I hope your holiday season has been book-filled and restful and that 2024 shines brighter than 2023. I mean, no matter how things are, sometimes just hoping that things “are better next time around” is good enough. 2023 had its rough patches, but there’s a new year just around the corner.

I’ve never been much of an Auld Lang Syne kind of person (though New Year’s Eve is absolutely my favorite holiday), and I don’t get very nostalgic, but it is fun to look over a stack of books you have read.

My 2023 stack is 25 titles tall, which LibraryThing tells me is taller than a garden gnome but shorter than a tennis net. I am also reading more contemporary books, with all of my 2023 reads having been published since 1990. I am running about 50% fiction and 50% non-fiction. That sounds healthy, doesn’t it?

My favorite fiction reads of 2023 were: Erasure by Percival Everett, How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely, and Trust by Hernan Diaz.

My favorite non-fiction reads of 2023 were: This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew by Daniel Wallace, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, and Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling through the Land of My Ancestors by Louise Erdrich.

There are so many books I am looking forward to reading in 2024! Already in the queue are: The Fraud by Zadie Smith, The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading by Andrew Pettegree, The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, and Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson.

I think I am going to have to pick up the Stevenson first. Writers, trains, and a locked room murder seems like a wonderful way to spend the New Year’s weekend waiting for 2024 to arrive.

So, a BIG happy New Year’s to you all! Thank you for stopping by the blog, and I look forward to hearing what you are reading in the new year.