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 (!). The
list is in roughly chronological order.
Completed (or mostly
completed)
- (!) The Overstory – Richard Powers
- Born to Run – Christopher McDougall
- Your Best Stride – Jonathan Beverly
- (!) Run Forever – Amby Burfoot
- (!) Leviathan Wakes – James S. A. Corey
- The Wandering Earth – Liu Cixin
- Elements of Style – William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White
- (!) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M.
Pirsig
- (!!) Exhalation – Ted Chiang
- (!) Stolen Focus – Johann Hari
- Subprime Attention Crisis – Tim Hwang
- (!) The Electric State – Simon Stalenhag
- Learning in Public – Courtney E. Martin
- After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
- The Last Resort – Marissa Stapley
- ADHD Nation – Alan Schwarz
- (!) Little Fires Everywhere – Celeste Ng
- The Soul of the Camera – David DuChemin
- Photography and the Art of Seeing – Freeman Patterson
- Ghost in the Wires – Kevin Mitnick
- Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng
- (!) The Essence of Photography – Bruce Barnbaum
- (!) Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage –
Haruki Murakami
- Tales From the Loop – Simon Stalenhag
- Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro
- Outlive – Peter Attia
- Mating in Captivity – Esther Perel
- Babel – R. F. Kuang
- Stay True – Hua Hsu
- (!) Going Infinite – Michael Lewis
- How to Shit in the Woods – Kathleen Meyer
- (!) Never Split the Difference – Chris Voss
- The Mysteries – Bill Watterson
- Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami
Partially completed
- Build – Tony Fadell
- How to Read a Book – Mortimer Adler
- Price Wars – Rupert Russell
- Book Lovers – Emily Henry
- Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
- Who Owns the Future? – Jaron Lanier
- The Terraformers – Annalee Newitz
- See/Saw – Geoff Dyer
- Making Embedded Systems – Elecia White
- Small is Beautiful – E.F. Schumacher
- 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.
- (!!) Suzume (2022)
- Barbie (2023)
- (!) Past Lives (2023)
- Asteroid City (2023)
- Tunnel Vision (2023)
- (!) Still Life (2006)
- The Boy and the Heron (2023)