In a short story by Carol Shields, the narrator receives too many social invitations for the same weekend evening and decides to stay home and read Jane Austen instead.

I make decisions like this, too, which is why I read 201 books (54,498 pages) in 2023.

In terms of pages, this is similar to my previous reading year (about a thousand pages difference), but about forty books fewer.

The shortest books were Zadie Smith’s The Essay of Cambodia (which is a single short story) and Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow (96 pages).

And the longest was Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal, although ironically Zadie Smith’s Feel Free was tagging along there too (545 pages).

My quietest months for reading were February and July; my busiest months for reading for April and June. (From year to year, these months have proven that there’s no predicting: the previous year, the quietest was January and the busiest was December.)

NOTE: THE WIDGETS BELOW ARE DESIGNED TO BE VIEWED ONLINE, NOT IN EMAIL OR A FEED READER, SO PLEASE CLICK THROUGH.

201 Books Read

2022 = 242 books

My year began and ended with writers I’d not read previously, ‘new-to-me’ writers: some intentionally, some whimsically.

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% New-to-Me Reading
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% Of Reading

Both the percentage of books written by women writers and the percentage written by writers of colour: coincidentally, the same!

Shortest = 70pg

Longest = 560pg

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# Pages Read

The irony of the title of Métis writer Michelle Porter’s 2023 novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story, is that the story begins where one chooses. “Our creation story begins with the cry of the young and we follow that cry,” she later writes: “We’ll follow those cries across the land and into the next world, too.”

Time and space are different here: “And now it was someone else’s turn to tell a story. I was cold. I was old and cold.” The chapters are short and kaleidoscopic. With each turn of the page, readers have an opportunity to resituate themselves and the characters they’ve already met. Bits of story, like songs, align and diverge.

In some ways, this is more like reading poetry than prose. You can read a page or two and set aside the book once more because each section presents a different perspective. There are many perspectives here (with another writer, I might say many voices, but that’s not true here) and, at first, I thought I recognised a pattern I’ve loved in books by, say, Louise Erdrich or Michael Cunningham. And there’s some of that.

But Porter is telling a different kind of story about how one can choose to view the world, about how one can choose to view one’s own place in it, their relationships—kinships—to and with other inhabitants. And this is evident in the structure of her book.

“When it’s my turn, I’m going to bring everyone around an old wood stove, smell of a stew bubbling on top, the heat making our faces pink as the stories unwind. Can’t get enough of the telling. Which is a good thing, because it there’s one thing we’ve got here, it’s time.”

If you enjoy writers like Linda Hogan and Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo and Rebecca Solnit, Tommy Orange and Morgan Talty, you’ll want to read this. And if this sounds vague, it’s because the kind of jolt I got, midway through reading, when I began to understand what Porter’s up to, is the reason I read: I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. This is how a book permanently alters understanding: tenderly, lastingly. A highlight in my 2023 reading year.

What surprised me about 2023’s reading? I was surprised that some reading almost entirely disappeared (poetry, graphic novels and memoirs, books for children and young readers—just six of these, total). These are double-digit categories for me usually and for most of the year, I wasn’t aware of not reading them. But the previous year held more of all of them, more than usual perhaps, so perhaps a single year doesn’t really capture the spirit of a reading wave.

It’s easy to forget that when we are choosing what we will read, we are also choosing what we will not read. So I wasn’t reading as much of those categories, but I did read more than double the genre fiction than I read in 2022; that pleased me, brought more new-to-me writers into my stacks, and addressed the disappointment I’d felt at missing those stories in the previous couple of years.

Other categories seemed to swap too: I read ten more story collections in 2023 which made it a slightly-better-than-average year for short fiction for me. Because of the nature of my year, I didn’t post my usual Quarterly Short Story posts during the year, but they’re live now: Spring 2023, Summer 2023, Autumn 2023, and Winter 2023. Please let me know if any of these collections tempt you.

But while I was reading more short stories, I was reading fewer works in translation: fifteen fewer than in 2022. This hasn’t affected the overall diversity of my reading: there are still 32 countries represented in my reading log, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. And even before I had done my 2023 calculations, there were several translations in my stack for 2024 already, so I think this will steady.

I was disappointed to have only reread one book in 2022, but I reread three in 2023. With my reading goals for 2024, I think rereading will be a more natural fit. Almost half my reading is new books: in 2023, 42% of my reading was published in 2023 and 2022. Only ten books that I read had been published before 2000 (one of my 2022 readolutions that I am re-adopting for 2023, a backwards glance) and my three rereads were among them. I’ve already reread one book, and have readopted my abandoned Middlemarch project (also from 2022) which is another reread.

Non-fiction was scarcer in my stacks last year (only 24%, compared to 32% in 2022, which was a little low too) but I read more literary fiction (45%, compared to 37% the year before). My current library stack of five books includes two non-fiction and the next set of holds on their way reflects the same breakdown. I think that will naturally shift…but that’s veering towards more 2024 talk than 2023!

Some of my stand-out reads from 2023 will come into the conversation here by virtue of my reading more of those author’s books this year, so I’ll leave them be for now.

But Bryan Washington’s Family Meal was stand-out for me this year and I’m all caught up with him so won’t be reading him again this year, and I haven’t heard if Maxine Clair has a new book in the works, but Rattlebone was a perfect match for my reading taste (publisher).

Offline, James Nestor’s Breath is probably the book I’ve recommended most often in the past year, followed by Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara. And because I know some of you love linked collections of stories, Ana Menéndez’s The Apartments is one for you.

Chances are, I’ve already read your year-end summary but, if not, feel free to share the link in a comment. Because my feed reader was dormant for six months in 2023, some feeds seem to have been removed, and I’m only gradually reconnecting with some people now.

And, if you don’t create a yearly summary, feel free to share what you liked about your reading last year and what you’d hoped would be different book-wise?

Thanks to each and every person reading this: the community of readers online is a fantastic reminder that being bookish is a great way to be.