What did I read in 2023?
Taking into account the length of the reads, I read almost twice as much this year as last, hitting my stride during the first half of the year and losing steam during the holiday season. I contribute some of the uptick this year to organising a book club that meets roughly once per month. While this only accounts for 10 books on the list, I noticed a real multiplier effect as the club kept me firmly in the habit of reading. Here’s the full list, with book club reads marked as (dbc):
Fiction
- Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Taylor, Elizabeth
- The Three-Body Problem by Liu, Cixin
- Dune Messiah by Herbert, Frank
- Ubik by Dick, Philip K.
- Redeployment by Phil Klay (dbc)
- Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (dbc)
- Flowers for Algernon by Keyes, Daniel
- Cryptonomicon by Stephenson, Neal
- Goodbye Mr Chips by Hilton, James
- City of Thieves by Benioff, David
- Demon Copperhead by Kingsolver, Barbara
- A Little Life by Yanagihara, Hanya
- No Country for Old Men by McCarthy, Cormac
- Goodbye to All That by Graves, Robert
- The Children of Men by James, P.D. (dbc)
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Jackson, Shirley (dbc)
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Towles, Amor
- Two Sherpas by Daniell, Sebastián MartÃnez
- Normal People by Rooney, Sally
- Nightbitch by Yoder, Rachel (dbc)
- Lessons in Chemistry by Garmus, Bonnie
- Convenience Store Woman by Murata, Sayaka (dbc)
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels by Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Non-fiction
- A Philosophy of Software Design by Ousterhout, John
- The Best of Me by Sedaris, David
- Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Attia, Peter
- American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Bird, Kai
- Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Ferguson, Niall
- Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Bourdain, Anthony
- A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Beah, Ishmael
- Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Knight, Phil
- Skunk Works by Rich, Ben R.