Track Changes

A list of all the books I read in 2023. I’m quite proud of the fact I managed to read 35 books in a year. I think it’s the most I’ve read in 12 months. Granted, a lot of these were short books (Gatsby, Bell Jar, Sun Also Rises) but there were some longer ones in there and I still had to read them so I don’t know who I’m trying to impress.

The slightly arbitrary ratings out of 10 for each book help me keep track of how I felt when I finished each one.

Although if I were to do this again I’d use a different rating system. No book scores below a ‘6’. I’m an optimist, sue me.

1. A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College, Ryan Craig. 8/10. Easy to read, some good ideas (although slightly outdated now). Too many stories about when the author was at Yale.
2. The Talented Mr Ripley. Patricia Highsmith. 9/10. I couldn’t put this down. More homoerotic than the film, and much creepier. I re-watched the film straight afterwards and enjoyed it more than I did the first time. A lot of the references from the book aren’t explained in the film but add nuance to it. What a cast too. Still, go and read the book. It’s better.
3. The Book of Dreams, Ross Gay. 7/10. Lovely, lyrical meditations. Quite featherweight.
4. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson. 8/10. I re-read this after a 10-year gap. Still stunning.
5. The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest. David Roberts. 8/10. More of a travelogue about finding what happened to the Anasazi.
6. In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest, David Roberts. 8/10. Similar to above, need to be read as a pair.
7. Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea, Steven Callahan. 7/10. Man sails boat across the Atlantic, boat gets caught in a storm and sinks, man survives for 76 days in a raft. Good but not gripping.
8. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Ted Connover. 8/10. Very good ethnography of working at Sing Sing for a year.
9. Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America’s Mexican Migrants, Ted Connover. 8/10. Eye-opening look at how Mexican immigrants cross the border. Quite dated now (written in mid-90s) but some good stories.
10. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X. 7/10. Bit rambling and not as coherent as I thought it would be. Still an important story from civil rights era.
11. Range, David Epstein. 8/10. Generalists, rejoice!
12. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower. 6/10. Some good stories, not great.
13. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (“all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn it’s the best book we’ve ever had,” E Hemingway). 7/10, a road trip book. Similar style to Papillon, stream-of-consciousness, not exposition.
14. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 6/10, doesn’t make sense until the last third. But then is devastating.
15. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 9/10, almost a perfect book.
16. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway. 7/10, didn’t enjoy this as much on re-reading. Maybe Cormac McCarthy was right, “Hemingway should have stuck to short stories”. Found the dialogue slightly forced.
17. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath. 7/10. Probably needed to read this when I was 17. Still, haunting and lyrical in its descriptions of NYC.
18. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather. 8/10, beautiful, lyrical, wonderfully composed stories. Loved the links back to the David Roberts book In Search of the Old Ones about the pueblo communities of the south-west. Knowing the history really brought this alive.
19. O Pioneers! Willa Cather. 7/10, great opening lines, slightly formulaic story. But scene-setting of the mid-west was stunning.
20. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner. 6/10, didn’t get the comparisons to McCarthy. Multiple narrators was a tough hang.
21. The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather. 6/10, struggled slightly to finish this one. Some great set-pieces but it didn’t really come together until the last few chapters. Opera singer comes of age.
22. Fate is the Hunter, Ernest Gann. 8/10. Stunning tales of early aviation.
23. No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy. 9/10. Still the best book of the last twenty years.
24. The End of Me, Alfred Hayes. 6/10, not as good as My Face for the World to See. Very poetic, some good scenes. Michael & Aurora hoodwink Asher. Critique of hippies and squares in the 1960s New York.
25. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote. 7/10, lovely prose, slightly generic woman goes mad story. Great New York scenes. Unintentionally paired well with The End of Me.
26. Outline, Rachael Cusk. 8/10, really enjoyed this auto-fiction account a of a woman going through a divorce and teaching a writing class in Greece. Narrative told through her encounters with people (seat mate on a plane, colleague, writing class). You learn her name right at the end.
27. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. 6/10, didn’t grip me. Lyrical prose but quite a tough narrative. Although written in 1953 eerily predicts integration, Black Power, and tactics of Malcolm X.
28. Stoner, John Williams. 9/10, a book about love. For his wife, daughter, lover, work. And how each one ruins him. Almost a perfect book.
29. Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante. 8/10, raced through this. A woman’s despair at her husband leaving her over a hot, stifling summer in Turin. Made me want to read more.
30. Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams. 9/10, probably the best western I’ve read. Four buffalo hunters find a hidden valley in Colorado and slaughter 4,000 buffalo. Get snowed into the valley over winter. Lose the haul on a river crossing on the way home. Haunting.
31. The Bradshaw Variations, Rachel Cusk. 8/10, like a something something painting. Love, like music, is a cultural construct to accept arousal.
32. My Struggle 2, Karl Ove Knaussguard. 10/10. Couldn’t put this down. 600+ pages but I read it in a week. Awkward social situations, insightful glimpses into one persons’s life. That is all our lives.
33. The Lost Daughter, Elena Ferrante. 9/10. Dark but a wonderful story. Film was also very good.
34. Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy. 7/10. Enjoyed this more than I thought I would. Not really a plot, lots of maths talk. Interesting accompaniment to Oppenheimer.
35. Kudos, Rachel Cusk. 7/10. Not as enjoyable as Outline. More ephemeral. Characters less memorable.