) into two. Thus, this section is for books that people write about themselves, which really is quite different from a book written by someone about someone else. It comes down to lying vs. guessing. So these are the books that involve remembering and (perhaps) lying. Of them, my favorite was probably I Really Should Be Practicing. That was my father's book, so I enjoyed thinking about him reading it too.

• Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
• Becoming by Michelle Obama
• We Were Amused by Rachel Ferguson
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (read w/Teen A for school)
  
• Of Solids and Surds by Samuel R. Delany (Why I Write series)
• Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis
• Adventures with a Desert Bush Pilot by Sylvia Winslow
• I Really Should Be Practicing by Gary Graffman

 

Biography. ...and these are the books that involve researching and guessing. The Whitman biography is the book that motivated me to divide these categories. It's been widely praised, but I don't know. So much guesswork, so many unanswered questions. A memoir/autobiography really is a different animal from a biography. I didn't love any of these, though they were all interesting and worth reading. None were really what I wanted them to be.

• The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt
• Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan
• Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary by K. M. Elisabeth Murray
• Great Harry by Carolly Erickson

Presidential Biography. ...and as before this is the more specific category of books about American presidents. I only made it through three presidents this year, and barely even that because I was so caught up in my other reading project. I didn't read a separate biography of Taft because there aren't many (any?) good choices and The Bully Pulpit gave a lot of information about his life. He deserves a good biography all about him, though. I liked both The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and The Bully Pulpit, but I had a harder time getting through the latter -- I think Doris Kearns Goodwin maybe tried to cover too much ground in one book. So I'm going to choose the Morris as my favorite. But they were both good, and if you want to know more about Taft, you have to read The Bully Pulpit.

• William McKinley and His America (rev. ed.) by H. Wayne Morgan
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
• The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin

 

General Nonfiction. Some of the books listed here could be considered memoirs (The Discovery of Yellowstone Park) or biographies (Magnificent Rebels), but I chose to put them here because I think they are more about a concept or a thing than a person. I liked a lot of these, so it's hard to choose a favorite. I think I'm going to go with The Birder's Bug Book, which was such a surprising pleasure to read after seeing it on my bookshelf for so many years.

• Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf
  
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
• Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston (includes a lot of fiction!)
  
• Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions to Ask Before (and After) You Marry by Les and Leslie Parrott
• The Discovery of Yellowstone Park: Journal of the Washburn Expedition to the Yellowstone and Firehole Rivers in the Year 1870 by Nathaniel Pitt Langford
• Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines by David Haward Bain
• The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics by Gary Zukav
• From the Yaroslavsky Station: Russia Perceived by Elizabeth Pond
• In Leningrad by Joseph Wechsberg
• Love, Medicine & Miracles: Lessons Learned About Self-Healing from a Surgeon's Experience with Exceptional Patients by Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.
• Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
  
• The Search for the Giant Squid by Richard Ellis
• Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America by Audrey Clare Farley
• The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower
• The Desert Year by Joseph Wood Krutch
• The Coming Quake: Science and Trembling on the California Earthquake Frontier by T. A. Heppenheimer
• The Birder's Bug Book by Gilbert Waldbauer
• Colorado's Iceman and the Story of the Frozen Dead Guy by Bo Shaffer
• The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson
• Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
• An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England by Bruce Mitchell
• On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner