Assumed audience: People who like reading year-in-review summaries. (I always assume that’s mostly just me, a few years in the future!)
A bit of context: For many years now, I have made it my habit to write up one of these summaries. In this case, I have tried to make it a bit more digestible by breaking into smaller chunks. You can find them all here.
This year I finally read all the books I planned to — and then some! At the end of the year, I finished 31 works of nonfiction and 12 this year. I write “finished”, rather than “read”, in the name of pedantic accuracy. Most of the books on this year’s list were books I read start to finish this year, but not all. A fair number of those were books I had started before this year — in two cases as far back as 2020! — and only got across the finish line in 2023. I was glad to get them across the finish line, though! For a few weeks in November and December, I was texting one of my friends an updated count every few days of how many books I was “actively” reading still. The fact that my count is now 8 is a triumph: at various points in the year it was close to 20!
The other win, perhaps strangely, is that I committed myself to just tabling books I do not intend to keep reading at this point. Sometimes you get everything you need out of the first three chapters of a book. Sometimes you make it halfway through and realize it just is not for you. Sometimes you realize two chapters into a novel that it is terrible dreck that is not worth your time. In any and every one of those cases, it is okay to stop reading it. I have always had a completionist bent to my reading, and while I would very occasionally give up on a book before finishing it, the final months of this year saw me actually commit to a habit of making that call and moving on.
I am even beginning to think about books as starting out neutral and having to earn their way to completion. We will see if that mentality sticks, but life is too short to waste it on bad books, or even on books which are good but not particularly profitable at this point in my intellectual and spiritual journeys.
What about the good books, though? Well, I read a lot of those, thankfully! Listed below are the best books in each of the categories I read through. Notably missing is poetry — a gap I hope to address in 2024!
Nonfiction
Broken down by the major “segments” of reading I generally do. Not listed here: the many hundreds of articles and essays I read throughout the year. Perhaps next year I will keep an eye on those, too!
Theology
- Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian, John Webster
- Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch, John Webster
- The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, Alan Jacobs
Business and tech
These are books I read in conjunction with business and tech… even if they are not themselves explicitly addressing the subject.
- Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters, Richard P. Rumelt
- Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation, Shriram Krishnamurthi
- The Staff Engineer’s Path, Tanya Reilly
- Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella Meadows
Miscellaneous
- Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow
- Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age, Michael A Hiltzik
- Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, Dave Evans and Bill Burnett
- Shifting the impossible to the inevitable: A Private ARPA user manual, Ben Reinhardt
- What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World, Sara Hendren
Fiction
The truth is that standout novels is nearly the whole list from this year — the only novels I read which do not appear here were rereads or are filed under “still pretty good, just not amazing”:
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
- Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Tad Williams
- “Earthsea”, Ursula K. Le Guin
- Sword & Citadel: The Second Half of the Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
- Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson