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2023 Books in Review

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This is going to be a short update. I had a good year for my copyediting work, but this meant that I was doing crazy amounts of reading for technical topics, and my mind was burnt out for most other reading. Instead, I let my mind rest and mostly read a lot of webcomics, fanfiction, and magazines. These are my comfort reads, but they’re not easily trackable. Here are the “proper” books I read this year, using a truncated version of the list of questions from 2020:

  1. How many books did you read this year?

3 books (sigh)

  1. Did you reread anything? What?

I re-read some fanfiction that I adore, probably for the fifth time. In fact, I adore this particular fanfiction series so much (all 100,000+ words of it), I compiled all the different parts into a LaTeX document and exported it into a PDF, just for fun.

  1. What were your top five books of the year?

Since I only read 3 books this year, I guess they were all in my top 5.

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler – Blew my mind. Octopuses, robotics, philosophy, linguistics, and ethics. Really well written. I recommended it to my husband (who is more of a non-fiction reader), and it blew his mind too.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir – Necromancers in space. Enemies to epic lovers. Puzzles. Body horror. That’s really all that needs to be said about this book. I was very confused and unsure at the beginning but pushed forward, and it was fantastic by the end. Epic.

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells – Loved the first book, and while this didn’t quite reach that level, I thought it was a hilarious. Two robots pretend to be human to do a job interview. I mean. Hilarious. Martha Wells can do no wrong.

I loved all these books, and I’m glad I took the time to read them.

  1. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

Both Ray Nayler and Tamsyn Muir were new to me, and I look forward to reading more of their books in the future.

  1. What genre did you read the most of?

I read all speculative fiction in 2023. It’s my favorite genre to both read and write in.

  1. Was there anything you meant to read, but never got to?

So many. I’m in the middle of three different books at the moment, with at least 4 more that I’ve promised various people to read.

  1. What was your average Goodreads rating? Does it seem accurate?

My average rating for 2023 was 4.7 stars. I’m easy to please. I like most books that I read, and I tend to be choosy about which books I read considering my limited time. If I can finish a book, that book gets at least 3 stars.

  1. Did you meet any of your reading goals? Which ones?

I aimed for 10 books in 2023. That did not happen.

  1. What reading goals do you have for next year?

Read more and actually finish some of my half-read books.

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