2023 book reading in review
Russ Allbery
eagle at eyrie.org
Mon Jan 1 14:20:42 PST 2024
In 2023, I finished and reviewed 53 books, continuing a trend of
year-over-year increases and of reading the most books since 2012 (the
last year I averaged five books a month). Reviewing continued to be
uneven, with a significant slump in the summer and smaller slumps in
February and November, and a big clump of reviews finished in October
in addition to my normal year-end reading and reviewing vacation.
The unevenness this year was mostly due to finishing books and not
writing reviews immediately. Reviews are much harder to write when the
finished books are piling up, so one goal for 2024 is to not let that
happen again. I enter the new year with one book finished and not yet
reviewed, after reading a book about every day and a half during my
December vacation.
I read two all-time favorite books this year. The first was Emily
Tesh's debut novel [1]Some Desperate Glory, which is one of the best
space opera novels I have ever read. I cannot improve on Shelley
Parker-Chan's blurb for this book: "Fierce and heartbreakingly humane,
this book is for everyone who loved Ender's Game, but Ender's Game
didn't love them back." This is not hard science fiction but it is
fantastic character fiction. It was exactly what I needed in the middle
of a year in which I was fighting a "burn everything down" mood.
The second was [2]Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, the 29th Discworld and
6th Watch novel. Throughout my Discworld read-through, Pratchett felt
like he was on the cusp of a truly stand-out novel, one where all the
pieces fit and the book becomes something more than the sum of its
parts. This was that book. It's a book about ethics and revolutions and
governance, but also about how your perception of yourself changes as
you get older. It does all of the normal Pratchett things, just...
better. While I would love to point new Discworld readers at it, I
think you do have to read at least the Watch novels that came before it
for it to carry its proper emotional heft.
This was overall a solid year for fiction reading. I read another 15
novels I rated 8 out of 10, and 12 that I rated 7 out of 10. The
largest contributor to that was my Discworld read-through, which was
reliably entertaining throughout the year. The run of Discworld books
between [3]The Fifth Elephant (read late last year) and
[4]Wintersmith (my last of this year) was the best run of Discworld
novels so far. One additional book I'll call out as particularly worth
reading is [5]Thud!, the Watch novel after Night Watch and another
excellent entry.
I read two stand-out non-fiction books this year. The first was Oliver
Darkshire's delightful memoir about life as a rare book seller,
[6]Once Upon a Tome. One of the things I will miss about Twitter is
the regularity with which I stumbled across fascinating people and then
got to read their books. I'm off Twitter permanently now because the
platform is designed to make me incoherently angry and I need less of
that in my life, but it was very good at finding delightfully quirky
books like this one.
My other favorite non-fiction book of the year was Michael Lewis's
[7]Going Infinite, a profile of Sam Bankman-Fried. I'm still bemused
at the negative reviews that this got from people who were upset that
Lewis didn't turn the story into a black-and-white morality play.
Bankman-Fried's actions were clearly criminal; that's not in dispute.
Human motivations can be complex in ways that are irrelevant to the
law, and I thought this attempt to understand that complexity by a
top-notch storyteller was worthy of attention.
Also worth a mention is Tony Judt's [8]Postwar, the first book I
reviewed in 2023. A sprawling history of post-World-War-II Europe will
never have the sheer readability of shorter, punchier books, but this
was the most informative book that I read in 2023.
2024 should see the conclusion of my Discworld read-through, after
which I may return to re-reading Mercedes Lackey or David Eddings, both
of which I paused to make time for Terry Pratchett. I also have another
re-read similar to my [9]Chronicles of Narnia reviews that I've been
thinking about for a while. Perhaps I will start that next year;
perhaps it will wait for 2025.
Apart from that, my intention as always is to read steadily, write
reviews as close to when I finished the book as possible, and make
reading time for my huge existing backlog despite the constant allure
of new releases. Here's to a new year full of more new-to-me books and
occasional old favorites.
Below is some additional analysis plus personal reading statistics,
probably only of interest to me.
In 2023, I read and reviewed 53 books, up two books from 2021 and the
first time since 2012 that I read more than one book per week. Page
count increased accordingly, so this wasn't a run of novellas. (We're
in the middle of a golden age of SFF novellas, though, so I do want to
read more shorter fiction as long as I stay on top of review writing.)
Average rating climbed back up over 7, reflecting an excellent year for
fiction.
Overall statistics, with the change from last year:
Books read 53 (+2)
Total pages 18,494 (+758)
Pages per book 349 (+1)
Average rating 7.02 (+0.36)
Pages per day 50.7 (+2.1)
Days per book 6.89 (-0.18)
I've started tracking pages per book out of curiosity, and calculated
last year's to get the change. Apparently the average length of books I
read is hilariously consistent across two data points.
Breakdown by genre:
SF and fantasy 43 81%
Other fiction 1 2%
Non-fiction 8 15%
Graphic novels 1 2%
RPGs 0 0%
I was in the mood for SFF this year. The amount of non-fiction held
steady, as did the single graphic novel (this year only because I count
Pratchett's illustrated [10]The Last Hero as a graphic novel). At some
point I will get back into the mood to read more broadly, but now is an
excellent time for science fiction and fantasy.
Some people would count Madeline Miller's [11]Circe as mainstream
fiction due to the marketing, but to me it's firmly fantasy.
Of the SF and fantasy novels, here's a rough breakdown of the books by
reason for seeking them out. (As always, each book is only counted
once, and reasons higher on the list override reasons lower on the list
if both reasons apply.)
Award winners 3 7%
Award series 0 0%
Award nominees 5 12%
Re-reads 0 0%
Genre classics 1 2%
Favorite authors 17 40%
Current SF&F 6 14%
Recommendations 2 5%
Random 9 21%
(Percentages add to more than 100% due to rounding.) As with last year,
my My Discworld read-through significantly increased the "favorite
authors" category. During the end-of-year vacation, I made an effort to
dive deeper into my backlog, adding to the books I picked up on a
random whim or due to interesting-sounding reviews.
As usual, award winners and nominees are only for awards that I track.
Several of the books in other categories won other awards and could
have been in that category. I expect several of the 2023 releases I
read to end up on award slates next year.
I've become somewhat disillusioned by SFF awards and once again didn't
make an effort to read past award winners or nominees. I'm not sure yet
if I'll return to that project.
References
1. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-83499-6.html
2. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-230740-1.html
3. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-228013-9.html
4. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-089033-9.html
5. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-233498-0.html
6. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-324-09208-4.html
7. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-324-07434-5.html
8. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-4406-2476-3.html
9. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-02-044220-3.html
10. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-050777-2.html
11. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-55633-5.html
--
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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