2023: My Year in Books
Time for my annual roundup of the books I read in the last year. This time, I am trying to overcome my weakness for procrastination; in 2022 I didn’t finish this essay until February 24th.
Anyway, here they are, in chronological order. I’m not the ranking type.
1. The Dutch House, Ann Patchett
2. Bloodbath Nation, Paul Auster
3. O Pioneers!, Willa Cather
4. The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
5. Stolen Focus, Johann Hari
6. Pandemic, Sonia Shah
7. The Five Wounds, Kristin Valdez Quade
8. Lit, Mary Karr
9. Thank You For Your Servitude, Mark Leibovitz
10. Paul: A Biography, NT Wright
11. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
12. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolfe
13. Super-Infinite: The Transformation of John Donne, Katherine Rundell
14. The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?, Michael J. Sander
15. Trees, Percival Everett
16. Range, David Epstein
17. King Lear, William Shakespeare
18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
19. Blindsight: The Mostly Hidden Way Marketing Reshapes our Brains, Matt Johnson and Prince Ghuman
20. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Hailey
21. Murder Your Darlings, Roy Peter Clark
22. A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar
23. The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
24. Anna Karenina, Lev Tolstoy
25. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, Zena Hitz
26. ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction — From Childhood to Adulthood, Edward M Hallowell, MD and John J. Ratey, M.D.
27. The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, Maurice Carlos Ruffin
28. The History of Philosophy, A.C. Grayling
29. The Five Pillars of the Spiritual Life, Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J.
30. Consciousness and the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene
Book that lived up to its billing: Anna Karenina. Many people say it is the best novel of all time. If not, it is close.
Surprise of the Year: I thought Lost in Thought would be a run-of-the-mill book about why we should read the classics. Not so. It makes a fairly serious philosophical case that without an inner intellectual life, the individual is doomed to be overwhelmed by the noise and materialism of living. Much more interesting than I thought it would be. And also told from an occasionally Catholic point of view, which I appreciated.
Surprise of the Year II: A Thousand Acres was remarkably good. It is a fairly faithful retelling of _King Lear_ on an Iowa corn farm. Very well done.
Mistaken Identity: I had often heard that Mrs. Dalloway is a stream-of-consciousness novel. It is nothing of the sort. What Woolfe wrote is a novel in which the point of view changes constantly, sometimes in mid-paragraph. This constant shifting of point of view feels a bit like stream-of-consciousness, but it is not the same thing. For my money, Woolfe’s approach is better.
Possibly More Trouble Than It Was Worth: The History of Philosophy was very interesting in its early chapters on Greece and Roman philosophy. Up through the Victorian period it was engaging. But I found analytic philosophy ridiculously convoluted and useless, and after that Grayling made a mad dash through almost a hundred philosophers, moving so fast I couldn’t figure them out.
Honorable Mention: I very much enjoyed The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You. This collection of stories included some very short stories — flash fiction, really — that weren’t to my taste, but whenever Ruffin’s stories went longer, he was excellent. Since the long stories made up most of the book, it was quite good.
Worst Book: ADHD 2.0. Ninety percent trash. I need to stop reading self-help books. They don’t help any selves.
