What I Read in the Year 2023

2023’s books are recorded in the same notebook as the previous year and the one that I am still using for 2024. It’s a year that you can read about in more detail in my wrap up blog which you can find here. I also listed my favourite books of the year in three blogs which are here, here and here. I finished reading my 60 books, one from each year of my life just after I reached 61 years of age and you can find details of that here. I also started a summer challenge to try and read more books from my to-be-read piles – details of that challenge are here. It was, as you can see, a busy year.

I read 342 books in the year which is probably about the number I will read in 2024 and seems to be the number I naturally achieve these days – remember that as I am a retired person I do have more time than the average reader. Of those I read 24% were non-fiction which is a big increase on previous years and about the level that I want every year. Of those books, 36 were history, 25 biography/memoir and 10 were true crime which are my preferred type of factual book although I also enjoy reading travel books.

My first book of the year was Small Island by Andrea Levy which I read to represent 2004 in my 60 books challenge. You can read my review here but it is fair to say that it was a book I admired rather than loved (this is true about many of the books I read for this challenge). It’s about immigration and its effects on culture, society and individual people.

The final book I read in the year was Imperium by Robert Harris (see my review here) which is set in Ancient Rome and which I enjoyed a lot. It’s the first in a trilogy and although I own the next volume I haven’t got around to reading it yet which shows how bad the backlog of unread books now is. I may get to it in 2025.

2023 seems to me to have been a year in which crime reading was the staple of my reading diet. 37% of the books I read were crime, thrillers or suspense novels of one sort or another and as I have reviewed my reading over the past 25 years I can see that this is the genre that I always read the most – I think that I like the idea of wrongs being righted and the bad guys found, and I also like the puzzle element of the story. There always seem to be plenty more to read !