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 |
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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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