Books I read in 2023

2023-12-29

I read many more books in 2023 than I did in 2022, which is something I’m pretty happy about. I think this is mostly because I started commuting by transit, which gave me a lot of time on the train to read.

In 2022, much of my fiction reading revolved around sci-fi. While I read some great sci-fi in 2023 too (I have been recommending Ted Chiang’s Exhalation to everyone who asks), I also branched out a bit more to literary fiction (e.g., Celeste Ng, Haruki Murakami).

On the nonfiction side, I started the year with a few books about running, and dug a bit into photography later in the year. I think the rest of my nonfiction reading is pretty varied and not easily grouped into categories. There are some books about tech in there, but in general I think I felt pretty tired of tech books.

The books I particularly liked are marked with an (!).1 The list is in roughly chronological order.

Completed (or mostly completed)

  1. (!) The Overstory – Richard Powers
  2. Born to Run – Christopher McDougall
  3. Your Best Stride – Jonathan Beverly
  4. (!) Run Forever – Amby Burfoot
  5. (!) Leviathan Wakes – James S. A. Corey
  6. The Wandering Earth – Liu Cixin
  7. Elements of Style – William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White
  8. (!) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig
  9. (!!) Exhalation – Ted Chiang
  10. (!) Stolen Focus – Johann Hari
  11. Subprime Attention Crisis – Tim Hwang
  12. (!) The Electric State – Simon Stalenhag
  13. Learning in Public – Courtney E. Martin
  14. After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
  15. The Last Resort – Marissa Stapley
  16. ADHD Nation – Alan Schwarz
  17. (!) Little Fires Everywhere – Celeste Ng
  18. The Soul of the Camera – David DuChemin
  19. Photography and the Art of Seeing – Freeman Patterson
  20. Ghost in the Wires – Kevin Mitnick
  21. Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng
  22. (!) The Essence of Photography – Bruce Barnbaum
  23. (!) Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage – Haruki Murakami
  24. Tales From the Loop – Simon Stalenhag
  25. Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro
  26. Outlive – Peter Attia
  27. Mating in Captivity – Esther Perel
  28. Babel – R. F. Kuang
  29. Stay True – Hua Hsu
  30. (!) Going Infinite – Michael Lewis
  31. How to Shit in the Woods – Kathleen Meyer
  32. (!) Never Split the Difference – Chris Voss
  33. The Mysteries – Bill Watterson
  34. Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Partially completed

  1. Build – Tony Fadell
  2. How to Read a Book – Mortimer Adler
  3. Price Wars – Rupert Russell
  4. Book Lovers – Emily Henry
  5. Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
  6. Who Owns the Future? – Jaron Lanier
  7. The Terraformers – Annalee Newitz
  8. See/Saw – Geoff Dyer
  9. Making Embedded Systems – Elecia White
  10. Small is Beautiful – E.F. Schumacher
  11. The Sum of Small Things – Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

Films

Okay, so this doesn’t really belong here, but I thought I’d include it anyways. I haven’t been a big movie person in the past, but I enjoyed watching some more movies this past year. We discovered the Roxie, a cool independent theater near us, and went there several times.

  1. (!!) Suzume (2022)
  2. Barbie (2023)
  3. (!) Past Lives (2023)
  4. Asteroid City (2023)
  5. Tunnel Vision (2023)
  6. (!) Still Life (2006)
  7. The Boy and the Heron (2023)