Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
I blog regularly. (Once a year is regular. Right?)
Be that as it may, for my own record-keeping as well as for the two or three people who will read this, I present: my 2023 reading.
As I’ve mentioned before, I keep a giant master spreadsheet of books I read throughout the year–leisure reading as well as for my freelance work–but I don’t tally anything up until New Year’s Day, when I find out what I accomplished and come here to post about it.
In 2023, I read 90 books: 53 for work, and 37 for not-work.
For comparison, the last few years’ numbers were: 2022, 98 total (70 for work); 2021, 141 total (82 for work); 2020: 86 total (61 for work); 2019: 112 total (86 for work); 2018: 148 total (84 for work); 2017: 115 total (92 for work); 2016: 107 total (80 for work); and 2015: 63 total (38 for work).
My work reading numbers are down, but not for last year’s reason (which was that I was trying to explore this whole “leisure” concept) (ha-ha). Instead, I’m now working about 25% time for my brother’s tech startup, which is exciting and fascinating and very satisfying, and something that I hope to tell you more about someday soon. For now, it has cut into my freelance copy editing and proofreading work, and that’s a great thing. It’s always smart, as a freelancer, to diversify your income sources.
I do see that my “for-fun” reading increased a bit, and I’m happy about that as well. Actually, I’m pretty happy about my whole work life, because I get paid to read books, and how cool is that? The vast majority of my “for-work” reading was at least as enjoyable as my “for-fun” reading. Win-win. (Oops, I almost typed “wine-wine,” but that would be a different blog post…)
I experimented last year with listing all the books I read (including the work ones), but it’s just too hard to figure out which ones have not yet been announced by their authors or publishers, so I’m going back to listing only the leisure reads.
So here’s the 37 books I read for fun last year, in order:
- Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace
- Louise Penny, The Cruelest Month
- Helene Wecker, The Hidden Palace (Mark and I read this aloud)
- Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder
- Marissa Doyle, Betrayal at Brighton
- TC Boyle, The Terranauts
- Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth
- Louise Penny, The Brutal Telling
- Naomi Novik, A Deadly Education
- R. F. Kuang, Babel (Mark and I read this aloud)
- Bethany Maines, An Unseen Current
- Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead
- Louise Penny, The Hangman
- Bethany Maines, Against the Undertow
- Louise Penny, A Trick of the Light
- Bethany Maines, An Unfamiliar Sea
- Ann Leckie, Provenance
- Marte Harter, Cabin in the Woods
- Louise Penny, The Beautiful Mystery
- Scott Hawkins, The Library at Mount Char
- Daniel Abraham, Age of Ash
- Louise Penny, How the Light Gets In
- Louise Penny, The Long Way Home
- Louise Penny, The Nature of the Beast
- D. W. Ulsterman, The Writer: A San Juan Islands Mystery
- Steven Erikson, The Crippled God: The Tenth Book of the Malazan Book of the Fallen
- TC Boyle, The Women
- Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning
- Samuel W. Gailey, Deep Winter
- Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone
- Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm
- Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising
- Louise Penny, Glass Houses
- Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind
- Carrie Vaughn, The Cormac & Amelia Case Files
- Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex, Spare
- Louise Penny, A Better Man