Daily Archives: December 22, 2023

My Books of 2023

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We’re back to another of my annual posts. In past years I have tried to pick five books I’ve read to highlight, though it doesn’t always work out that way.  Last year I stumbled, and I fear that this year will be even more of a stumble. Past entries in this series:

I probably could pick five, the problem is that 2023 seemed to break my stride in reading.  In past years, I had a nice pattern where I found time to read regularly, something that seemed to fall apart in 2023.

My 2023 banner courtesy of our daughter

So when I went over to Good Reads to get my list of books to pick from… well, there wasn’t as much there as I expected.

My Year in Books from Good Reads

Still, I can highlight some parts of my reading experience in 2023.  And it is a Friday, which Google analytics tells me is my worst day for traffic, so I might as well schedule a post about books!

One thing I did set out to do this past year was read all of the Philip Marlowe detective noir novels by Raymond Chandler, and I can report success on that front.  These are detective stories, taking place from the late 1930s into the 1950s in southern California.  They are all more complicated than they perhaps should be.  Chandler goes to great pains to make sure each tale is fully resolved and there are times when you think things must be done, when a new wrinkle appears or some seeming innocuous thread rears up to become critical or Marlowe announces some observation of his that throws what seems to be a tidy ending into disarray.  They are very much books of their time, and sometimes dizzying in their sudden changes of direction.

In the forward to one of the books Chandler is quoted as saying that he kept writing these LA noir stories because the genre itself had never been perfected.  He also admitted to following one of the cardinal rules of the genre: When in doubt, have somebody barge into the room waving a gun.  They all follow a pattern of sorts, but it is the pattern of Marlowe’s code and conscious and the world breaks around those in a myriad different ways.

This may be the best audio book I listened to this year and, though I have been critical of over-produced audio books in the past… just read me the text dammit, I don’t need an intro/outro score every chapter or cheap sound effects… this is one title where the effects help sell the story.  Seriously, I think this is probably a better experience in audio format.

Ryland Grace wakes up from an induced coma on what he finds to be a spaceship and slowly has to piece together his mission.  His memory slowly comes together and he realizes he is out in space to save Earth.  I always say that taking a voyage of discovery with the protagonist makes for an excellent tale, and this one is gripping and well worth the effort.

  • Empires of EVE Vols. I & II – Andrew Groen

I own both the books, having supported the Kickstarter campaigns that funded them.  However, they are large, hardcover volumes and I will admit that I have not sat down and read them cover to cover.  Their size does not make them conducive to reading in bed, where my quality reading time tends to occur.

I have picked them up, read sections, looked at the maps, and admired them, but have not fully invested.  As I mentioned after listening to the Down the Rabbit Hole EVE Online documentary, I figured it might be time to commit to these two volumes.  As it happens, I also have the audio books, and went down that path with them.  Audio books are imperfect, but they can be an excellent way to get through dense and perhaps not always deeply interesting sections of a book.  My first successful pass through The Silmarillion was an audio book version, which got me going past the sections I had bounced off of so many times before.

Anyway, the tales of New Eden and the empires of null sec were quite gripping.  Having Andrew Groen read them to me while I did some quests in WoW or ran Abyssals in EVE was the tonic I needed to absorb the whole thing.  I was also a bit surprised to find large chunks of my blog post about being in the battle at 6VDT-H, the final battle of The Fountain War, quoted in the book two.  I had not realized.  The second volume book carries on past that and past B-R5RB into the era of the blue doughnut, hinting at the protagonists in the coming Casino War.

He won’t be doing a third volume, which is a shame, but the Down the Rabbit Hole video did the conflict justice.

  • Other Mentions

And really, those are the titles that stood out for me this year.  You can see my full reading list here.

I read some others that were decent.  I got my share of history in with Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand, the tale of Custer’s defeat at The Little Bighorn and how both sides built up to that battle, The Cactus Air Force, the story of the air battles during the Guadalcanal campaign in WWII, my annual foray into the works of Anthony Beevor with his Ardennes 1944, and Mark Galeotti’s Putin’s Wars, which details Putin’s ever more aggressive push to get the Soviet Union back together, which currently has him bogged down in a war in Ukraine.  The latter was almost ready to be published, then had to be pulled back to cover the onset of the invasion of Ukraine.

But what also set this year apart was the number of disappointing starts I had with titles that I just did not end up enjoying.  That count from Good Reads overstates my efforts in 2023.  If we limit it to books I actually finished rather than letting fall by the wayside in disappointment, the number is probably 16.  Still more than one a month, but well of my usual annual pace.

I think part of that is my usual time spent with audio books has tapered off, replaced by podcasts about the current political state of the country.  I am probably more invested/concerned with that, and compensating by obsessing as a substitute for feeling I have any real control over what disaster may befall us with the next presidential election.

I should probably try to let go of that, to seek more escapism rather than less.  But the news is always dire and it is a train wreck in progress that is hard to look away from.  We suffer the curse of living in interesting times.