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 33 (of 52) – Clark And Division

Clark and Division – Naomi Hirahara

A Japanese family is living out the American dream in California until war breaks out between their homeland and their adopted country.  Forced to leave their lives behind, they head to the internment camp together before being released to start a new life in Chicago.  However, the death of the oldest daughter, who was released earlier than the rest of the family, haunts the youngest, who is determined to find out what happened to her in Chicago before the rest of the family arrived.

Clark and Division, by Naomi Hirahara, grabbed my attention not so much because of the subject matter but because of the setting.  While many of the businesses are no longer the same, the locations, streets, and neighborhoods ring true.  Whether it was walks on the beaches of Lake Michigan, to dances at the Aragon back when it was an actual ballroom, to the subway stop at the titular street corner, the locales of the work ring true of a Chicago gone by.  There is a second book in the series, which follows the characters back to California after the end of World War II, but I don’t know if I’m invested enough to go along for the ride.