Best of the Year - 2023

[Q-pee]

With about a day to go it's time to think about the good and great books for the year.

What was your best read?

Any high recommended books?

Anything you regret reading?

If you had reading goals, did you meet or miss them?

[Q-pee]

I read really great books all year, very happy to say!

Best fiction of the year: hands down, is Kindred by Octavia Butler

Not a new book but if you haven't read it you definitely probably should

Highly recommended: Trust by Hernan Diaz and The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

Trust has unreliable narrators and I want to read it again check up on them. The Island of the Missing trees is excellent, and was very close to being my fav for the year.

Best non fiction: Letters to Camondo, by Edmund de Waal

Really hard to explain this book, at the end I felt like I'd had a personal tour of Camondo's house by EdW who is very knowledgeable about the family, history, art... it's a delight. (Well until the Nazi's turn up but it's European history, what can you do?)

Writer to Watch: Shankari Chandean, I read "Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens" and look forward to future books.

This was a very good family saga sort of book about families who migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia and formed their own community. There was a sort of crime element that got too convoluted and her rendition of dialogue needs work but I think she's a really interesting writer.

Disappointment of the year: The House of Fortune, I live in the Netherlands so it was kind of fun to read about a city I know well. But oh dear.

I also abandoned The Fraud... but I'm going to pick it up again at some point.


I have a "read diversely" goal and I did pretty well this year, I read slightly more books by women than men, but all the non-fiction I read was by men. Ooops. I read some books by LGBTQI+ writers and some that had gay/lesbian characters. I read a few books in translation and plenty set outside anglo-euro countries - although the most common setting for the book was UK (I read a few Agatha Christies which upped the number). I also want to read at least one classic per year - this year was "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" which was published in 1848, I also read The Great Gatsby, which might be a classic ... but my threshold for this is pre 1900.

[lillielangtry]

I came to make this thread, but am happy to see it already here! I love everyone's reports - please join in even if you only want to mention one favourite, or of course if you want to break down your stats you're welcome here too!

I've read a lot this year - just over 100 books, some of it for procrastination/distraction purposes. Oh well. Also, the Agatha Christie audiobooks, which are only about 6 hours long, really bump the numbers up.

Highlights non-fiction: Ann Patchett's These Precious Days and Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road

Highlights fiction: tiny gems; Minor Detail by Adania Shibli and Small Things like These by Claire Keegan;
chunky tomes; Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson; Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez; The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (gasp - a man!)

I try to keep ticking off my challenge to read a woman from every country by adding 20 new countries each year but this year, I only did 19 (bringing me to a total of 148). They were: Bahamas, Belize, Bhutan, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Libya, Malaysia, Niger, Panama, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Tajikistan, Togo, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu and Vietnam. It's really getting more difficult now and the chances of me adding a new country just because I pick something up in a bookshop is small. I have to research and hunt down each book (and in the case of Solomon Islands, not in fact a book but a number of poems I found online) and for the majority of countries left now, the choice is very limited if there is any at all.

Good point on classics, Q: I read two books I considered classics (E. M. Forster's A Room with a View and Winifred Holtby's South Riding), but neither of them were written before 1900. That's a change from 2022 when I listened to Dickens and Gaskell. Might try to remedy that in 2024.

Once again, I failed miserably at reading much in German - a mere 8 books, less than 10%! Oops.

Nearly 20% of my reading was in translation, which is quite a bit but less than you'd expect given how internationally I read.

Overall I'm pleased. First goal for 2024 is to read some of the books waiting on my shelves before buying more!

[Liiisa]

Thank you Q! I had no goals, though "finally getting around to reading The Book of the New Sun" might be counted as a long-term goal of sorts.

Favorite fiction:
Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
N. K. Jemisin, The World We Make (I also read her 3-volume geomancer series, but this New York stuff is my favorite of hers)
China Miéville, Embassytown
Claire Keegan, Foster
Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard (not usually a horror enthusiast, but his work is so imaginative)
Tom Comitta, The Nature Book
James Hannaham, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta
Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds
Anna DeForest, A History of Present Illness
Gene Wolfe, Book of the New Sun (series)

Favorite nonfiction:
Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia
Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World
Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe
Neil King Jr., American Ramble
Jenny Odell, Saving Time

[sophie]

Best of the year: either Island of Missing trees or House of Doors. I loved both.

Disappointed by The Wren, The Wren.

I have read probably about 60 books this year but I should have kept notes. No patterns, no focus.

[Q-pee]

I put notes and ratings in good reads, which is helpful because by December I don't remember much about January...

[Liiisa]

I keep a list in Evernote, and ones that really strike me get a *** by them.

The only one I was disappointed by was the Velvet Underground book that I finished last night. I'd really been looking forward to it, but it was so repetitive that I ended up skimming a lot of it.

Edited to add: yikes lillielangtry - i just started reading "Our Share of Night" and am having trouble putting it down already; good choice to put that on this list.

[lillielangtry]

I also use Goodreads; I also had a spreadsheet with various info on it but I gave up on that around the middle of the year ;-)

[mod]

Linking last year's best books

figjamnation.proboards.com/thread/9620/best-books-2022-reading-stats

[Webs]

I don't really keep track on any app but I go through my Audible list.

But here is what I read this year that I recommend to others:

No Two Persons - Erica Baurmeister (Interconnected stories about a story)
Year of Wonders - Geraldine Brooks (The plague in Rural Britain)
Heaven and Earth Grocery Store - James McBride (people outside the power structure and their interconnected determination to save a boy and themselves)
The Dark Queens - Shelley Puhak (If you're watching House of the Dragon this will feel similar)
The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O'Farrell (an unexpected story about an unexplained death)
The Good Wife of Bath - Karen Brooks (A woman's survival despite the men in her life )

[scrubb]

My 2023 stats:

112 books read
67 by women, 45 by men
91 fiction, 21 non-fiction (slightly more NF than last year, but less than the few years before that)
14 in translation - from Japanese(7), Swedish (3), French (2) Portugese (1) and Spanish (1)
English writing authors from: USA, England, Canada, Haiti, Australia, Ireland, Barbados, South Africa, the Falklands, and Ghana
only 2 were really bad; another 10 or so were just ok.
65 were excellent or very good
The balance (about 30 or so) were good, but nothing spectacular.

Best books of the year - several of the ones on my list had some problems or weren't quite perfect, but I found them all engrossing and excellent.

Best fiction:

All My Puny Sorrows - Miriam Toews
Women Talking - Miriam Toews
Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver
Seeing - Jose Saramago
So Big - Edna Ferber
A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True - Brigid Pasulka
The Night Ship - Jess Kidd
And for the final one I can't decide between:
Nothing to See Here - Kevin Wilson; Warlight - Michael Ondaatje; The Love Songs of WEB Dubois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Best non-fiction:

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future - Elizabeth Kolbert
These Precious Days - Ann Patchett
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men - Caroline Criado Pérez
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand - Jim Harrison

[HalcyonDaze]

I read 120 books this year.

4 non fiction, a tiny increase from last year.

33 were by Australian authors.

I don't appear to have recorded reading anything in translation, but I did think I had, so might look at that again.

94 books by women.

will do the best of lists later.

[ozziegiraffe]

Read 96 this year. Goodreads says 100, but some of those were ebook box sets that I completed.

Best non-fiction Sand Talk, by Tyson Yunkaporta, read in the context of the indigenous Voice to Parliament. I also liked No one is too Small to Make a Difference, by Greta Thunberg.

Fiction, The Tea Ladies by Amanda Hampson and The Wattle Island Book Club.

[scrubb]

Dec 31, 2023 9:35:40 GMT -5 lillielangtry said:

I also use Goodreads; I also had a spreadsheet with various info on it but I gave up on that around the middle of the year ;-)

Heh, I've kept a spreadsheet since 2009. I probably should just put stuff on goodreads and be done with it, but I like having the format where data is easy to collect.

[ozziegiraffe]

Dec 30, 2023 11:52:59 GMT -5 lillielangtry said:

I try to keep ticking off my challenge to read a woman from every country by adding 20 new countries each year but this year, I only did 19 (bringing me to a total of 148). They were: Bahamas, Belize, Bhutan, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Libya, Malaysia, Niger, Panama, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Tajikistan, Togo, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu and Vietnam. It's really getting more difficult now and the chances of me adding a new country just because I pick something up in a bookshop is small. I have to research and hunt down each book (and in the case of Solomon Islands, not in fact a book but a number of poems I found online) and for the majority of countries left now, the choice is very limited if there is any at all.!

If I can get it to post, I found a recent photo of Solomon Islands poet Julie Makini.

[lillielangtry]

Thanks! Great picture.

[ozziegiraffe]

Posted today on Facebook by my friend, who is, of course, related to her.