What a pleasure it is to curl up with a book, or take one with me on travels, or speed read a book because I can’t put it down. This year I began listening to audiobooks, after having so much fun narrating my own. I’m still not back up to the 52 books a year pace but managed to do a wee bit more reading this year than last. Focused on fiction in the back half of the year after many non-fiction reads earlier in 2023 and also a lot of non-fiction for work in 2022. Herewith:
1 | Slutever | Karley Sciortino |
2 | Central Places | Delia Cai |
3 | Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals | Oliver Burkeman |
4 | Plucked | Rebecca Herzig |
5 | Mad Honey | Jodi Picoult |
6 | Fat Talk | Virginia Sole Smith |
7 | Crying in H Mart | Michele Zauner |
8 | I Have Questions For You | Rebecca Makkai |
9 | All The Lovers in the Night | Mieko Kawakami |
10 | True Biz | Sara Novic |
11 | The Nineties | Chuck Klosterman |
12 | Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow | Gabrielle Levin |
13 | Advice for Living | Kevin Kelly |
14 | Romantic Comedy | Curtis Sittenfeld |
15 | Slow Days, Fast Company | Eve Babitz |
16 | The Emotional Lives of Teenagers | Lisa Damour |
17 | Happiness Falls | Angie Kim |
18 | Disorientation | Elaine Hsieh Chou |
19 | Couplets | Maggie Millner |
20 | Organs of Little Importance | Adrienne Chung |
21 | Lunar Love | Lauren Kang Jessen |
22 | Eyeliner: A Cultural History | Zahra Hankir |
23 | The Nutshell Method | Jill Chamberlain |
24 | Natural Beauty | Ling Ling Huang |
25 | The Messy Truth | Alli Webb |
26 | Funny You Should Ask | Elissa Sussman |
27 | Yellowface | RO Kwon |
28 | You Could Make this Place Beautiful | Maggie Smith |
Highlights:
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is now the book I recommend to everyone, in any circumstance. As I said to the Texas Book Fest, “Ostensibly [it’s] a book about time management, it’s actually a philosophical take that argues against productivity hacks and optimization. I think about it all the time.”
Fiction Favorites: Natural Beauty is a horror that feels all too real, Happiness Falls a mystery and character study I couldn’t put down, Disorientation was absurd and engrossing, Romantic Comedy was my favorite romcom, and among paperback romance novels I loved both Funny You Should Ask and Lunar Love.
Non-fiction Favorites: Besides Four Thousand Weeks, I loved Fat Talk, Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart, Maggie Smith’s divorce memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and Plucked, which seems like it’s about hair removal but is really about abuse.