2023 reading in review

Looking back on 2023 I really did read some wonderful books but it also seems like I read some of them a million years ago, which I think is just what happens when you have a baby; time does funny things. What I read was very largely dictated by what I could get out of the library, either physically or as e-books; I only noticed this year but I have transitioned almost entirely to reading library books (an easy 70-80% of my reading) and I buy very few books, and none in hardcopy. I would like to buy more in hardcopy this year, I think, because I do enjoy the physicality of reading them; I might make that a goal for 2024. I would also like to make a recommendation for physical books as a GREAT hobby for when you have a small kid. Extremely portable and stop-startable. Alas for my fibrecraft hobbies, which are going to have to wait patiently a while longer.

Also NB: picking a top 5 in some categories was VERY hard this year - there are many books I gave excellent reviews which aren't here because the competition was just too stiff.

Non-fiction

The top five non-fiction books I read were Pompeii (Mary Beard), Debt: the first 5000 years (David Graeber), Exactly (Simon Winchester), The Matter of Everything (Suzie Sheehy), and The Underworld (Susan Casey). The latter three are all a few years old now, the latter two published in 2023; all of them are extremely accessible and shed new light on things which are both conceptually familiar and little-understood at once.

Honourable mentions
Fen, Bog, and Swamp (Annie Proulx), essays on wetlands; Otherlands (Thomas Halliday) on prehistoric ecosystems; and How Far The Light Reaches (Sabrina Imbla), a memoir themed around marine biology.

Fiction (series starters)

To Shape a Dragon's Breath (Moniquill Blackgoose) is far and away the best series opener I read this year, simple in theory but with so much going on underneath. Scarlet (Genevieve Cogman), the Scarlet Pimpernel with poor people and vampires, was also good but they don't really compare - no offence to Ms Cogman who is a fine writer, and the same goes for The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (Garth Nix). The other series openers I would recommend I've dumped in a different category because I read the whole series.

Fiction (series continuations)

He Who Drowned The World (Shelly Parker-Chan), The Ivory Tomb (Melissa Caruso), Furious Heaven (Kate Elliott), The Faithless (C L Clarke), and The Oleander Sword (Tasha Suri) finished (the first two) or continued excellent trilogies/duologies. My cup overfloweth with fucking great queer specfic narratives (although being fair the Radiant Emperor duology is more historical fiction with genderfuckery).

Fiction (whole series)
The God-King Chronicles (Mike Brooks) and The Merchant Princes (Charles Stross) are a trilogy and trilogy of trilogies which are smart, fun, involve massive death and destruction, but are ultimately optimistic about humanity (even if Stross fully admits that was just he couldn't stand to end a series on a downer mid-pandemic).

Fiction (stand-alones)

Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh), Witch King (Martha Wells), Untethered Sky (Fonda Lee), Translation State (Ann Leckie), and A Half-Built Garden (Ruthanna Emrys): sometimes a specfic book can just be a book. I would be remiss not to state that Some Desperate Glory is jaw-droppingly, astonishingly, if-it-does-not-win-many-awards-I-shall-be-outraged good - and consider the company in which I'm stating that!

Honourable mentions
Mammoths at the Gate (Nghi Vo), The Mimicking of Known Successes (Malka Older), Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz (Garth Nix), The Keeper's Six (Kate Elliott), and Cassiel's Servant (Jacqueline Carey). OK, fine, I probably read technically better books not mentioned than that last but it's an honourable mention TO ME.