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.
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