2023: My Worst Year in Books, Ever (No, Really)

The whole thing feels a bit like you've spent the afternoon wandering down a long, sandy, rainy beach. (I feel like a bit of an expert in these; the PNW happens to have a lot of them.) 

You've been flipping over any big stones, hoping to find some little crabs or something, looking for a tide pool or maybe scanning for movement amongst the gravel, only to look back once you've reached the end and see you simply left a lot of holes, but haven't unearthed a darn thing. Sure, you made the distance, got some steps in, and maybe found a little bit of cool bits of broken shell or thwacked your sibling in the leg with some dried seaweed, but for the most part? A lot of sand... and it's a longer way still to get back to the car. 

What I'm saying is, personally speaking, 2023 felt like a bit of a bust.

So, can we just say "Happy New Year"? I'm trying to stay away from broad, hyperbolic statements like "Surely, it couldn't get any worse," because if there's anything I've learned from countless hours of children's media, it's that the sky would suddenly break out into rainfall, the dam would collapse behind us, and a cloud of locusts might appear on the horizon. 

How about instead, we just recognize that the last couple of "new" years have, in fact, been a little bleak, and leave it at that. 

(The most frustrating thing about this this, is that we don't all seem to be on the same page: for instance, some people I truly adore in this world have spent the past year getting engaged, getting married, starting new jobs, starting new lives in new cities, having babies, getting published, going viral, what have you... but this post isn't about them. This post is about me... and maybe you too?) 

Let's start with the obvious: I missed my Goodreads Challenge goal. In fact, thanks to Goodreads and the power of dedicatedly logging all of your reading habits into a portal that the whole world can check on whenever they please, is that you know, straight up, all the "when"s and "how"s of a bad reading year... like, for instance, when you've been on decline for multiple years in a row, and even how you've had reading years where you've read almost double what you managed in this past one. 

I think it's time to trot out some excuses for myself. So, what gives? 

• I did a lot of travel last year. You would think this would help me read more, right? After all, I have put up plenty of vacation-style reading recaps in the past... but if anything, it made my regular daily schedules feel out of whack, and hard to settle back into, every time we went out of town. Either I was reading in unfamiliar locales, which was both hard to acclimate towards and made me feel incredibly guilty for not making the most of my new surroundings, or I was at home, scrambling to do all the things I couldn't get done while I was gone.
• My family is going through some major upheaval at the moment. But it's actually a good thing: one of my siblings got engaged in 2023, and will be getting married in 2024, with yours truly serving as a Maid of Honor (or Disrepute, Chaos, or Distraction, considering which sources you believe). With another sibling graduating college this year as well, it's been pretty busy around here.
• My volunteering hours have absolutely skyrocketed. Without giving too much away: whereas I used to serve a few key functions for the organization I dedicate the most time to, in the past year, that has increased exponentially. The good news is, I have gained several new key skill sets; the bad news is it feels like my free hours are still dwindling rapidly. Then again, I wouldn't be dedicating a minimum of four-to-six hours a week to this organization if I didn't care. 
• I started a new writing venture! As you might know, I now am also the author of not only this platform, but a monthly cooking Substack. Not only am I doing a very different kind of close reading these days, but I'm also dedicating several hours a month to both jam-packing the fridge with all of my necessary ingredients, and dishing up about exactly what I've been cooking on my newsletter. 
• I experienced a serious Reading Slump, from September through December. I'm not interested in getting into it, at least right now - you might have noticed that this platform has been pretty desolate for this last third of the year - but trying to get my brain to commit to consuming anything that wasn't a scrolling Tetris game or something easy on Food Network was a hard go of it, for sure. 

And things aren't slowing down. We've got a sister to get hitched - plus the accompanying Bachelorette Trip, Bridal Showers, Wedding Weekend, and more - coming up in 2024, as well as a college graduation and a sibling's subsequent move home, and that's just all the stuff that isn't even my fault. I'm still writing my Substack, volunteering even more than I used to, and to top it all off... I just started a new job! 

So, you know. Things are fine. 

Oh, right, except the fact that in 2023, I read eight books less than the year previous. 

(Kind of funny, once you consider that my total page count was down only 469 from the year before, too. So I guess I could have just read eight more books, around 60 pages in length, to meet 2022's numbers?) 

The shortest book I read was 114 pages - Time is a Mother, a poetry collection by Ocean Vuong - and the longest book was 592 pages, as Leigh Bardugo needed every last one of them to round out her King of Scars duology with Rule of Wolves. All told, my average book length was 320 pages, which is way up from 274 in 2022. 

The only thing I can say for consistency's sake is that my average score is still rocking at 3.6 stars! This has become something of a norm for me - occasionally vacillating upwards to 3.7 every once in a while - which is kind of nice. It means that I'm not especially loving or hating books out of the norm, at least on an annual aggregate basis. 

Outside of what stats Goodreads can hit me with - like bb pellets on the shin - there were some cool, non-quantitative things that happened this year, though. 

For instance, my best months for reading were in June and August, no doubt thanks to my annual propensity for getting real weird about the Seattle Public Libraries Summer Reading Challenge.  And I did, in fact, get three bingoes on my Summer Reading Book Bingo card, just like I shoot for every year.

I successfully completed a Book Buying Ban, and the only three titles I broke my promise for were during my Bloggoversary! (But more on this later.) 

In terms of favorite bookish projects that warranted a mention on the blog, I not only reread Jane Eyre by myself to start off the year last January, but I also collected every single word I had to google during that dedicated effort, and even published all of them for you on the blog, as well as some words of argument as to why we should all be learning new words, all the time. 

Off the blog, I launched my first ever attempt at a non-scholastic buddy reading experience with my younger brother, of the Sibling Shakespeare Book Club. We read the entirety of The Tempest together through the month of July, with weekly check-in Zoom meetings, complete with PowerPoint slide decks oriented around cultural significance, literary references, and deep-dives into popular quotations (me), as well as a lot of great memes and undeniable enthusiasm (him). It was honestly really cool to not only feel like more of an English major again, but also get to experience something like one of my favorite plays for the first time through someone else's eyes. 

It was pretty quiet here, on this platform, though: only 24 posts total from the year, averaging two a month... which is still the most posts I've had on the blog since 2019. Hooray? 

books of the year 

Despite the fact that I did end up reading significantly less than I have in recent years, I still managed to read a few books that really defined my bookish experiences in 2023... showing that even if you read less than you'd like, there's still a great chance that at least one or two of the titles you pick up are going to stick with you! Out of the 38 books I read, here are five that really made me feel like I got some good reading done.

Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong

I'm not much of a poetry collection kind of gal, but in the past few years, that's been starting to change... and I've got the carefully-printed-and-taped entries onto the wall leading into my room to prove it. The actual action of reading poetry regularly, though, is still something I'm easing into. 

The last two summers have seen me spending time with poetry collections, thanks to various Book Bingo requirements, and Summer 2023 was definitely a highlight for that. Ocean Vuong is one of those social-media-famous poets not because of any kind of aesthetic pandering or pseudo-intellectualism in their messaging, but because their words are so incredibly intentional and deliberate, their messages are universally accessible, and their voice feels so specific and unique. I'm a big fan, and I can see why everyone else is, too.  

The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher

Just like Poetry, I'm not exactly too much of a Horror fan... though a youthful fascination with Stephen King short stories and a collegiate-born love of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves might surprise you. (It all dovetails pretty neatly with how I stopped watching scary movies in college when I realized they made my anxiety so much worse.) But look at me now! I read two Horror books this past Summer, and they were both incredible. This one beats out Stephen Graham-Jones' The Only Good Indians for two specific reasons: this was just a little more straightforward in its intentions, and it was one of the most fun (and funny!) reads I experienced this year. 

I actually even read part of it while I was camping, if you can believe it. 

On top of that, it was one of two Kingfishers I read in 2023, and it's the one that made me a cemented fan. I actually just received two of their other novels as a Christmas gift from my brother - Thornhedge, a Fantasy novella, and A House with Good Bones, another Southern Gothic-style Horror, both published last year - and I'm so, so excited to read them. 

How Far the Light Reaches: a Life in Ten Sea Creatures, Sabrina Imbler

Again, yet another hit from the mysterious inner workings of SPL's Book Bingo. The square was for "Sea Creatures," and the mega-hyped title everyone was trying to grab was Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures. To be honest, I am still planning on reading that title eventually, but by the time I got to it back in June, the library holds list already stretched to hell and back, so I decided to veer towards Imbler instead, and I am so ecstatic I did.

It's both informative and engrossing, matching a very genuine enthusiasm for marine life with a careful and considerate perspective of their own life, too. Imbler is thoughtful and made interesting connections, treated everyone in their social circle with intention and focus while still holding their own perspective in the foreground, and overall, I just got the very intense feeling that they're someone I'd really love to sit down to coffee with. 

(Maybe that's just one of those joyful things about memoirs; it's all of our opportunity to get coffee together.) 

Now that I'm released from the self-manufactured cage of a Book Buying Ban, this is a title I'm actively interested in securing for my own shelves, so I can reread it again later, or lend it to as many people as I'd like. 

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, Kikuko Tsumura

Okay, so apparently, all of the biggest and most important books I read this year came from Summer Book Bingo?? Good grief. This one was used to fill a block that called for "Worker's Rights," which is a pretty generous stretch of relevance there, on my part, but a choice that I still stand by. 

Truly a testament to the awe-invoking power of a book's ability to change the way you experience your own life, this not only set me on a more hopeful and positive job search path this past year, but is something that I genuinely believe helped make the difference in me finding the one that I did. 

A Japanese translation that was absolutely gorgeous to read, it was also a bit of a trip, matching a sense of magical realism and surreality with the mundane aspects of holding or maintaining unconventional jobs. I think I've brought this book up in conversations this year more than anything else I've read... it really is something you need to experience yourself, though, so I'm pretty unwilling to give a lot of spoilers for it. 

It's also definitely the reason I'm going to be look to read more translations from Japanese novels in the future. Like with Imbler's HFtLR, I'm trying to add a physical copy of this title to my personal bookshelves as well. 

Shubeik Lubeik, Deena Mohamed

I was looking for a bit of hope while suffering under my slump, and inspired by Goodreads' incredibly bone-headed decision to eliminate the Graphic Novel from this year's iteration of the Goodreads Awards, I placed a few on hold at my library, and picked this one up in December. 

I mean, come on. When's the last time a Graphic Novel made you cry? I still have pictures of dialogue sections from its pages saved into the Camera Roll on my phone, because I like to go back and look at them when I need another dose of perspective. 

It's a pretty unique combination of sociocultural landscape and Fantasy influence, wherein a modern-day Cairo lays the stage for interactions between regular, everyday people and genie wishes available for purchase. Where contemporary politics meets historic pain; economic status interchanges with differences in identity and opportunity; where the overarching magic seems to stem from, once again, human connection and the people we share our lives with. 

Absolutely incredible, and well worth how thick it is. I read it in two afternoons - bisecting only thanks to various family gatherings - but it would also be a great way to spend a free evening. I promise you will be grateful for the bit of peace you might feel in reading this. 

That's it for 2023. I give the year no warning about whether or not the door should hit it on the way out; I'm too wrapped up in trying to scramble as hard and as fast as I can towards 2024 to care. I'm hoping it will be kinder, or - at the very least - it will be slightly easier to manage, and that unlike in the past few years, I will somehow manage to find both more time and inclination to read again. 

But of course, there's still a little bit we have to talk about before we wrap up the past year completely. There are two major Challenges that are still under discussion... one distinctly more effective and complete than the other. 

More on that later. Until then! 

How did your reading year go in 2023? What were some of your top titles of the year? Let me know, in the comments below!