The best, the worst and the hair-tearers of 2023 — My reading summary
2023 was a funny year. Those who expect that every year following the current year would be better should consider a paradigm shift: AI is more prevalent and available for anybody with internet access, Hamas attacked Israel to spark a retaliation which polarised the world in half, the global recession is going strong and gaining speed as more and more jobs are made redundant, and temperatures everywhere are shattering records as 2023 beat preceding years as the warmest year in history to this point.
Regardless of this, I still resort to my books as an escape. I don’t think that’s likely to change, though the tumultuousness of 2023 which shattered the global scale is mirrored in my tempestuous personal life. Literature has always been there to carry me through some bad times and it has proven the same again last year.
I crossed the lifetime 1,000 books mark this year and it felt alright. I’m glad to have gone past the line, though it’s not by any means a finish line. If anything it made me consider whether I’m spending too much time reading again, which pervades my thought regularly anyway.
My reading patterns for 2023 was as follows:
In 2023, I completed 74 books out of the 60 books that I initially set out as my yearly goal. Out of those 74 books, most of them are fiction — only ten are non-fiction books, and some may be borderline fictional, as autobiographies are often guilty of. I’m ashamed to say that there’s not a lot of variety in the books I read last year in terms of the origin of the author: a whopping three-quarters of them are authors born in USA or England. These include second gen authors who may write about the country of their parents including Andrea Levy and Jhumpa Lahiri.
In terms of gender difference, only 19 of the 74 books are written by females, which is about a quarter. This is slightly better than my lifetime average of 15%. Though I seldom care about the author’s country of origin, I try to read more books written by female authors, but the prevalence of male authors mean that this number may remain hereabouts in the future, unless I start binge reading chick lit.
I’m a bit hard of my ratings, so there were no five star reads this time around, even though there were close contenders. The average rating this year was 3.01, which is low compared to previous years. All in all, I read 28,849 pages which the average page read per book at 389. That’s all the useless stats I’ve got for you.
As per the best and the worst, go read right ahead.
The Best: The Complete Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen and The Beast Within by Émile Zola
Andersen’s fairy tales almost made five star status, as I loved many of the stories in it. The stories are seldom happy, and the good guys seldom win. Those who wither are rarely offered salvation, and would just whimper and die. Yet, in all this misery, the fairy tales are wrought in beauty — it is full of humanity and human kindness. I read the fairy tales during a tough time, and I’m not sure if it helped. Perhaps it made my mental state worse, but it was a friend to me that I needed to visit, regardless of the ugliness coming out of his mouth.
Zola’s The Beast Within (La Bête Humaine) shattered me like a neighbour’s glass window, or more accurately like a trainwreck derailing through a city. Zola writes his characters like nobody’s business and exposes human frailty and folly to its utmost extremes. He seems to be obsessed with death and sex, and in the novel, the two go hand in hand. The prose melts like butter: in no other novel would you feel so attached to an inanimate object, as La Lison, the locomotive.
I couldn’t pick the best novel apart, so I needed to include these two.
Read my review of The Complete Fairy Tales here and The Beast Within here.
Honourable mentions:
- Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola (again!)
- Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant
- The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
The Worst: The Ambassadors by Henry James
This year I learned that I fucking hate Henry James and his deliberately convoluted fiction, weak as piss characters and unfinished dialogues that make you go huh? Yes, the man was obsessed with the form of the novel and The Ambassadors is a testament to that, but fuck me dead reading The Ambassadors is like waking up next to a fucking chainsaw that’s non-stop cutting down trees all day.
And once you unveil the novel, there’s not much behind the veils. That’s the thing that pissed me off the most. Yeah, maybe it’s not my cup of tea. But this tea tasted like shit to me.
Read my review of The Ambassadors here.
Honourable mentions:
- Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
- King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
The Hair Tearers: The Complete Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
Sometimes the best is also the most difficult. Andersen’s tales are mostly wonderful, but each one demand a lot from the reader. A tale can be multi-layered, a story within a story, and all layers will at some point interweave. A story can have multitudes of characters and species. Sometimes one event to the next are only loosely connected.
All short stories are taxing to my feeble brain. Context switching is real and his 160 odd fairy tales are each of a different colour. But don’t let this put you off — the tales are all wonderful, and I’d argue that we get more of it reading them as an adult than as a confused child.
Read my review of The Complete Fairy Tales here.
Honourable mentions:
- The Ambassadors by Henry James (Fuck this book, seriously)
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
