★★★★☆ Ten thousand

My 2023 in books

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I read 230 books and stories this year, as Goodreads tracks them. Last year I hit 237. I am 68 years old. If I had read 237 books in each of those years, my total would reach 16116.

Now, my life-time average is obviously lower than 237 books/year. I read precious few books before the age of three, even if I count picture books my mother read to me. And I do! Those absolutely count. Still 16,000 books is an upper bound. At a guess, I may have read 10,000 books in my life.

That doesn't seem like very many. There are far, far more than ten thousand books that I want to read or to have read. Yet it is a lot! I know that I read more books than the average person. So that's a thing to think about if you're a reader. It's unlikely that you will read more than ten thousand books in your life.

I changed my reading routine a bit over the course of this year. I have always disliked reading more than one book at a time. However, I now routinely have four in my "Currently Reading" List. First is the book I consider myself to be reading (currently The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, William Manchester, Paul Reid), usually on kindle, but occasionally paper. Then I have an audiobook going to listen to on my daily walks or on road trips (currently The Annihilation Score, Charles Stross). That is usually a re-read. Then I have a book of poetry going (currently Enough Rope, Dorothy Parker). I read a couple pages every morning. Finally, there is the book from which I am currently harvesting Japanese vocabulary (currently The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry). I try to add five new flash cards to my drill every day. When my supply of new cards goes below five, I read enough to find five new words to add to my decks. Since each new word yields two cards, that means I progress through the book at an average rate of 2.5 new words a day.

Some stand-out books in 2023:

The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
Once There Was, Kiyash Monsef
Soldier of the Mist series (reread), Gene Wolfe
The Founders Trilogy, Robert Jackson Bennett.
Little Thieves, Margaret Owen
A Shropshire Lad, A.E. Housman
The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Roger Zelazny (natch!)

I am not dissatisfied with my 2023 in reading. I will probably set my challenge goal to 200 again next year. I honestly don't care about the challenge per se, but I like to know how many books I've read and the challenge is a convenient way of keeping track.

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★☆ A spaceship makes tea and a detective looks for bodies

The Tea Master and the Detective Aliette de Bodard Aliette de Bodard 's The Tea Master and the Detective is a novella/novelette (it took me about two hours to read) set in de Bodard 's Xuya Universe . In my opinion, a reader will benefit from a little background reading on Xuya before attempting any Xuya stories. Of the three I have read so far, which are The Citadel of Weeping Pearls , Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight , and The Tea Master and the Detective , this is the only one that is really comprehensible without a prior introduction to the world. The main innovation in this story, and one of the principle features of de Bodard 's Xuya, is the existence of spaceships who are persons. Science Fiction fans will have encountered the idea of conscious spaceships before this. The earliest example of it that I know was Anne McCaffrey 's The Ship Who Sang , and a more recent example is Ann Leckie 's Imperial Radch ...

★★★★★ Witches and pain magic

Storm Cursed Patricia Briggs As I have noted elsewhere , the three pillars of magical society in Patricia Briggs 's Mercyverse , also Mercyverse , are werewolves, vampires, and fae. However, she also feels free to import any folkloric creatures that anyone has ever told stories about. Thus Mercy herself is descended from First Nation not-quite-a-god Coyote. Aside from the big three, most of these other magical beings are one-offs. And since Briggs is all about the politics and palace intrigue, they don't have the standing to become pillars of Mercyverse magical society. In fact, the first three books, Moon Called , Blood Bound , and Iron Kissed , served as introductions to werewolves, vampires, and fae, respectively. If there is a fourth, it is witches. Witches are important in the Mercy Thompson series and even more in the companion Mercyverse series Alpha and Omega . Columbia basin witch Elizaveta Arkadyevna has a...

★★★★★ Kaladin and Sylphrena dance

Wind and Truth Brandon Sanderson Some books contain a moment so perfect, so luminous, that it glows up an entire series. I think of the scene in Lloyd Alexander 's Chronlces of Prydain in which Fflewddur Fflam burns his harp, or the reunion of Molly and Foxglove in Ben Aaronovitch 's Lies Sleeping , or Cordelia's return from her shopping trip in Lois McMaster Bujold 's Barrayar . Wind and Truth , the latest installment in Brandon Sanderson 's Stormlight Archive contains such a moment. It is when Kaladin, trying to imagine something that would make him happy, realizes, "He wanted to go dancing with Syl." Kaladin, "an old spear who wouldn’t break," is a grizzled veteran who has been a solider, a slave, and a leader and who has survived the hardest of lives. Sylphrena is an honorspren -- that is, she is an audible, visible, and occasionally tangible embodiment of Honor. She and Kal are bound by oaths, not t...

★★★★★ Brilliant, dark and dangerous and angry

Once There Was Kiyash Monsef Marjan Dastani is an orphan. Her mother died of cancer when she was eight years old. Her mother's death broke Marjan and it broke her father Jamsheed. Eight years passed, then her father was murdered. That was three months ago. Marjan is still grieving, and hers is not a gentle grief. Marjan does not grieve gentle -- she grieves hard and she grieves angry. Marjan's father was a veterinarian. He had a small, struggling practice in Berkeley. Marjan, being still in High School, has no formal training in veterinary practice. Her father, however, let her watch while he treated animals, and even asked her assistance. Even without formal training, Marjan is a practically trained vet. Marjan's father frequently left Marjan to herself for days or a week while he left town on unexplained trips. Now, months after her father's death, she receives a phone call, and a request to travel to England (along with a first-class air ticket). At the airport a dig...

★★★☆☆ There are three kinds of people…

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything Nate Silver I have mixed feelings about Nate Silver ’s On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything , because it is a mixed kind of book. On the one hand, I find Silver ’s way of thinking: quantitative, probabilistic, epistemically humble, congenial. On the other, his need to make enemies is less congenial. The premise of On the Edge is that people who live by managing risks form a community, which Silver Calls “The River”. His definition of the River (“River: A geographical metaphor for the territory covered in this book, a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded, highly analytical, and competitive people that includes everything from poker to Wall Street to AI. The demonym is Riverian.”) is broad and vague, but that is not really a problem, because the book consists mostly of profiles of hundreds of Riverians — by the end, you have a clear idea of who (in Silver 's mind) the members are. Silver ...

★★★★☆ Once the engine starts, it's great

The Briar Book of the Dead AG Slatter Personnes d’un certain âge had an experience that I think most of you young folks now manage to avoid: starting a small gasoline engine with a pull cord. Here's what that's like. You always start by flooding the carburetor. Then you pull the cord, the engine turns over, and stops. You do it again and again. Finally, maybe on the fourth pull the cylinder fires once -- "putt". Then, on the next pull, you hear it fire three times -- "Putt, putt, putt," and stall again. At last, you pull once more time, the engine catches, you open the throttle a bit -- "Roar!", and you're off. I mention this, because that's what reading A.G. Slatter 's The Briar Book of the Dead was like. At the beginning I could feel Slatter trying to start this plot. She'd pull the cord, it turned over and failed to catch. Finally, about a third of the way into the book, I felt the engine fire. The next chapter after that it...

★★★★★ Finding a home

The Blue Sword Robin McKinley When I was growing up my father's job kept my family moving. Mom and Dad eventually settled down, but just when they did I became an itinerant academic, moving to study and work at various research institutions. I was a 27 year old grad student at Stanford when I first read The Blue Sword and the longest I had ever lived in one place was six years. (Understand, I am not complaining -- I was and am a Happy Nomad.) There's a peculiar type of homesickness experienced by rootless people. One usually thinks of homesickness as being away from and missing a very specific place -- the place one calls home. But I had no place to call home. And yet I sometimes felt homesick -- I felt the lack of a home -- all the more because there was no home where I longed to be. In the first few chapters of The Blue Sword I immediately recognized this feeling of rootless homesickness in Angharad (Harry) Crewe, the hero of the book. As the book begins Harry ...

★★★★☆ Thursday Next goes recursive

First Among Sequels Jasper Fforde We ended Something Rotten with what looked a lot like a resolution. We learned that Granny Next, who had been hanging around wearing blue gingham and looking for the ten most boring books ever written, was in fact Thursday herself in her old age. If you've read the previous books in Jasper Fforde 's Thursday Next series , nothing will surprise you less to learn that 110-year-old Thursday had somehow become a contemporary of mid-thirty-year-old Thursday and died happily in her presence. And if you HADN'T read the other books, you might think that this means that Thursday is going to survive to a grand old age and die peacefully, in the presence of her family. Happy endings all around! But of course nothing is more labile than the past in the Thursday Next series . Thursday's husband Landen has blinked in and out of existence for most of the previous books. So, although I do suspect that Thursday's eventual fate will be as fo...

★★☆☆☆ There must be a more concise way to say, "Scientists are bad, and I don't understand virology."

Rise: A Newsflesh Collection Mira Grant Rise: A Newsflesh Collection is a collection of short fiction adjacent to Seanan McGuire 's Newsflesh series of zombie novels. It includes all the Newflesh short fiction currently (14-Jul-2022) listed on Goodreads' Newsflesh series page , except for Fed . And the collection is NOT short. Most of the eight stories included are novellas and took me about two hours each. So, it was a long slog, which I undertook only as part of my project to read everything McGuire has published. I was glad to reach the end. There is, in my opinion, one rather good story in here: The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell . By itself it would rate a high three stars. It is the reason the book gets two stars rather than one. Without further ado, here are the stories: Countdown tells the story of how the Kellis-Amberlee virus (the Newsflesh zombie virus) came to be. it is a long recitation of McGuire ...

★★★☆☆ Simon is still droopy, but at least we learn things

With Sweet Peace Seanan McGuire With Sweet Peace is Seanan McGuire 's September 2022 Patreon reward. It is a story in her October Daye series , and continues the recent series of short stories about Simon and August Torquill's settling into their new lives in Saltmist. Here's how she introduced it on Patreon, Uh-oh! Here we go again. Faerie needs therapists, but at least August knows what those are, and can help her father a little bit with trying to figure himself out. We're Undersea again, as the timeline marches forward, and August gets info Toby lacks. With Sweet Peace is the sixth Patreon story set in what I will call the Lorden household (because Lorden/Twycross/Torquill becomes unwieldy). In A Killing Frost Simon Torquill was freed of his entanglements with several horrifying fae women: Eira Rosynhwyr, Amandine, and Oleander (although to be accurate, Oleander had already been dead for several novels at the time) and immediate...

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