Books I read in 2023
It's time for my annual books roundup - slightly late, but who's counting? (it's me)
In the earliest moments of 2023, my partner Yee Aun and I were hailing a pedicab on the rainy streets of San Diego; as the year ended, we were cozy in bed hours before, having succumbed to sleep. Funny, the contrast.
Looking back on this list, Jo Harkin's Tell Me An Ending stands out as my favorite, a story following several people through a world where memories can be removed and restored. It makes me self-conscious about my own relationship with the past: I have a rather poor episodic memory; while the broad strokes of a time period are easy to recall, exactly what happened becomes muddled quickly. What does that mean for my identity? In contrast, Yee Aun's memory is often precise, and she knows it. As we grow older together, how will that shape us?
In the midst of wedding planning, I think back to a hazy impression from a trip to Portland: standing in a bookstore during the early days of our relationship, reading the blurb for Joseph Fink and Meg Bashwiner's two-sided memoir, The First Ten Years. In the blue section of our bookshelf, a copy of that book lives with our scrawled notes in the margins, an artifact. It's stamped into our history together.
Last year, I read less than I expected to. Moving apartments shifted my habits, ConcernedApe's Stardew Valley (a feat of storytelling itself) displaced a lot of leisure time, and losing my Kindle in my own home didn't help either. Instead of triangulating it via Wi-Fi, I gave up after a month of looking and bought a new one; of course, the old one immediately reappeared on a rarely-used corner of the windowsill, behind the curtains. One more thing to return, I guess.
In 2023, I read 33 books.
In the list below, books marked with an exclamation mark (!) are the ones I enjoyed especially.
- The Cabinet - Un-su Kim, translated by Sean Lin Halpert
(!)The Course of Love - Alain de Botton- The Emperor of All Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee
(!)Singer Distance - Ethan Chatagnier(!)Valuable Humans In Transit and Other Stories - qntm- Addiction by Design - Natasha Dow Schüll
(!)Shape Up - Ryan Singer- Permafrost - Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches
- The Idiot - Elif Batuman
(!)Thank You For Smoking - Christopher Buckley- Pipe Dreams - Chelsea Ward
- Flatland - Edwin Abbott
- Self-Portrait With Nothing - Aimee Pokwatka
- A River of Stars - Vanessa Hua
(!)The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins- Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
(!)Tell Me An Ending - Jo Harkin- Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
- The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
- The Ballad of Songbirds And Snakes - Suzanne Collins
(!)Anxious People - Fredrik Backman- Turn The Ship Around! - L. David Marquet
- Permutation City - Greg Egan
- The Two Hour Cocktail Party - Nick Gray
- Come As You Are - Emily Nagoski
(!)Birnam Wood - Eleanor Catton(!)This Is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper- Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion
(!)Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng- Olive, Again - Elizabeth Strout
- Eight Dates - John Gottman, Julie Schwartz Gottman, Doug Abrams, Rachel Carlton Abrams
- You Have A Choice - Eric Nerlich
- Just Fucking Ship - Amy Hoy
As always, thanks to everyone who gave me book recommendations. Directly: Yee Aun, Camila, and Bex. Indirectly: the San Francisco Public Library; the person pseudonymed "Ketchup Duck" from Astral Codex Ten's 2021 Book Review Finalist #10; Cedric, Minh, Eric, and others from the Commoncog community; and the Amazon Kindle recommendations emails, somewhat surprisingly.