I just finished the final book I’ll finish in 2023: Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg. It’s a collection of quirky short stories that are funny and philosophical and weird, and that are all about love in one form or another, including the love a dog Rufus has for his ManMonster, told from the point of view of Rufus. Our son gave me this book as a Christmas gift, and told me it is one of his favorite books of all time. Of course this made me want to read it, every word. I laughed, I cried. It was the perfect book to end the year with.

This book took my reading year out with a bang. I’m grateful for that, because it wasn’t a great reading year for me compared to other years. I started but didn’t finish several books in 2023 because they just didn’t do it for me. I’m not going to suffer through crap I don’t want to read, not any more. I’m almost 50, I don’t have time for that.

I remember blogging at least twice this year about being in a reading slump, and my book count this year was 49 on a goal of 60. I set a goal of 60 because 60 was fewer than what I read in 2022 because why even set a reading goal, that’s dumb when I read for pleasure, and I don’t want to pressure my reading life, but Goodreads has a reading challenge thingy, and I do challenges, and I figured why not, 60 is easy. I read 60 in 2019, 65 in 2020, 70 in 2021, and I don’t know how many in 2022 because I forgot to publish a “Reading in 2022” post and Goodreads doesn’t easily give up that stat now that we’re in the end of 2023 (but I counted manually because now I want to know, and the count in 2022 was 64). So 60 is the minimum number of books I’ve read in a year since I started paying attention to that.

Well, now that minimum has dropped to 49. I don’t know how to deal with this for setting a goal for 2024. I’ll figure that out tomorrow. But for this year, for 2023, I read 49 all the way through to the end. Only a couple of them were terrible, but I finished them anyway because either I paid for them or they were short. The rest were pretty good, and a few were excellent. Things really turned around in October when I got my hands on Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, and then Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and then Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds. I wasn’t in a slump anymore when those came out.

Looking at my list, I have no recollection of some of the books; I am nostalgic for where I was and what I was doing when I read others. I am nostalgic for the early part of the year when I was preparing for my February trip to Istanbul. Seeing If We Were Villains takes me back to our summer beach vacation to the Outer Banks, where I turned the pages so fast I almost tore them. I remember really enjoying The Golem and the Jinni, and buying a copy of When God Was a Woman for one of my best friends, and sending it immediately after I finished the book.

Here’s what I read in 2023, in chronological order:

• The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak ♥️
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
• Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay ♥️
• Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay ♥️
• Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali
• Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
• Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
• I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson ♥️
• When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone
• The Magicians by Lev Grossman
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt ♥️
• Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• Seven Days in June by Tia Williams
• Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer
• The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker ♥️
• Weyward by Emilia Hart
• The London Séance Society by Sarah Penner
• The Measure by Nikki Erlick
• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
• Symphony of Secrets by Brendan Slocumb ♥️
• Still Life by Louise Penny
• The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron
• All the Names by José Saramago
• If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio ♥️
• Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff ♥️
• The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden ♥️
• Honor by Thrity Umrigar
• The Forgiven by Lawrence Osborne
• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
• A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley ♥️
• The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
• Tom Lake by Ann Patchett ♥️
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin ♥️
• The Housekeepers by Alex Hay
• The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff ♥️
• The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna ♥️
• The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak ♥️
• The Memory Keeper of Kyiv by Erin Litteken ♥️
• The Alice Network by Kate Quinn ♥️
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
• North Woods by Daniel Mason
• The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder David Grann ♥️
• The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
• The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams ♥️
• Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg ♥️