Reading Year at a Glance 2023

2023 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A fruitful reading year of 72 titles, 17,475 pages, and ratings averaged 3.8. Most of my collection was from the U.S. but 26 titles were translations and 9 were poetry collections. Apparently, twenty of my authors were men. Authors new to me numbered 25 and included Sophie Divry, Elissa Bassist, and Tan Twan Eng. Old favorites continued to be favored, i.e. Ian McEwan's Lessons, Diane JohnsonThe true history of the first Mrs. Meredith and other lesser lives and Muriel Spark The Abbess of Crewe. My non-fiction selections were 18, anchored by Nabokov's memoir (Speak, Memory).
Books published in 2023 came to 25. The oldest was Nabokov's. The stories that excited me the most were The English Understand Wool and The Wren, the Wren(Irish)and Foster(Irish), although I was quite taken with Australian author Helen Armstrong (The Children's Bach). I thought The true history of the first Mrs. Meredith and other lesser lives was a delight and an ingenious history and Mary Ruefle'sThe Book pleased me with its discussions of friendships, of plums. Authors new to me were Sophie Divry, Elissa Bassist, Tan Twan Eng and Marie NDiaye.
***
Just read Val's valiant effort to reduce her number of TBRs to 195. My 1164 TBR's are really books I want to read so the longer the list, the more curious and interested in variety I appear, no? Such a didact! My shame would be the number of books on my shelves which I have yet to read, and still I buy more. These two categories conflate in my records. I read Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home and aspired to do as she did, stop buying books and curtail library usage, until the landings were cleared. In fact, one of my categories toward this end is "Howard's End is On the Landing" (HEIOTL). I also chuckle familiarly over Nick Hornby's The Believer columns where he reviews books bought and books read and sometimes there is no overlap. I understand. I now must catalog the HEIOTLs with new vigor and make next year's 70-book goal to read my own books.

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