My 2023 Reading List
This year, I thought about looking at the word count of the amount of fanfiction I'd read, but in the end I was too afraid to know the answer to this and decided that blissful ignorance was the best way to go. It has definitely impacted my novel-reading time; a total of 28 this year (including 3 re-reads).
I have to say there was nothing that immediately jumped out at me as my Book Of The Year, but I think I would give it (almost by default, because she's incredible) to Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead.
Even without counting fanfiction, I read quite a lot on my Kindle this year due to spending two months overseas. Though I still prefer physical books when not travelling, it's certainly a handy device.
Here we go, in chronological order:
1. Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat
This book was mostly just sort of okay-ish, up until the last 20 pages or so which absolutely blew my mind and guaranteed that I would be buying the sequel. I saw the author at the Sydney Writer's Festival and she had cool leather boots. (See related comments at #7).
A classic English fantasy that drew a lot of its vibes from Tolkien and Arthurian legend. Prophecies, knightly orders, ancient evil reborn, chosen ones, swords, etc. And an ending that knocked me sideways with surprise.
2. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle [re-read]
I first read this as a teenager, and read it again in preparation for my trip to France. In my memory of my first reading it is mostly the tale of British expats experiencing French food, with lots of long and loving descriptions of leisurely lunches. On re-read, this was definitely still a feature, but also a lot about the people and the culture of Provence. And descriptions of the very cold and dry Mistral wind which blows in March (I was forewarned). A very funny read, and very English at the same time as being very French.
3. Home at Grasmere: The Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth
I read this in preparation for visiting Dove Cottage in the Lake District, the home of Dorothy and William Wordsworth from 1799-1808. I fell head over heels in love with Wordsworth during my university days, and his poetry and writing are so important to me. Times being what they were, his sister Dorothy Wordsworth was never published herself, but the volumes of her journal certainly show her skill and make you wonder just how much of Wordsworth's success was due to her. There are phrases in the finished poems that seem to come almost directly from her own journal writing (the host of dancing daffodils).
My time in the three Wordsworth residences that I visited was something of an emotional pilgrimage, and I could write a whole entry just on this part of my trip. (Another time, perhaps).
 |
| Dove Cottage, Grasmere |
4. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
My last physical book before my France/U.K. trip and switching to my Kindle for a while. This book is a modern American re-telling of David Copperfield. 'Red necks', the foster care system, the opioid crisis, and what it's like to be poor in America. Kingsolver writes with such empathy and understanding of people who are so different to me, it's important (and eye-opening, and compulsive) reading. Absolute queen of contemporary literature.
5. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (translation by Robin Buss)
This book begins (somewhat famously) in Marseille, so I began it just before I left on my trip and did a lot of reading in airports and on planes and throughout the south of France. This is a whopper of a book, almost (but I think not quite?) as long as War and Peace, but it was a bit more of a page-turner and never dragged. I didn't take a boat trip to visit the Chateau d'If in person, but I have photos of it from the Marseille port. Maybe the easiest-to-read 'classic' that I've ever read, despite its length. A good yarn.
6. Travels With A Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson
Before he was a novelist, my ancestor wrote travel books. The Chemin de Stevenson (Robert Louis Stevenson trail) is a long distance path in the south of France that tracks RLS' progress on the journey which he wrote about in this book. I read this while I was staying in that part of the countryside (even did part of the hike), and it was truly a wonderful reading experience to see the landscapes with my own eyes. I couldn't help feeling a kinship with him.
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?"
(RLS discovering mindfulness in travel 200 years before it was cool).
7, 8 & 9. The Captive Prince trilogy by C.S. Pacat
At the writer's festival mentioned in #1, the panel host asked the author something about how she had made the transition to young adult fiction considering the different genre of her first successful trilogy. Since the "different genre" wasn't exactly specified, this perked my interest.
Friends, these books were adult fantasy with delightful smatterings of (gay and fairly explicit) erotica, and suddenly the fact that the only characters with chemistry in Dark Rise were two young men who basically steamed off the page..... made a whole lot of sense. I tore through the Captive Prince trilogy in about three days, and I have no regrets.
10. The Imagination Chamber by Philip Pullman
11. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune.
This book was reasonably enjoyable, but I really felt it was trying so hard to say something 'meaningful' that it came across somewhat ham-fisted and obvious. It seemed like the writing was aimed at quite a young audience (though I don't think it was marketed at YA). If I'd read it with that in mind, I might have enjoyed it more and rolled my eyes a little less.
12. The Border Keeper by Kerstin Hall
Imaginative and different and trippy novella. Not really the kind of fantasy I read as my bread-and-butter, but it's good to experience exotic flavours and seasonings every now and then.
13 & 14. The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold.
Really really good classic fantasy. Rock solid world-building, great characters, a gripping plot. The first book really establishes the universe, the second has an introverted middle-aged woman as the main character, and I want to read more fantasy with these sorts of main characters. Writing this list has reminded me that I want to get my hands on the rest of the series.
15. Infinite Splendours by Sofie Laguna
[Spoilers and trigger warning for CSA]. I wanted so badly to like this but in the end I kind of hated it. The moral of the story seemed to be that if you were a victim of child sexual assault, the best thing you could do with your life is to kill yourself. What the actual fuck? I felt like throwing this book across the room. No amount of admittedly gorgeous prose could make up for that ending. It's been a while since a book made me this mad.
16. Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Talk about mood whiplash. Deeply funny and excruciatingly English story about, well, three men in a boat - a riverboat on the Thames to be precise. Reading about these three absolute idiots was very enjoyable and had me laughing at loud in multiple sections.
17. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin [re-read]
I read this again in honour of my beloved Gran who passed away this year. She was a big fan of Le Guin and this was one of her favourite books. I have her paperback copy which is yellowed and fading and falling apart at the binding. I love it so much.
I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise?
18. Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
This was a really cool mash-up of urban fantasy/fairytale Deal With A Devil, plus aliens-living-incognito-on-earth. It doesn't sound like it should work, but it mostly did. The only problem was that I found the main character a little un-sympathetic; we were clearly supposed to be rooting for her but she made some morally questionable choices that I couldn't quite overlook.
19. A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
The kind of intelligent and philosophical science fiction that Ursula Le Guin would have been proud of. This is a novel of first contact and environmentalism. Aliens come to earth and want to save us from our dying planet - but what if the planet is worth saving? What if we should at least try?
20. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
This is a re-telling of the romance and married life of William Shakespeare and Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, based on the scant historical facts that we have - they had a son named Hamnet who died as a child, and the play Hamlet was written a few years afterwards. The POV characters here are mostly Agnes and Hamnet, which I liked (the domestic figures obscured by history), but it also made me want to read a really good fiction biography of S himself (anyone have any recommendations for me??)
Part of the reason that I enjoyed this was that I had only a few months earlier been standing in the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where Shakespeare was born, his parents' home, where he and Agnes/Anne first lived together. I could picture so clearly the upstairs bedrooms, the room downstairs with its window to the street where his father sold gloves. Much of the book is set there and it was a solid place in my mind.
21. My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
Gran told me once, when she had finished reading the novel I'd just written, that I reminded her of the young Sybylla; stubbornly refusing to marry and triumphantly embracing independence and a career as a writer.
I've honestly never been so chuffed.
An Australian classic, namesake of now two major literary awards, I was long overdue to read this. It reminded me a little of We Of The Never Never, which I read last year - a feminine take on a particular era of Australian history and landscape. Very much a product of its time (first published 1901), but with some flashes of insight into class and gender relations that perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised to see; it's a classic for a reason, after all.
22. Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
After becoming ridiculously obsessed with the Good Omens TV show in 2023 (hence drowning in fanfiction), I thought I would give Pratchett another try. Unfortunately, I still feel like I'm missing something. His books are... fine, and the humour is, well, unrelenting, but I feel there's some substance that's lacking. (Good Omens the book didn't have this problem, as I feel like Neil Gaiman balanced out the witty observations with more solidity).
He's such a cult hero, I want to love Pratchett. I do. It just doesn't work for me.
One good passage that sticks with me though, about the human need for fantasy. (It's a bit long, read the quote here).
23. On The Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta [re-read]
If you're going to recommend books to friends that you know will emotionally traumatise them, the least you can do is re-read them yourself and have a good cry. Bec, I'm sorry/you're welcome. :P
Reading this book again as an adult rather than a teenager made me want to ask "Wtf were you thinking??" of all the adult characters who raise the child who becomes the main character of this book. Stuff like that kind of goes over your head when you are a teenager yourself.
24. Witch King by Martha Wells
A very different genre (magical fantasy) to the author's Murderbot series (straight sci-fi), this book shared the same likeable character and page turn-y plot. Wells writes excellent action sequences - it all happens so fast that sometimes I have difficulty picturing exactly what is happening, but I get swept up in it and it doesn't seem to matter too much. Like other stories where A Lot Happens, I find I have only hazy recollection of the plot once I'm done reading.
There was a drowned temple, and I pictured the main character as Crowley (probably more to do with my Good Omens brainrot than anything in the book itself. Well, he was a demon.)
25. The Weekend by Charlotte Wood
This is the second novel I've read by Charlotte Wood and I'm realising that her Thing might be these characters that are so incredibly infuriating and in many ways deeply unlikeable, and then you realise, holy shit, I am each of these different characters, they are all so relatable, and you sort of cringe-laugh at yourself, and by the end of the novel despite all of their problems you kind of can't help but love them a bit because you empathise with them really in spite of yourself? Painfully, unapologetically observant and real. A slightly uncomfortable slice of modern Australia.
26. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
My first time reading Plath. I didn't realise just how much of this book was going to be set in psychiatric facilities. Still, I'm glad I read it, if only to see the oft-quoted fig tree concept in its original context:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
27. Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge
See, no offence to Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, but THIS is the kind of witty writing that I really enjoy; the wit is incidental to the plot, not the main feature of it. From the first sentence of this little fantasy novel I was enraptured by the author's twisty sentences and wry humour. And underneath the cleverness, real characters and a surprisingly intricate amount of worldbuilding and storytelling for a relatively compact novel. Will read more by this author (thank you K for the recommendation).
28. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Continuing my tradition of Only Learning About World History by Reading Novels About It (as per Les Miserables, War and Peace and The Count of Monte Cristo).
This was a historical novel (published 2016) with perhaps a slight twist of magical realism. In 1922 a somewhat eccentric aristocrat is sentenced to indefinite house arrest within the Metropol Hotel, across the road from the Kremlin. From there, the decades and character studies unfurl. First thing I've read by this author but he is an indisputable master of prose. It's not that the prose is overwhelmingly literary or anything like that; it's like someone talking to you. The words are almost invisible, they speak directly into your ear.
A Final Note brought to you by poetry
And a recent volume of Margaret Atwood poems that looked untouched, but when I opened it, I found Gran's underlining throughout. She's still here, in all of the words she left me.
Comments
Post a Comment