Books in 2023
May. 6th, 2024 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starfishstarHow many books read in 2023?
68
How many fiction and nonfiction?
61 fiction, 7 nonfiction
How many male authors, female authors, nonbinary authors?
42 by women, 23 by men, 3 by nonbinary authors
How many books by people of color?
21 books (31%)
Favorite books of 2022?
FIVE FAVORITES:
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong – I wonder why I don't read more nonfiction, because when I find a really excellently written nonfiction book it sticks with me for ages and I talk everybody's ear off about it! This was FASCINATING.
Catfishing on CatNet and Chaos on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer – I finally got a chance to read this delightful duology, about a near-future world with a non-evil, sentient AI that just wants to make humans' lives better, and I adore it. (This sort of spins off from the premise of Kritzer's short story “Cat Pictures Please,” if you've read that. And if you haven't, you should!)
The Marrow Thieves and Hunting by Stars by Cherie Dimaline – The worldbuilding here, but especially the characters and the community they form, have really stuck with me.
Only This Beautiful Moment by Abdi Nazemian – Ugh, I love everything by Abdi Nazemian. I'm always trying to shove his books into people's hands. He tells beautiful, true queer stories. And I've always appreciated that even though he writes YA, he doesn't go for the easy, predictable ending; he goes for the right ending.
The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes – I really, really enjoyed this! A fresh angle on a YA LGBTQ+ romance and so full of heart.
A DOZEN MORE I ENJOYED:
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope
Himawari House by Harmony Becker
The Last One by Fatima Daas, translated from French by Lara Vergnaud
The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen (among various others by K.J. Charles)
The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen by Isaac Blum
Heartstopper (Volumes 1–5, plus The Heartstopper Yearbook) by Alice Oseman
The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian
Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stories by Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi
Katie the Catsitter: Secrets and Sidekicks by Colleen AF Venable and Stephanie Yue
When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb
The Way Back by Gavriel Savit
And did I reread Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall YET AGAIN? ...Yes, I did. (I also listened to the audiobook of Husband Material in German, since that happened to be available through NYPL, which was a fun and weird experience. Unfortunately, the surprisingly plot-relevant phrase “fuck off and die” doesn't translate very well.)
Oldest book read?
A delightful little volume called Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls by Marjorie Winslow, for which oddly I can't quite pin down the details: it seems to have been first published in 1961, or possibly 1959 or 1960.
Followed by About the B’nai Bagels by E.L. Konigsburg (1969), then The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope (1974).
Longest and shortest book titles?
longest title:
Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will by Judith Schalansky
shortest title:
Holes by Louis Sachar
Longest book?
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong (464 pages)
Any translated books?
Just 4 translated books: 2 from Japanese, 1 from French, and 1 from German, silly though that last one seems (I happened to come across it in my library, and of course we only had it in English translation). Also, 2 books that I read in German.
Most read author of the year, and how many books by that author?
Heh, I suppose this isn't surprising for a stressful year in which I worked way too much and found myself just needing to read escapist, happy romances: Most read author is K.J. Charles with 8(!) books, followed by all of Alice Oseman's Heartstopper series at 6 books (my middle and high school students are SO OBSESSED with Heartstopper! It's like the unofficial school-wide favorite thing), then Alexis Hall with 4 books.
Any re-reads?
Not a lot, it turns out! Some of my K.J Charles and Alexis Hall were rereads, and I did also reread Nimona after I saw the movie.
Which books wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation?
I always enjoy this question, because it's satisfying to think back on how the books I read first landed on my want-to-read list. Rather than trying to list everything, here are just a few examples:
The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope was a recommendation from a friend. A different friend's recommendations accounted for quite a few of the books I read this year, from The Last One by Fatima Daas to A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys. Other recs came from colleagues and sometimes my students.
Also, did I really read Heartstopper for the first time just this year? I'd heard of it for ages of course, and I've long loved Alice Oseman's novels, but somehow never got excited about reading her graphic novel series – even though a librarian friend specifically recommended what a great model it provides to teenagers for a healthy, respectful first relationship. But now that I'm working with teens and preteens again, I did finally read the series (and watched the show) and my gosh is it all true! I enjoyed reading Heartstopper (and, in a rare case, the show is even better than the books!) but far more that, I LOVE what it provides to my students and how much they love it. Girls, boys, nonbinary kids, my little 6th graders, the much more cynical 9th and 10th graders...they all swoon over Heartstopper.
Did you read any books you’ve always been meaning to read?
Lots of them! That's the nature of keeping such a massive list of books I want to read: Everything I come across that sounds promising goes on the list, and then it can take quite a while for me to come back around to any particular title. So sometimes it's quite a relief when I do finally get to a book that's been on my list for ages.
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Date: 2024-05-21 02:52 pm (UTC)Ah, Elizabeth Marie Pope, my beloved! She only wrote two novels, as far as I can tell. Her day job was being an English teacher. The Perilous Gard is by far the more famous and quite possibly the objectively better one, but I fell in love with her other one, The Sherwood Ring, back when I was about 14. I inherited it from my mother, who had discovered it in a library in Florida during a family road trip during *her* teenage years in the 1960s (it was published in 1958). She and her older sister loved and adored it, and every year when they went back on their annual family trip to Florida, they would go back to that library and read it again. It was one of those formative books for them, snarky and fun with interesting narrators & several quasi-adversarial romances amiably recounted by friendly and loquacious ghosts from the Revolutionary War era. It will always have a very special place in my heart <3 I do enjoy The Perilous Gard a lot, too, though I only read it once. The part that lingers with me is the ending with that near-perfect revenge so narrowly avoided!
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Date: 2024-05-21 05:38 pm (UTC)I think what I liked most was that The Perilous Gard was such an unexpected delight to me, a book whose description didn't *sound* like something I'd seek out, but I trusted the opinion of the friend who recommended it, so I put it on my list ages ago and now finally got around to reading it, and then was like, Oh, wait, that was really good! I felt the same way about I Capture the Castle, I think. Sometimes it doesn't even matter what the subject matter is; it matters that the writer is so good at their job that they'll take you along regardless. <3
Yes, I'm still loving my job! I'm about to chaperone students on a multi-day trip in the woods, which is why I got in the mindset of needing to catch up on lots of things beforehand. :-) I hope you're well!