Best of 2023: Books

Happy New Year! According to Goodreads, I read 205 books in 2023, or roughly 70,000 pages. Here are a few stats.  

Breakdown by star rating: 

5 stars (loved/it was great): 14 (7%)

4 stars (liked a lot/it was good): 80 (39%)

3 stars (liked a little/it was okay): 75 (37%)

2 stars (barely liked/it was not that good): 23 (11%)

1 star (it sucked but I finished it): 0 (0%)

0 stars (DNF): 13 (6%)

Average rating including DNFs: 3.2

Average excluding DNFs: 3.4

Breakdown by type: 

Audiobook: 165 (81%) 

eBook: 27 (13%)

Paper Book: 13 (6%) (of these, 8 were from my own shelf)

Published in: 

2023: 63 (31%)

Other years: 142 (69%)

I guess the moral of the above stats is that if a book sucks, I just DNF it, rather than finishing it, hence the case of no one star ratings. Also this year my proportion of audiobooks read increased by about 6% over last year. My number of books read in total increased by about 29%. I would guess that much of this increase is due to the fact that I have been listening to less and less music and/or podcasts and leaning more towards listening to books. I still find the need to pump up a run from time to time with some Lil John, don't get me wrong, but I often stray more towards books. 

You can find a list of all of my favorites from prior years on my bookshelf page or on Goodreads. 

I am usually a little bit stingy with my five star ratings on Goodreads. However, this year I had fourteen books that I thought deserved that high rating! Here they are, in no particular order! 

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. What can I say, this is a cute book. I did not hear all of the hype; I just picked it because it had a bright cover and came up on my list on Libby when I was searching for books. It is about the relationship between an old lady and an octopus and a younger, kind of troubled boy. I enjoyed the characters, the story was engaging but not too fluffy, and I was entertained throughout. 

Dinners With Ruth by Nina Totenberg. I do like RBG and enjoy learning more about her as well as hearing each different point of view from the different authors I have read. Nina was a reporter who became friends with Ruth despite their age difference. This book details their friendship as well as some of their accomplishments, especially geared toward equality for women. 

The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama. In this novel, Obama talks about her relationships in life, but especially the ones with her mother and her kids. She has some words of wisdom like "start kind" which could be kind of corny coming from the wrong person but from her it makes sense. 

All The Broken Places by John Boyne. This book is about an elderly woman living in London. When a new family moves in downstairs from her, it brings up some memories of the past, which are mostly surrounding her escape from Nazi Germany at age 12 and the fact that her father was the commandant of one of the concentration camps during the war. It goes back and forth between the two time periods, weaving a story of guilt, complicity, grief and remorse and in the end, she has to decide whether or not to reveal some of her long kept secrets. 

Quit Like a Millionaire by Kristy Shen. Although I work in the finance industry, I enjoyed this book because it is written in a simple manner that anyone can understand. Shen talks about growing up in China where her family lived on pennies per day, to moving to the US where she learned how to invest so that she could quit work early and travel the world. Her plan is pretty simple and you may have heard it before but it is still a nice reminder that we can live more simply than we do and perhaps spend more time enjoying our lives now rather than always working so hard to make more money for the future. 

In Love by Amy Bloom. Get your tissues out for this one. This is not a spoiler, but this book is about a woman whose husband gets diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's and he decides to die with dignity rather than living out his life with the disease. Obviously this is not an easy decision and Bloom goes through some of the struggles that they face as they work through the plan. 

I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys. Although this is a YA book, it touches on something that we sometimes forget about here in the US, and that is the fact that as late as 1989, people in Romania were still under communist rule. The main character is a teenager who has normal teenage dreams but is held back by the government oppression and has to decide whether to do nothing or to fight back and risk the lives of his family. 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. This is not the first time I read this book and it will not be the last. It is about a girl in Brooklyn and her family struggling to survive as they go through life. Life is not easy, food is scarce, and some of the lessons are hard, but Francie and her family persevere. The reread was heighted even more by the discussion had as part of Engie's cool blogger book club. 

Good For a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man's World by Lauren Fleishman. I really enjoyed this inside peek into the world of elite running. Lauren not only talks about the difficulty of being a woman in a mostly male sport (or at least one where the males are more prized), but she also gets into some of the eating disorders that the young runners had and it was very eye opening. I also read The Longest Race by Kara Goucher (4.5 stars) and was appalled at some of the things that were done to some of the elite running women. 

The Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Hardin. This one is all about sex, drugs and rock and roll. Okay, maybe more like drugs, jail and redemption. I am not going to lie; I had no idea who this woman is, but she was the ghostwriter for Desmond Tutu's book and The Sun Always Shines, which I enjoyed. The first chapter had me railing against her, as she dragged her three year old from place to place in an effort to score drugs. I wanted to slap her! Then she gets arrested, and chronicles life in jail, which I found fascinating. When she finally gets out, it is a struggle to manage life, try to find a job, not break parole, find housing, and stay clean. She finally does all of this, becomes a successful writer and even gets to meet Oprah and the Dali Lama in the end! So yes, it is a feelgood "rags to riches" kind of story, but I enjoyed hearing the ins and outs and some of the struggles that people face in a world that I am not part of. 

A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney. Get your tissues out again; this is a father's heart wrenching story about his young son getting diagnosed with terminal cancer. I didn't really know who the author was, but he is a comedian and actor, and he does a good job of putting his emotions into this book but still making it light, if that even seems possible. 

Drowning by T.J. Newman. I know that I joined the momentum train on this book, but I found it was a fast, easy, entertaining read. Was it profound? No. Did it make my runs go by faster? Yes. A plane goes down over the ocean and it hits the water, bursts into flames and sinks. What happens to the passengers? Do they survive? And if so, how? Read on to find out. (P.S. I also read Falling but was not as enamored by that one). 

Go As A River by Shelley Read. This is a story of a girl growing up in Colorado in a farming town in the 40s. It goes through her life of love, her relationship with her family, the hardships of life at that time and her struggles to get by. There were some details in the story that sounded so real that I had to fact check and they were real! 

Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent. Birchie recommended this with the caveat that it was strange and she was not sure what to think of it at first. It was a thriller about a woman in her 40s who lacks the mental maturity of someone her age. When her father dies, she puts him out with the trash, just as he has told her to do. This gets the attention of the police and the surrounding community, as well as the media. Due to this she later gets some unwanted attention and finds out things about her past that she did not know about before. It's twisted and dark, but I enjoyed every minute of it. 

A couple of additional nearly five star reads were You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith, Kindred by Octavia Butler, I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai, and The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb. 

What was your favorite book of 2023? Do you mostly read audio, eBook or paper books?