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 29 (of 52) – Sea Of Tranquility

Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel

A blip in the matrix ties together an exiled Englishman forced to move to Canada in the early 20th century, a young woman with a video camera in the late 20th century, and a novelist from the early 23rd century.  An investigator goes to visit all three, hoping to determine if reality is a simulation or not.  When he goes off script and tries to change the past, he finds the true cause for the blip may be closer to home than he realized.

Sea of Tranquility, the latest from Emily St. John Mandel, was the Goodreads Choice Awards winner for best science fiction release in 2022.  I am not familiar with her or her work at all, despite watching some (but not finishing) the adaptation of her 2014 novel Station Eleven.  I wasn’t all that sure where this one was going, and almost thought it was going to be a collection of short stories based on a similar theme before the actual story kicked in and tied it all together.  I don’t read as much science fiction as I used to, the odd Star Trek novel aside, so I may need to look more into her work going forward.