My Year in Books

I'll tell you my favorite if you tell me yours...

I was in the middle of doing tax prep, so naturally I decided to stop and make a list of all the books I read this year. This is something I’ve never done before, and I found it so incredibly satisfying that I’m clearly going to have to make it an annual “thing.”

(And much like tallying my deductions, next year I should probably keep a running list instead of hunting and pecking through a year’s worth of data to compile it all at the tail end of Q4. Woof.)

ANYWAY.

It looks like I averaged a little more than one per week: 65 total books; 51 of them fiction and 14 nonfiction. And over half of them were by authors whose previous book(s) I’ve also read and enjoyed, which I thought was an interesting factoid. I’m a gal who knows what she likes.

I’m in the middle of a novel right now (Less by Andrew Sean Greer) and have a memoir on tap after that (Class by Stephanie Land), so with two weeks left on the calendar, I’m guessing I’ll come in at a cool 67 when all is said and done.

Not too shabby!

One of the great joys of my life for the last eight years has been getting back to reading purely for pleasure. I was an editor for fifteen years before that, and while I loved having the chance to discover new voices and publish terrific books and contribute to the cultural conversation in that way, it also meant I was speed-reading dozens of submissions a week, and then reading MY authors’ manuscripts three, four, five, maybe even six times during the editing process, so there was precious little time left for reading just for the fucking fun of it.

Which is to say, looking at this list makes me happy.

A half dozen of these books, I seriously LOVED. Most of them, I really liked, and many were enjoyable enough to get the job done, so to speak. One of them I’d been looking forward to and was utterly disappointed by, and one I hate-finished just to see what happened. (And there were four books that didn’t make the list because I disliked them enough to neither finish nor hate-finish them. Life is too short.)

Overall, a very pleasing ratio of great reads to total turkeys.

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Some highlights:

Yellowface was my favorite book of the year (and not only because I got to read it by an infinity pool in Greece). It was just so smart, provocative, and page-turning—and of course I love all of that Book Publishing inside baseball, which I thought was done exceptionally well.

Spare by Prince Harry was my surprise hit. As I said in my October newsletter, “I don’t give two puddings about the Royal Family, but I decided to get this book after reading a fascinating interview with Harry’s ghost writer, J.R. Moehringer. And you know what? I loved it. #NotSorrry.”

It was cool to read the seven books in Adrian McKinty’s Belfast Troubles-era crime series all in a row. I did the same with Tana French’s oeuvre during the pandemic and highly recommend it. (Related: what is it with me and bingeing on Irish crime fic?)

And there are two books in here that basically saved my life this year. I’ll be writing more about them soon…

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Here’s my 2023 reading list, alphabetical by author last names:

FICTION

• Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott

• Bunny by Mona Awad

• Cutting Teeth by Chandler Baker

• Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

• The Spare Room by Andrea Bartz

• The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop

• The Guest by Emma Cline

• My Darkest Prayer by S.A. Cosby

• Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

• Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens

• The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley

• The Traitor by Ava Glass

• The Lost Man by Jane Harper

• Ghostman by Roger Hobbs

• Vanishing Games by Roger Hobbs

• Gangland by Chuck Hogan

• Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes

• The Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard

• The Last Orphan (an Orphan X Novel) by Gregg Hurwitz

• Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

• Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

• Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

• Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica

• Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

• She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb

• Prom Mom by Laura Lippman

• I’d Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman

• I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

• Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner

• What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall

• Friends Like These by Kimberly McCreight

• The Housemaid by Freida McFadden

• The Sean Duffy series by Adrian McKinty: The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, Gun Street Girl, Rain Dogs, Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly, and The Detective Up Late

• The Only Survivors by Megan Miranda

• The Vanishing Year by Kate Moretti

• The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

• The Mystery Guest by Nita Prose

• The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager

• Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin

• Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey

• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

• Zero Days by Ruth Ware

• One by One by Ruth Ware

• Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

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NONFICTION

• Whorephobia: Strippers on Art, Work, and Life by Lizzie Borden

• How to Be a Grown-Up: You’re Doing Fine and Let Me Tell You Why by Daisy Buchanan

• Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge: Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage by Helen Ellis

• Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses by Sarah Fay

• The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism by Dr. Jen Gunter

• Spare by Prince Harry

• Quietly Hostile: Essays by Samantha Irby

• Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

• Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier by Marissa Meltzer

• The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain by Dr. John Sarno

• Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by Dr. John Sarno

• Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder

• The Status Revolution: The Improbable Story of How the Lowbrow Became the Highbrow by Chuck Thompson

• Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia by Jade Wu, PhD

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How about you?

Do you count and keep track of the books you read? Do you stop reading books you don’t like, or do you soldier on to the bitter end? What did you read and love this year that you would recommend most highly? I’m on the hunt for January!

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A bit about me: I was a book editor in NYC for 15 years before quitting that career to pursue a freelance life (a decision that involved a lot of red wine and a lot of tears). In 2015 I had the idea for my first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck. And people loved it, so I kept writing! Today my sweary self-help series includes Get Your Shit Together, Calm the Fuck Down, Grow the Fuck Up, and more, with 3 million copies in print all over the world.

You can also find me on Instagram, where my content skews tropical (in addition to quitting my job, I quit New York entirely and moved to a small fishing village in the Dominican Republic), plus food, cocktails, travel, and cats. So many cats.