My 2023 Year in Books

January 15, 2024

For the first time in several years, I completed my Goodreads Reading Challenge in 2023, reading 106 books with a goal of 100. That doesn’t mean I read more in 2023; my goal was just more realistic. So how much did I read? What did I read? And have you read any of the same books I did?

The last time I completed my Goodreads Reading Challenge was in 2019, with 166 books and a goal of 150. That was the year I discovered graphic novels and read 80 of them. This year I set a more reasonable goal of 100 books, and thanks to a handful of short Christmas romances, I met that goal on December 23 with Snowed in with the Boss. Of the 106 books I finished during the year, 16 were graphic novels (I read one of them twice). That’s about half as many as last year; several of them were not manga, so I read less than half as many manga in 2023. Although I read three more books in total than in 2022, I read almost exactly 1000 fewer pages.

Book Lengths

Not only was my longest book several hundred pages shorter than last year’s (Lonely Planet Spain) but the average was about 20 pages shorter, too – perhaps because I read more poetry. Plus, those Christmas novellas…

Popularity

Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane, which I adored, was the most popular book I read in 2023 on both Goodreads and StoryGraph. But it was only about half as popular as last year’s most popular book, Madeline Miller’s Circe (which I also loved, but for very different reasons). For unpopular books, I outdid myself. Last year’s Pearl in the Rice was read by 20 other people, while I was the only person on Goodreads to shelve The Daydreamer this year. Perhaps because it’s a children’s book? But I found it on a school library’s “Must Read” academic book list. I guess the youth don’t do Goodreads. On StoryGraph, the least popular book was An Unreasonable Woman, Shirley Deane’s memoir of traveling around Asia and Africa alone in the 1950s. Ironically, or maybe serendipitously, I picked it up because I was looking for a different Shirley Deane travel memoir about moving to Andorra. But it turned out to be a completely different author!

Best Loved

Last year, the highest rated (by others – I don’t do star ratings anymore) book I read was the manga Toilet-Bound Hanako. Maybe the youth do Goodreads after all, although the story is better than its title would indicate. This year the highest rated read was a little more highbrow, Stone Cell, a collection of poetry by the Taiwan-based contemporary Chinese poet Lo Fu. Not gonna lie, I found most of his poems pretty inaccessible.

StoryGraph

I don’t know what kind of book nerd tracks their reading in two different apps just to snag extra data points, but I’m it. Being that kind of OCD, it stresses me out that my total count between Goodreads and StoryGraph differed by 2 books and about 100 pages. But I’ll just have to live with the uncertainty. According to my StoryGraph 2023 Reading Wrap-Up, I started the year with heavy books and except for an exceptionally cheery July, got lighter in mood all year.

July and December were my big reading months. No surprise there. Those are “vacation” months. Apparently, I read 4,009 pages in July.

I don’t always agree with StoryGraph’s genre and mood tags, but they are interesting to look at anyway.

Authors

For the record, Adachtoka wrote the Noragami manga. Jeannie Lin wrote the Pingkang Li mystery series, and Kiiro Yumi is the author of Library Wars. I read 45 books that were part of these and other series. Kiiro Yumi was part of five-way tie of authors I read three books by:

Neil Gaiman
Mo Xian Tong Xiu
Tawna Fenske
Fumi Yoshinaga

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All the Books

It’s always a challenge to figure out how to capture the book cover images from Goodreads’ year-end report and place them here so people can see. But I love going back to visit the friends I read throughout the year. And I love talking about books I’ve read with people who have also read them, although I rarely get the opportunity to do so IRL. So, by all means, if you see something in my list that you’ve read, please reach out and let me know what you thought. If you see something interesting and end up reading it, please, please let me know. If you see something you might read, feel free to ask about it – I’d love to share my opinion. If you have bookish thoughts – call me, okay?