Thanks to Goodreads, I have a record of everything I read in 2023. I love going back over what books I finished and the notes and highlights that stick out to me.
Here are lists I’ve compiled over the last few years:
- 8 Books To Review – A Summer Reading List (2019)
- Every Book I Read Last Year (2021)
- All The Books I’ve Read So Far In 2022
- Every Book I Read Since June (2022)
Fun Reads
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober.
Books That Changed My Mind
Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow’s edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.
Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy
Birth tears you open, sometimes violently, and you don’t just pull yourself back together and return to your previous state. Your organs have shifted, your muscles have torn, there are extra folds and layers to your skin and soul.
When we stop fearing laziness, we can find time to reflect and recharge, to reconnect with the people and hobbies that we love, and to move through the world at a more intentional, peaceful pace. “Wasting time” is a basic human need.
Books I Learned A Lot From
“The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”
The Sum of Small Things — A Theory of The Aspirational Class
The members of today’s aspirational class fully embrace their cultural omnivore status through many different forms of cultural capital and totemic objects. They pride themselves on going to hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants instead of Applebee’s, buying local farmers’ eggs, and wearing TOMS shoes because these signifiers of cultural capital reveal social and environmental consciousness, surely acquired in the pages of the New Yorker and at the elite universities they attended.
Memoirs
Exit Interview: The Life and Death of my Ambitious Career
On Polyamory and sexuality
Polywise: A Deeper Dive Into Navigating Open Relationships
Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy
Why is his being “logically right” more important than my feeling secure?
Cultural blind spots can show up as centrisms: couple-centrism, heterocentrism, eurocentrism. Nonmonogamy, extramarital sex, and open relationships all define themselves by what they aren’t, thus implying that they’re some exception to the “normal” relationships that “normal” people have.
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture
Beach Reads
Like even when something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters.
To Be Honest, I Did Not Finish This
There’s not anything necessarily wrong with these, but I didn’t end up getting very far through them.
To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories
Will Be Gifting This Book!
Noticing Book Trends
In total I read 37 books. Last year I read almost double that. I’m surprised, because I felt like I read about the same amount. Still, there’s no competition for reading the most books and I feel good about what I read this year!
You may notice some trends. One thing I noticed was an uptick in non-fiction books exploring a specific topic (in this case, polyamory). I also having been reading a ton of memoirs, which makes sense because I’m writing one!
I have very few books about money on the list. I did read Die With Zero, which was an interesting take on learning how to spend money when so much of our money culture is focused on scrimping and saving. The other money book I meant to get to this year was Financial Feminist. However, I just didn’t get around to reading many money books at all this year!
I also noticed a big uptick in unfinished books. I would often try reading multiple books at a time (with friends, book clubs, etc.) which would sideline books I was partway through. All-in-all, 2023 was a good year for reading, and I’m looking forward to my to-read list for next year!
I just compiled my list of reads for 2023 and it was more books than I though, although a good 50% could probably be categorized in the category of female protagonist detective series. I see you’re going old school with Tipping the Velvet 🙂 I don’t know that I can recommend a lot of the queer fiction that I read in the 90s and early 2000s to the youngest generation but they were important at a time when representation was slight.
I don’t know about favorite but I plowed through books 1-3 of the Locked Tomb series (Tamsyn Muir) and read the entire Chaos Walking trilogy over a long weekend.
Oh I love the sound of female protagonist detective series!
I’ll check out those series, always love the ones that keep you hooked.
Good idea of keeping track, I think the Libby app does that too for those that borrow from the Library. Dopamine Nation caught my eye, looks like it’s been a popular book this year. Got it on hold!
Yes! I also checked my Libby app as well. Let me know what you think of Dopamine Nation!
Hey Financial Mechanic, are you gifting this book away? If that’s the case, I’ll take it lol
Will Be Gifting This Book!
Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha
Hi Ken, sorry to say I just meant that when it’s time to gift someone like my sister or friends a book, that’s one I’ll pick to pass on! Though this does make me wonder if I should do another book giveaway, I haven’t done one since Work Optional. https://financialmechanic.com/my-work-optional-life-and-giveaway/
OMG I love your list so much. So many of these resonate with me and are interesting so thank you for sharing! My favorite books are “The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying,” by Bronnie Ware, “Finding Me,” by Viola Davis, the Esther Perel Book and anything by Terry Real is amazing and so insightful. Especially the book on male depression. Thank you so much for sharing your list!
I didn’t know any of those books (aside from Perel) so thank you for sharing!
I LOVE these book posts! I especially love how you organize them by categories, rate them, and give a short summary. I used last year’s reading summary to make a To-Read list for myself and will do the same this year. Thank you for taking the time to share these!
So glad to hear! Hope to hear what you think of some of the same books!