I read 37 books in 2023, four of which were re-reads and the rest of which were new to me. I didn’t read quite as many books in translation as I meant to (I read 7; I was aiming for 10) and I definitely did not succeed at reading books from outside the US, UK, and Europe (oops), but I did succeed at reading various book club picks (for the in-person nonfiction book club someone at work started, and for the online romance book club someone else at work started, and for an online out-of-copyright-books book club that used to be on Habitica and is now on Discord). <\/p>\n
By category, my 2023 breakdown was:<\/p>\n
Middle-grade and YA: 5 books, my favorites of which were The Lost Library<\/i> by Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass (which is a sweet cozy bookish mystery) and The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel)<\/i> by Ellen Raskin (which is a silly\/bonkers mystery that I read as a kid and was delighted to re-read as a grown-up).<\/p>\n
Non-fiction: 12 books. I especially loved The Illiterate<\/i> by \u00c1gota Krist\u00f3f (about how the author left Hungary and ended up in Switzerland, and the linguistic displacement that entailed). I also really loved two books about Italy—Two Cities<\/i> by Cynthia Zarin and Watermark<\/i> by Joseph Brodsky, the first of which I read before an Italy trip that included Venice and Rome (which are the two cities Zarin writes about) and the latter of which I read in Italy, mostly on a train between Venice and Florence. Travel-memoir is definitely one of my fave genres and these two short books are both full of gorgeous language and images.<\/p>\n
Fiction for grown-ups: 20 books. I FINALLY read Austerlitz<\/i> and definitely want to read more by W.G. Sebald. Austerlitz<\/i> is beautiful and sad, haunted, haunting, and I’d been meaning to read it for literally decades and I don’t know what took me so long. I delighted in Our Country Friends<\/i> by Gary Shteyngart, which is an excellent Covid-era novel and a great take on Chekov. I was thoroughly into the first two books in Charlie N. Holmberg’s Whimbrel House trilogy, and can’t wait for the third to come out: these are such sweet\/cozy reads for me, with just the right blend of magic and romance. And I really liked Beyond Black<\/i> by Hilary Mantel, which is a novel about a medium and her business partner and is quirky in a way I found very appealing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I read 37 books in 2023, four of which were re-reads and the rest of which were new to me. I didn’t read quite as many books in translation as I meant to (I read 7; I was aiming for 10) and I definitely did not succeed at reading books from outside the US, UK, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalmeta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13159"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13162,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13159\/revisions\/13162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}