2023: The Year In Books

As 2023 comes to a close, my third full year of remote working, I managed to far surpass my previous records by completing a whopping 59 books, four books more than my previous high from last year and my third consecutive year completing the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge.  I completed the challenge in late November and surpassed last year’s total in mid-December.  I read (or listened) to 21,394 pages, by far my highest total of all time and only the fourth time I’ve passed 10,000.

Of those books, eleven were non-fiction and, of the remaining 48 novels, only four were tied to a TV show, either as the source material or as a tie-in.  None of the books came out of my dwindling “to-read” drawer, with 53 e-books and two audiobooks.  I continued to take advantage of my library card, which helped me procure 44 of the books I consumed throughout the year.

Over 61% of the books I read this year were by authors I had read before. The 22 authors that I read for the first this year were:

Selma Blair Stacy Willingham Gillian McAllister Chuck Klosterman
Gabrielle Zevin Ronan Farrow Matthew Perry Amor Towles
Jason Rekulak Emily St. John Mandel Bonnie Garmus Thomas Mullen
Naomi Hirahara Maitland Ward Busy Phillips Elliot Page
Jinwoo Chong Maureen Ryan Minka Kelly Britney Spears
Emily Henry Rebecca Makkai

Jennifer McMahon, Karin Slaughter, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Erle Stanley Gardner, Grady Hendrix, Jeffery Deaver, Laura Lippman, Ruth Ware, and Stacy Willingham were the only authors that I read multiple titles from during 2023.

18 of the books I read were released this year, while only five of them were released last century, with the oldest first published in 1934.

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Book 23 (of 52) – The Lincoln Highway

The Lincoln Highway – Amor Towles

After serving his sentence for manslaughter, a young man returns home to find his father has died and the family farm has been repossessed.  Deciding to head west to California to start a new life with his younger brother, instead he’s forced to head to New York when a couple of friends from his time away “borrow” his car to settle some scores of their own.

The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental highway in the United States, running coast-to-coast from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco.  The local portion runs less than a mile north of my house, so when I became aware of Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, I figured it would be worth a read.  Given the name of the book and the fascination of one of the characters, very little time is actually spent travelling the Lincoln Highway.  I don’t know if I’ll dip my toe back into the Towles pool, but I did enjoy this incursion.