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 17 – Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow

Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin

Sam Masur and Sadie Green have been best friends their entire lives, even when they have hated each other.  The one constant in their relationship is video games: playing them, creating them, and producing them.  Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow covers thirty years of their lives, from childhood in California, to reconnecting in Boston and forming their gaming company, and, finally, moving the company back to California, where tragedy puts a giant wedge between them.

Gabrielle Zevin’s novel, which won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fiction and the Book of the Month Book of the Year Award, was already on my radar when I received a copy as a gift from Val.  Because of the way my brain works, I kept finding messages in the text that I assumed had something to do with our friendship.  I could certainly see some similarities between the Sam character and myself, especially the way we internalized everything and questioned whether our friends were truly our friends.  For my own well being, I’m going to assume there was no ulterior motives here and that this was just a book that she enjoyed and genuinely felt that I would as well.

As for Zevin, this was my first encounter with her work.  I’ll certainly have to look deeper into her back catalogue and see if there is anything else that tickles my fancy.  Based on this work, I’m sure I won’t be disappointed.