What I Read: 2023

Happy (almost) New Year!

I did not mean to disappear on here for much of December but I am alive and well and enjoying some much needed time off with my family. At the end of November, my boss passed away very suddenly and I was thrown into a lot more responsibility at work, all during our busiest season of the year while dealing with my own personal loss and the grief of those around me. I may share more but it’s been an intense time on a lot of levels and many things are still being sorted out. This is my first week in a while where things have been a little calmer.

So December didn’t go quite the way I had planned and I fell short in a few ways but I always enjoy looking back over my year in books and how reality matched up to the reading goals I set in January.

My 2023 Goals

1. Read 100 Books

I came close to this one but it’s December 30 and I’m coming in at 98. I probably could have made it if December had been a little less insane but I’m happy with the reading I’ve done.

2. Read 15 Translated Works

I read 9 books that were translated from other languages which is over half but not amazing. Part of my problem was finding copies of the books I had on my list. I didn’t buy and don’t aim to buy many new books so I rely heavily on the library system to check things off on my TBR.

I read books translated from Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Dutch, and Italian. The French Canadian books I’ve read in recent years are absolutely bonkers while the Japanese ones often seem to have non-linear plotlines. Spanish writers seem to delve a little deeper into creepy territory than I’m used to.

3. Read 30 books I Already Own

I read 22 books that I owned this year. Not 30 but I’m pleased because that is 22 books fewer from the piles of books I keep around that I’m totally going to read one day. As I said, I don’t aim to buy a lot of new books (5 of the books I read in 2023 were books I purchased new at some point) so most of my owned TBR comes from thrift stores, library sales, and Little Free Libraries. Once I read these books, most of them went back to the library sale or a Little Free Library.

4. Read 20 Books That Have Been on my TBR since before 2020

I read 17 books that had been sitting on my TBR since before 2020. My current TBR list dates back to 2015 but some of them may have been on there from a previous list so could be even older. To accomplish this goal I made good use of the inter-library loan system as well as a few books that I already owned. The 20 Books of Summer challenge was particular useful for this as I made that the focus of the titles I chose.

I did also cross off some pre-2020 titles that didn’t make it on the final list of 17 since I either decided I didn’t want to read them anymore or I borrowed them from the library but DNFed them. So all in all I made a good dent on my list. A year ago it was at 215 and today it is at 197. I probably added about 60 books to it in 2023 though of course I’ve read many of them already.

My 2023 Reading Statistics.

I always enjoy keeping track of what kinds of books I read and where they came from. Here are some of my stats for the year:

• 88 of my 98 books were fiction. 1 was an anthology.
• 25 of my 98 books were audiobooks. This made a huge difference in my reading this year and obviously boosted my numbers. I started listening to audiobooks last fall so this was my first full year of using audiobooks.
• 75 of the books I read were written by women.
• I read 9 short story collections.
• Where did my books come from: 59 from the library (the vast majority), 16 were thrifted, 4 were borrowed, 14 were ARCs, 5 were purchased new by my (though not necessarily this year), 1 was a gift. Obviously the library dominated; as I said, the inter-library loan system was key to my reading this year and all of my audiobooks were borrowed from my library.
• Who wrote my books: 41 authors were from the United States, 24 were English, 21 were Canadian, 5 were Irish. I was surprised to see England overtake Canada in my reading. Other countries represented were Australia, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Russia, Argentina, New Zealand, former Yugoslavia, India, Romania, Germany, Georgia, Scotland, the Netherlands, Thailand, and Italy.

Other Reading:

I read at least 22 books with Pearl and Rose. I mean, I read a lot more if you include chapter books but those 22 include the books we read together as our family chapter book before bed every night. That does include a couple of audiobooks that we listened to on road trips. I don’t include any of these books in my own personal reading total.

I followed a Daily Bible Reading plan and read the Bible Chronologically in 2023. I really enjoyed doing this, particularly as someone who has grown up with Bible reading. I’ve read the Bible in a year for the past couple of years and so reading it chronologically allowed me to have some new insights and better understand how some of the Bible stories and history relate to one another. I found it especially helpful around the prophets. I’ll hopefully do it again in a couple of years. For 2024, I’m still deciding what my daily Bible reading will look like.

The List (aka Everything I Read in 2023):

1. The Marriage Portrait – Maggie O’Farrell
2. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
3. The Pull of the Stars – Emma Donoghue
4. Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens
5. Classic Crime Short Stories – ed. by Ruth Rendell
6. The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre – Natasha Lester
7. Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel
8. Forgive – Timothy Keller
9. The Final Solution – Michael Chabon
10. Haven – Emma Donoghue
11. River Sing Me Home – Eleanor Shearer
12. Brutes – Dizz Tate
13. A Woman is No Man – Etaf Rum
14. Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan
15. Abyss – Pilar Quintana
16. Stardust – Neil Gaiman
17. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
18. Collected Short Stories – E.M. Forster
19. The Female Persuasion – Meg Wolitzer
20. Ella Enchanted – Gail Carson Levine
21. The Porcelain Moon – Janie Chang
22. We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky – Emma Hooper
23. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents – Julia Alvarez
24. A Thousand Ships – Natalie Haynes
25. The Bandit Queens – Parini Shroff
26. La Guerre, Yes Sir! – Roch Carrier
27. Memphis – Tara M. Stringfellow
28. Blue Hour – Tiffany Clarke Harrison
29. Orphaned Believers – Sara Billups
30. Daisy Jones and the Six – Taylor Jenkins Reid
31. Two-Part Invention – Madeleine L’Engle
32. Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
33. Instructions for the Drowning – Steven Heighton
34. The Memory of Animals – Claire Fuller
35. Shrines of Gaiety – Kate Atkinson
36. The Dead Husband Project – Sarah Meehan Sirk
37. Womb – Leah Hazard
38. Life and Holiness – Thomas Merton
39. Stone Blind – Natalie Haynes
40. Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay
41. Cousins – Aurora Venturini
42. When Women Were Dragons – Kelly Barnhill
43. Life and Other Love Songs – Anissa Gray
44. The Certainties – Aislinn Hunter
45. The Mythmakers – Keziah Weir
46. A Good Neighbourhood – Therese Anne Fowler
47. The Night Ship – Jess Kidd
48. The Garden Party & Other Stories – Katherine Mansfield
49. Let Us Be True – Erna Buffie
50. The Sleeping Car Porter – Suzette Mayr
51. She Who Became the Sun – Shelley Parker-Chan
52. The Friend – Sigrid Nunez
53. Telling Secrets – Frederick Buechner
54. Wilder Girls – Rory Power
55. Yellowface.– R.F. Kuang
56. I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home – Lorrie Moore
57. The Whole Animal – Corinna Chong
58. The Parables of Grace – Robert Farrar Capon
59. Bad Cree – Jessica Johns
60. Travels with my Aunt – Graham Greene
61. Poirot Investigates – Agatha Christie
62. Of Love and Other Demons – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
63. The Water Cure – Sophie Mackintosh
64. Eagle & Crane – Suzanne Rindell
65. Tom Lake – Ann Patchet
66. Adult Children – Lindsay C. Gibson
67. The Tiger’s Wife – Tea Obreht
68. Night Theatre – Vikram Paralkar
69. Bottled Goods – Sophie Van Llewyn
70. My Soul Twin – Nino Haratischvili
71. The Glass Blowers – Daphne du Maurier
72. Weather – Jenny Offill
73. Romantic Comedy – Curtis Sittenfeld
74. The Imposters – Tom Rachman
75. Soucouyant – David Chariandy
76. Belle Epoque – Elizabeth Ross
77. In the Lake of the Woods – Tim O’Brien
78. Trespasses – Louise Kennedy
79. Godmersham Park – Gill Hornby
80. The Cocktail Party – T.S. Eliot
81. Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein – Anne Eekhout
82. The Last – Hanna Jameson
83. Early Morning Riser – Katherine Heiny
84. Away from the Dead – David Bergen
85. Land of Milk and Honey – C. Pam Zhang
86. Normal Rules Don’t Apply – Kate Atkinson
87. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
88. Bangkok Wakes to Rain – Pitchaya Sudbanthad
89. Girlfriend on Mars – Deborah Willis
90. Stubborn Archivist – Yara Rodrigues Fowler
91. The Wild Heavens – Sarah Louise Butler
92. Daughter – Claudia Dey
93. Roman Stories – Jhumpa Lahiri
94. Inland - Tea Obreht
95. Study for Obedience - Sarah Bernstein
96. The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Agatha Christie
97. Ordeal by Innocence – Agatha Christia
98. America Fantastica – Tim O’Brien