For the past few years, I’ve kept my To-Be-Read lists (TBRs) on this website–updating them whenever I read a new book, whether it was on my initial list at all. I started this in 2020, and have maintained in in 2021 and 2022. Also, I’ve already posted my intended reading list for 2024.
2023, however, was a different animal.
In previous years, my read count has been in the thirties, and I always feel like I could do more. Of course, I teach first-year writing at a community college, so I do much more reading that those numbers indicate–but it’s mostly student essays.
But in 2023, unless I forgot to log something (which is incredibly likely), I only read thirteen books. Thirteen!
There are a few reasons for this:
- I don’t count re-reads, and in 2023 I reread a couple of books that took a good chunk of time: namely, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. (Technically, I’m still reading Great Expectations again. I’ve been reading it aloud to my wife, and we just haven’t gone back to it in a few weeks.)
- I was building and designing a few brand-new classes this past year, particularly literature classes. Building a new class and then running it for its maiden voyage can take a good deal of focus.
- I played more video games this past year than I have in previous years. That’s just where my brain was at.
- Whereas I ordinarily listen to 6-12 audiobooks a year, this year I found myself listening to more podcasts on my various walks and drives instead.
But the big one is… it was just a tough year. Good things came out of it, but it was hard. When I had some leisure time, I didn’t have the capacity to read. I was either playing video games or staring out the window getting lost in my thoughts.
But that’s neither here nor there.
Looking back on my reading from 2023, there’s a couple highlights I’d like to point out:
Shuna’s Journey, by Hiyao Miyazaki, translated by by Alex Dudok de Wit (find it at Brazos, or your local bookstore). Not quite a graphic novel, but close to one. I had no idea this book even existed until I found a copy of it in Brazos Bookstore while looking for something to give Alli for Jolabokaflod. It’s about a prince of a poor country who journeys across the world to find his people a more stable crop. The interaction of images and text–the dependence of these elements on each other–was remarkable.
I’ve read several graphic novels that felt like little more than illustrated books. Don’t get me wrong–the illustrations in these books were great, but there was always a sense that the written story was the real or originary, and that the images had been added to it. And I’ve read some graphic novels where the text feels like an afterthought to a set of sequential art that doesn’t entirely need it. Shuna’s Journey, though, is a rare text where neither of these elements makes complete sense without the other.
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett (Brazos). For too long, I kept the juvenile Discworld novels at arms length, and I don’t know why. I guess I still had some unquestioned assumptions from my own education that books for youths somehow didn’t count. But that’s an entire post unto itself. Regardless, for Christmas of 2022, I got my wife and mother (separate people) their own copies of the Tiffany Aching books, and the set I got my wife came with Amazing Maurice as a lagniappe. We read it aloud together and were thoroughly enchanted by it. Not long after, we were looking at movie listings to see if we could catch Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and we just happened to see a single showing of The Amazing Maurice–the animated movie based on the book we had just read! We saw this instead (and, come to think of it, still haven’t seen Quantumania) and enjoyed it immensely. Of course, the act of adaptation demanded certain changes, but I’ve definitely seen worse Discworld adaptations. In this novel, the titular critters are a cat and some rats who, through the sort of magical accidents that are not uncommon in the Discworld, acquire the capacity for speech and human reasoning. They immediately take to traveling the countryside, going from village to village and performing a series of Pied Piper-style con-jobs.
But far and away, the reading I was gladdest to do all year was Life After Myth, by Elizabeth A.M. Keel. I’ve written about Elizabeth’s writing before. Life After Myth explores the implications of the Medea myth. It’s not a reimagining of the old tale as much as an extension of it–imagining the figures of Greek mythology surviving into modern times by virtue of their status as legends. I find the Medea story fascinating (you might notice I read two Medeas last year).
When Euripides decided to center a play on her and her concerns rather than making her a two-dimensional antagonist for Jason, that was already a bold decision. Elizabeth’s book goes further by exploring her interiority in the way modern fiction can do–and doing so with appreciable grace and wit. The first chapter of the book is an amazing, fast-pace retelling of Medea’s story–and if I teach another class on ancient drama, I may well assign this chapter as a standalone story. However, this is only the set-up–the rest of the book exceeds by chronicling the latter stages of Medea’s millennia-long quest to resurrect her sons and stop being reducible to the phrase “the woman who killed her children.”
The novel shows both a real command of the relevant mythology, and also a sharp sense for how these figures fit into ongoing questions of power, culpability, and the tension of being forced to live within someone else’s definition of you. I’ve been furnishing links to local bookstores for the other books I listed here, but since this book is a print-on-demand affair, I need to link to its Amazon page. Regardless, I strongly recommend you pick this one up. Even if Elizabeth weren’t one of my best friends, this would still be one of those reads I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
That’s a brief year-end review for 2023 in books. Here’s hoping a to a better year and some new, wonderful finds in 2024!
Image credit: Book photograph by Martin Vorel is under a Creative Commons Attribute Share-Alike 4.0 International license. I have superimposed the years on it for use as a header on this blog post, but the original may be found here.
Jeff (in the bowtie!) 
