Another year of reading is in the books! I love that I’ve been keeping track of my reading for almost my whole adult life—I started in 2008, when I was 21. I think it’s neat to be able to trace my interests and how I’ve formed my opinions on a lot of issues over time by seeing what I’ve read.
This year I finished a very respectable 82 books! This is quite a bit more than last year’s 51 (recall that last year I was doing a lot of work in vision therapy) and 2021’s 62 books (recall that I was taking that big Spanish exam that year). In 2020 (recall that … never mind) I read 88 books, so I guess I am reading more than I realized, even though I was once again disappointed to not read 100 books in a year. However, as I wrote in my plans for 2024 post, I am giving up that goal for good. If it happens, it happens. I’ve been joking that for every day I spend on the internet, I add three to five books to my reading list. There are just so many interesting books out there and unfortunately finite time in this existence (if any of you become a vampire, PLEASE turn me). I would like to take a year off of work and responsibilities to read a book every day and get caught up. I would also like the publishing industry to take a year-long moratorium on new works so I can get caught up. I think both of these requests are reasonable.
- Page count: I read 27,566 pages. For comparison, last year I read about 18,000 pages in and 2020 I read just under 33,000. The most pages I’ve ever read in a year is 35,000 back in 2014 (when I had an office job and nothing to do all day).
- Library use: 30 books from the library and 52 of my own books. Shout out to the library for saving me money! Thank you, local tax payers.
- Digital and analog: 49 ebooks and 33 paper books. I’m definitely finding it easier to read the ebooks than the paper books lately. For example, I was trying to read this giant book about tap dance and it was hard to hold and the print was very small. I am weak, give me the ebook.
- Fiction and non-fiction: 56 fiction and 26 non-fiction books. I am only growing more interested in the world around me, so I predict that my non-fiction to fiction ratio will increase over the next few years.
- Instead of favorites, this year I am giving you some notable reads:
- Notable disappointment: Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore. It sounds exactly like a book I should love but I did not love it! I barely finished it!
- Notable linguistics-themed fantasy: Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang. This is the linguistics-themed fiction I want! Stick it to the fucking man!
- Notable history: Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price. I don’t know, I just really liked it! It covered so much ground and was so accessible.
- Notably almost making me learn Chinese right now even though I have enough going on: Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu. The level of effort it took to standardize Chinese! How do you make a dictionary without an alphabet? How do you make a typewriter? It’s cool as hell.
- Notable autism book that low-key blew my mind: Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price.
- Notably spicy fantasy romance: A Power Unbound by Freya Marske.
- Notable Regency-era fantasy: Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater. I thought this whole series was fun to read and very sweet.
- Notable queer memoir: The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag by Sasha Velour. I love Sasha Velour’s view on art and drag and queer history.
- Notable story that feels like it’s gonna stay with me: Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis.
If you want to see what I read in previous years, you can click the books of the year tag to see all my past annual book posts.
If you would like to be book friends all year, you can join me on StoryGraph! My username is linzomatic.
And now: the list of books I read in 2023.
| Date Finished | Title | Author |
| 1/1 | Armistice | Lara Elena Donnelly |
| 1/3 | Amnesty | Lara Elena Donnelly |
| 1/7 | High Times in the Low Parliament | Kelly Robins |
| 1/14 | Egypt’s Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth | John Darnell, Collen Darnell |
| 1/15 | Miss Iceland | Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir |
| 1/22 | The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket | Benjamin Lorr |
| 1/22 | Battle of the Linguist Mages | Scotto Moore |
| 1/26 | Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism | Amanda Montell |
| 1/29 | Black Water Sister | Zen Cho |
| 2/2 | Hotel Silence | Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir |
| 2/4 | Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever | Nomi Prins |
| 2/13 | Plain Bad Heroines | Emily M. Danforth |
| 2/21 | Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution | R. F. Kuang |
| 2/25 | “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People | Aubrey Gordon |
| 2/28 | Remote Control | Nnedi Okorafor |
| 3/10 | The Citadel of Weeping Pearls | Aliette de Bodard |
| 3/13 | Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings | Neil Price |
| 3/19 | The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life | Johan Eklöf |
| 3/19 | Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia | David Graeber |
| 3/27 | The Wolf in the Whale | Jordanna Max Brodsky |
| 3/30 | Outlawed | Anna North |
| 4/8 | The Sellout | Paul Beatty |
| 4/12 | The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies | Mariana Mazzucato, Rosie Collington |
| 4/13 | Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto | Tricia Hersey |
| 4/16 | The Age of Witches | Louisa Morgan |
| 4/20 | A Court of Thorns and Roses | Sarah J. Maas |
| 4/28 | The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language | Mark Forsyth |
| 4/30 | Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern | Jing Tsu |
| 5/1 | Caperucita se come al Lobo | Pilar Quintana |
| 5/2 | Half A Soul | Olivia Atwater |
| 5/5 | Ten Thousand Stitches | Olivia Atwater |
| 5/13 | Longshadow | Olivia Atwater |
| 5/14 | Tema Libre | Alejandro Zambra |
| 5/18 | A Court of Mist and Fury | Sarah J. Maas |
| 5/25 | A Court of Wings and Ruin | Sarah J. Maas |
| 6/3 | Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity | Devon Price |
| 6/5 | The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill | Rowenna Miller |
| 6/7 | The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag | Sasha Velour |
| 6/10 | Some Desparate Glory | Emily Tesh |
| 6/22 | The Librarian | Mikhail Elizarov |
| 6/23 | A Court of Frost and Starlight | Sarah J. Maas |
| 6/29 | A Court of Silver Flames | Sarah J. Maas |
| 7/5 | The Restoration Program | Mary Dublin, Anne Kendsley |
| 7/11 | The Book of Goose | Yiyun Li |
| 7/12 | An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace | Tamar Adler |
| 7/17 | Strong Female Character | Fern Brady |
| 7/19 | Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea | Rita Chang-Eppig |
| 7/21 | Ink Blood Sister Scribe | Emma Törzs |
| 7/25 | Camp Damascus | Chuck Tingle |
| 8/1 | Un vaso de agua bajo mi cama: Inmigración, feminismo y bisexualidad | Daisy Hernández |
| 8/10 | The Archive Undying | Emma Mieko Camden |
| 8/12 | Translation State | Ann Leckie |
| 8/17 | Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives | Amelia Possanza |
| 8/20 | Daughter of the Moon Goddess | Sue Lynn Tan |
| 8/23 | Sappho Is burning | Page DuBois |
| 8/24 | Vampires of El Norte | Isabel Cañas |
| 8/27 | Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics | Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò |
| 8/29 | To Be Taught, If Fortunate | Becky Chambers |
| 9/4 | Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy | Ben Davis |
| 9/7 | The Saint of Bright Doors | Vajra Chandrasekera |
| 9/14 | The Jasad Heir | Sara Hashem |
| 9/17 | Red, White, and Royal Blue | Casey McQuiston |
| 9/24 | Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism | Leandro Vergara-Camus |
| 9/24 | Now Is Not the Time to Panic | Kevin Wilson |
| 10/4 | The Deep Sky | Yume Kitasei |
| 10/19 | Witch King | Martha Wells |
| 10/24 | All Systems Red | Martha Wells |
| 10/24 | Palestine: A Socialist Introduction | Sumaya Awad, Brian Bean |
| 10/26 | No Meat Required: The Cultural History & Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating | Alicia Kennedy |
| 10/29 | Artificial Condition | Martha Wells |
| 11/8 | The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto | Jonathan Taplin |
| 11/17 | Rogue Protocol | Martha Wells |
| 11/21 | The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 | Rashid Khalidi |
| 11/22 | Exit Strategy | Martha Wells |
| 11/24 | A Marvellous Light | Freya Marske |
| 11/28 | A Restless Truth | Freya Marske |
| 12/1 | A Power Unbound | Freya Marske |
| 12/10 | The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism | Jen Gunter |
| 12/20 | The Hexologists | Josiah Bancroft |
| 12/23 | Cantoras | Carolina de Robertis |
| 12/27 | Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind | Molly McGhee |
| 12/29 | Heart of the Sun Warrior | Sue Lynn Tan |
