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 21 (of 52) – Catch And Kill

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators – Ronan Farrow

As an investigative reporter for NBC, Ronan Farrow thought he was working on just another story. Rumors of Harvey Weinstein’s misdeeds had been an open secret in Hollywood for years, but Farrow was starting to get women abused by Weinstein to break their silence and go on the record. This was bound to become his biggest story yet, until NBC mysteriously started to get cold feet, slowing his reporting and, eventually, stopping it altogether.  Farrow took the story to The New Yorker where, in step with similar reporting by the New York Times, Weinstein’s crimes were made public and led to his eventual arrest and conviction.  For his work, Farrow, along with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey from the Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.  NBC, meanwhile, found themselves under fire, both for sitting on the story in deference to Weinstein and for covering up sexual abuse in their own house.

In Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, Ronan Farrow recounts his early work with NBC trying to track down sources and evidence against Harvey Weinstein, something many journalists had tried to do previously but, for many reasons, were unable to bring to fruition.  After releasing the Weinstein story, he was able to get information on the lengths Weinstein had gone in order to stop him and the others, including berating his bosses and NBC and hiring Israeli intelligence firms to track their movements and dig up dirt on them.  He closes up the book with the aftermath and NBC, where Matt Lauer, longtime host of the Today show, was exposed and executives who covered for him and kowtowed to Weinstein were let go.

Farrow puts together a compelling, and also horrifying, story, where powerful men are able to get away with anything so long as they continue to produce profits or value for their organizations.  The publication of both his and Kantor and Twhoey’s work led into the explosion of the #MeToo movement, where women across the globe stood up against their abusers and tried to take back their power.  There’s still plenty of work to do, but I have to hope we, as a civilization, are in a better place than we were six years ago.