my 2023 reading year in review
I read 41 books this year, surpassing my goal of 30. This is up from last year's tally of 24, but being single and unemployed frees up a lot of time.
41 books sound like a lot, but a handful of these "books" are merely short stories. Counting books can be misleading for this reason, so I prefer to count pages, and this year I turned 10,359 pages. It's more than the 9,247 and 6,544 I read in 2021 and 2022, respectively, but less than the 12,011 I managed in 2020 (ah, peak COVID).
I don't know what to make my reading goal for next year. 13,000 pages? 35 books? I want to set an ambitious goal that will push me to read more, but at the same time I don't want to discourage myself from challenging myself with more difficult books that might take me longer to complete.
I've sorted all the books I read this year below based on how much I enjoyed reading them. I'd recommend anything in the first two sections (i.e. the very best and the great).
The very best 💎
- These Precious Days, Ann Patchett
- The Essays of E.B. White, E.B. White
- Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, Lori Gottlieb
- There Is No Good Card for This: What To Say and Do When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love, Kelsey Crowe, Emily McDowell
The great ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
- Bonfire Opera: Poems, Danusha Laméris
- The Hurting Kind: Poems, Ada Limon
- Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
- Severance, Ling Ma
- Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami
- Hills Like White Elephants, Ernest Hemingway
- Essential Bukowski: Poetry, Charles Bukowski
- Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
The good ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- The Dutch House, Ann Patchett
- We Were Dreamers, Simu Liu
- This Is One Way To Dance, Sejal Shah
- Intimate Relationships, Rowland S. Miller
- Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
- A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson
- Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You, Ray Bradbury
- The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966, Charles Bukowski
- Rooms Are Never Finished: Poems, Agha Shahid Ali
- The Principles of Communism, Friedrich Engels
- Why Socialism?, Albert Einstein
- Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
- The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel
- In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain, Tom Vitale
- The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, Esther Perel
The okay ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Jia Tolentino
- The Best American Poetry 2021, Tracy K. Smith (editor), David Lehman (series editor)
- You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters, Kate Murphy
- The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker
- frank: sonnets, Diane Seuss
- All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, Patrick Bringley
- Dancing in Odessa, Ilya Kaminsky
- The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman
- The Shaping of Us: How Everyday Spaces Structure our Lives, Behaviour, and Well-Being, Lily Bernheimer
The forgettable
- Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki, Rosemary Valero-O'Connell
- A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy, Miyamoto Musashi