Books of 2023

It says here I finished reading 44 (non comic) books in 2023. Don’t get the wrong idea: They were mostly lightweight fantasy or science fiction. I haven’t been much in the mood for nonfiction lately, or Weighty Novels, and it’s been an eternity since I’ve been in the mood for short stories.

Books I started and did not finish reading in 2023 include the one I’m working on now. (Christopher Moore’s Lamb, a reread.) Other than that, a small number I stopped reading either because I just didn’t like them (and there should have been a less small number of them; for instance, why I didn’t bail out of D. A. Holdsworth’s How To Buy a Planet early on I don’t know — I certainly wish I had), or because they were not about what I thought they’d be about and I wasn’t interested in what they were about. Or in one case, there were a very promising first few chapters of an on-sale novel I downloaded as a free sample, only to find I hadn’t read it fast enough and the sale price had expired in the meantime. I’ll wait until it’s on sale again.

Note: Do you know about eReaderIQ? If you buy ebooks on Amazon, or even if you buy them elsewhere, it lets you set price watches on ebooks of interest and then sends you an email when the price drops (at Amazon, but usually elsewhere too). That and BookBub keep me out of debtor’s prison.

I started off the year with a lot of time travel stories: Some of Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel books, and then continuing with the St. Mary’s/Time Police books by Jodi Taylor I’d started in 2022. From there it was not a big leap to Eva St. John’s Quantum Curators novels. Then a few miscellaneous stand-alone or duology books, followed by Kim M. Watt’s Gobbelino London stories. More miscellany then, including a reread of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. And from May to November, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in real time.

I’m not about to review all of them, but I’ll mention the ones I liked best. In the order I read them:

To Say Nothing Of the Dog by Connie Willis

Well duh. This is at least the third time I’ve read this one, so of course I like it a lot. I wrote about it, and Willis’s, to me, less successful Blackout/All Clear in Time travel for fun and misery. tldr; For my money, pretty much the best and funniest time travel novel of all time.

Star Island by Carl Hiaasen

I got into Hiassen a couple years ago, I guess. He’s written a lot of books, so I’m still catching up: Star Island dates from 2010. It’s pretty much what you expect from Hiassen — Florida, violence, entitled yuppies, clueless losers, and a screwball plot. It has Skink in it, if you’re wondering. And other memorable characters, notably Cherry Pye, a young alleged singer who’s about two steps away from being the next pop star overdose death, and her more down to earth body double, Ann DeLusia, who I dare you not to fall in love with.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Swashbuckling fantasy adventure, set in and around the Gulf of Aden about a thousand years ago. The main character’s a retired pirate captain who just wants to stay home and raise her daughter. You will not be surprised to learn she does not do so. Instead she’s blackmailed into tracking someone else’s granddaughter, who has been kidnapped — or was she? — by what turns out to be a European sorcerer on a quest to gain supernatural power. Amina needs to get the gang back together, scrounge up a crew, and sail off to rescue the girl and take down the bad guy and his pet sea monster. Escapist stuff, but well written.

Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet

An instant classic. Weinersmith, the creator of the “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal” webcomic, and legendary artist Boulet team up to give you Beowulf. Or maybe not you but your kids, because it’s retold as a story about a heroic girl who takes on a monster in the form of a middle aged guy who takes noisy children and turns them into (horrors) adults. It’s all in very authentic-seeming saga-type verse, full of alliteration and metaphor, and I changed my mind, never mind your children, you should read it. It’s actually only the first part of Beowulf, so, yes, plan on a sequel.

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

This is dark horror/fantasy, not the sort of thing I read a lot of, but I like it when it’s well written. Ninth House is very well written. Bardugo has a lot of balls in the air: The main story, the backstory, and the backstory’s backstory, all juggled flawlessly. It’s set at Yale University, where Galaxy (“Alex”) Stern is a most unlikely freshman. Unknown to most, her being there is not due to her scholastic record, athletic ability, or family pull; it’s because she can see ghosts. And seeing ghosts is a valuable skill when monitoring the occult activities of Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Manuscript, and the rest of the eight Houses of the Veil. Then a woman is murdered near campus, and it looks like the Houses might be connected, and Stern is told to keep her nose out of the case. So does she? Of course not. Warning: There’s graphic violence, sexual assault, and one bit of coprophagy here. There’s also the occasional laugh:

“Look around. What do you see? People in costumes, horns, false jewels… They stand up straighter, suck in their stomachs, say things they don’t mean, indulge in flattery. They commit a thousand small acts of deception, lying to each other, lying to themselves, drinking to the point of delusion to make it easier. This is a night of compacts… when people enter false bargains willingly, hoping to be duped and to dupe in turn for the pleasure of feeling brave or sexy or beautiful or simply wanted…”

“Darlington, are you telling me Manuscript is powered by beer goggles?”

And finally, from one of the books that didn’t rate quite as high, but had the best opening lines of the year:

There were two of them. Smiling, pleasant, devious, almost certainly lying through their teeth and definitely not to be taken at face value.

So that made three of us, then.

― Jodi Taylor, The Good, the Bad and the History