Books in 2023

2023 - 103 books!

Time for a quick overview of the books that I read in 2023. This year, I read 103 books, for a total of 27,892 pages.  If you follow me on Goodreads you'll only see 75, as that platform doesn't make it easy to add small press books like roleplaying books. I've moved all my day-to-day tracking to The Storygraph, which seems to be a better fit for me. Day-to-day tracking is right, as one of the things I've tried to do is read a little everyday, usually before bed, whatever is going on. As I type this, I've been doing that for 358-days, a habit which seems to have paid off with more books read. I've not broken 100 books since I started recording again on Goodreads in 2016.

The months I read the most both involved travel; July and August saw me away in Africa with work so several long-haul flights, and August saw me away for the family holiday in Cyprus.

Most Read Authors

My most read author was Mick Herron, as I worked through the Oxford Investigations, having finished the Slough House books in years before. That said, my highlight from him was The Secret Hours, which came out towards the end of 2023 and is, in effect, a prequel to the Slough House books.

Highest placed SF/Fantasy author was Alienate de Bodard. I finally read the Dominion of the Fallen trilogy, which was great. Bizarrely, I'd approached this from the perspective of having read several of the short stories related to it first. My favourite from her this year was The Red Scholar's Wake, and I'm happy that I've her latest sitting read to read in January.

The Modiphius 2d20 team sit high in my reading, driven by my foray into several of their game systems which I mentioned in the earlier post on Gaming in 2023.

Joe Abercrombie is in there, driven by the 'Read along with First Age' book club we had on the Tavern (which seemed to peter out in the last quarter of the year unless I missed the posts). I enjoyed the books, grim-dark though they were; I'd completely missed The First Law trilogy when it came out. I'm not certain I'll rush to read any more though, which is a similar feeling to the Hanna Jameson books. The London Underground books are brutal crime fiction, which I enjoyed but I very much need to be in the right mind to dig into. High energy, intriguing and messy, they do give a pay-off, often at the cost of reading about deeply dislikable characters.

Old favourite Ken Macleod was there again, with two books from his new Lightspeed trilogy, and a novella, The Human Front. 

I also enjoyed Charlie Stross' latest New Management book, and the third of Charles Cumming' Box 88 series. Gareth L Powell's Continuance books were great, giving me the kind of buzz I got when I first discovered Banks, MacLeod and Reynolds. I loved Nick Harkaway's Titanium Noir (which reminded me of Richard Morgan's work), and also should give a shout out for Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törz, which had me musing how to using the magic described in it in the Liminal roleplaying game, a blog post that kind of got lost in the middle of the #RPGaDay2023 frenzy.

I read 30-odd roleplaying books (and need to keep that up to make a dent in the gaming reading pile), but always find that the rules books take me much longer to read. Graphic novels were significantly down; although I did finish the year with finally reading The Umbrella Academy. 

I've also built a habit of listening to more factual and political books when travelling to the various offices and sites that I work up. As most of these journeys involve more than 4 hours in the car return, that's a great opportunity to dig into a selection from Audible. I find it easier to listen to some of these books than read them. Katie Mack's The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) was my favourite of these.

Overall, a good year for reading. I did let myself down at the back end of the year on my monthly blog entries on what I enjoyed, so I'll try to get into that rhythm going forward.

1 January 2024