2023 readiing review

2023 has come to an end. That means it's time for my year-end review of my reading hobby, my traditional first post of the new year.

My annual goal is to read 50 books of any type. Last year, I fell well short of that target. This year, on the other hand, I exceeded it, reading 70 books. That's a record, surpassing the 61 I read in 2020. According to my stats at Goodreads, by page count I've read only marginally more in 2023 than 2020. That means I've been selecting shorter titles, though for the most part not intentionally. (And not to cheat my way to meeting my goal!)

My first book this year was A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, whom I resolved to read more of in 2022. During the year I also read his An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day. The last was meant to be my final novel for the year until I realized it was much shorter than I remembered. Oops.

Anyway, the last novel of 2023 is The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. Technically, I finished it up this afternoon, but I'm not going to begrudge 2023 one last book over the last chapter. This was a re-read of a book that was required reading in my last year of high-school English. Like The Turn of the Screw a few years ago, I found I enjoyed it much more in middle age than my teenage years. Now I feel inclined to re-read and re-evaluate a lot of boring high-school literature. (The Catcher in the Rye and Heart of Darkness are still boring, though.)

The newest book I read this year was The Secret by Lee and Andrew Child, published in October. As the Jack Reacher series are the only books I make a point of reading soon after release, then unless the brothers Child change their publishing timetable or my overall reading habits evolve, this is very likely to be an annual constant.

The oldest book was, again, a play by Aphra Behn: The Dutch Lover from 1673. My original plan was to read all of Behn's plays during a year on weekend afternoons, as I had done with Shakespeare's works. I guess I'm less enthusiastic about Behn, since in nearly three years years I've managed only three out of (I believe) 18 plays. She's enjoyable, though.

My favourite book of the year? Well … The Remains of the Day has long been my favourite novel, nothing has yet displaced it, and I re-read it just this week (for the fourth time). If I leave it out of contention, however, and look at books I hadn't read before, then the nod goes instead to Stephen King's Revival, a surprisingly good horror story—surprising not because I have low expectations for King, but because his books just prior to this 2014 one were focused on crime (Mr. Mercedes, Joyland), fantasy (The Wind Through the Keyhole), and science fiction (Under the Dome), so his return to straight-up supernatural horror was a welcome one. Runner-up: An Artist of the Floating World. I'll grant this one to Ishiguro.

My least favourite of the year: Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh. I can't put my finger on anything particularly bad about this novel; it just failed to hold my interest. In my ongoing reading of the Hugo- and Nebula-winning novels, I was looking forward to this one, since I had read and enjoyed Cherryh's Rimrunners years ago, but Downbelow Station just didn't live up to the expectations I'd built up in my head. Your mileage may vary. Sometime in 2024 I'll also be reading a follow-up novel, Cyteen, set in the same universe as the other two, and I haven't been prejudiced against it yet. Runner-up: The Gray Man by Mark Greaney. Again, a novel that didn't live up to my expectations. It was entertaining enough to pass the time while travelling, but I thought it predictable and derivative of older thrillers such as The Bourne Identity.

The best new discovery of the year was a genre, rather than an author: the Japanese light novel. This isn't a genre that we have in the West, as such. I suppose the closest equivalent would be a young-adult series—or a comic book, if they came in prose. Near the beginning of the year, I watched the anime series Sword Art Online and Full Metal Panic!, and liked them enough to want to read the source material. I've read a handful of volumes of each series. Of the two, I enjoy the story in Full Metal Panic, written by Shōji Gatō more; but I think Sword Art Online by Reki Kawahara is better written. In fairness to both authors, I can't read Japanese, so I can't tell whether this is due to their own writing ability or the translators'. I'd never read a non-Western novel before the end of 2020, and now I've latched on to blatantly commercial Japanese juvenile fiction as a source of semi-disposable entertainment. Runner-up: The House Without a Key, the first of the Charlie Chan mystery novels by Earl Derr Biggers.

A book I finally finished: Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I visit with a friend weekly, and for many years it's been my habit on the walk back home to listen to an audiobook. In late 2019, I started Bleak House—specifically, the Librivox recording narrated by Mil Nicholson, which is excellent. Now, this is a long novel comprising 67 chapters, and my travel time was about enough for one chapter per week. And then there was the pandemic, which put a halt on those weekly sessions. Even without COVID it would have taken more than a year to finish; as it was, I finished Bleak House three years and ten months after starting. Runner-up: The Once and Future King by T. H. White, which took two years and ten months start to finish; it is, however, a series of four novels.

I aim to read five nonfiction books per year. In 2023, I read eight (and part of three more). Most of these were theology, as I have from time to time been studying issues such as Dispensationalism and neo-Pentecostalism. The best of these was No Quick Fix, by Andrew Naselli, a critique of the Keswick Holiness or “Higher Life” movement.

Finally, my reading goals for 2024 include:

• completing my chronological reading of Stephen King's books, which I began c. 2010. Including the upcoming story collection, You Like It Darker, I've got ten books left. Then I'll have nothing else to look forward to but new Stephen King novels.
• blogging a readthrough of Roger Zelazny's fantasy series, The Chronicles of Amber. I'll post more details about this in the new year.
• reading Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en, one of the four great classical Chinese novels. This is a long one. I've read the complete works of Shakespeare, Les Misérables, The Lord of the Rings, and the Bible, and I think Journey to the West outweighs any of them. Reading it is sure to be almost as much of an epic as the story itself.

My return trip to Ottawa is the day after New Year's, and my coach reading (and very probably the first novel of 2024) will be Andrew Klavan's A Strange Habit of Mind, the second of his Cameron Winter mysteries.

Happy New Year, everyone!