My Best Reads of 2023

I read 101 books in 2023. I also read around 300 feature articles in magazines. What follows is my top 10 best book reads of 2023 and some of my favorite articles of 2023. For those interested in more details of my overall reading for 2023, see the section that follow this which summarizes my reading for 2023.

My Favorite Books for 2023

1. Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb

I have to admit that I didn’t know who Robert Gottlieb was at the start of 2023, although I’ve read several of the books he has edited. Then, in July, I came across a documentary called Turn Every Page about the relationship between Robert A. Caro and his editor Robert Gottlieb. It was a great documentary, directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb. I’ve read all of Caro’s books (indeed, I’ve recently acquired a personalized signed copy of his short book, Working) and I’m always fascinated by people who make a single subject their life’s work (see also: Will Durant and Dumas Malone). After watching the documentary, I searched for books by Gottlieb and discovered he’d written a memoir, Avid Reader: A Life.

Not since reading Isaac Asimov’s 3-volume autobiography have I come across such a detailed inside look at the book publishing world. It was a delightful, fascinating read that spoke to me on many levels. I think of myself as an avid reader, but I am lazy in comparison to Gottlieb. I didn’t want the book to end, and when it finally ended, I did something I’ve done only one other time in the 28 years I’ve been keeping my reading list: I immediately started the book over and read it a second time. And you know what, it was even better on the second go-around. It was, hands down, my favorite read of 2023.

2. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Years ago, Kelly and I went to a local performance of Les Mis. I don’t remember much about it, but the book, Les Miserables, has always intrigued me for its size and popularity. I decided to give it a try in the spring. I found that almost from the first page, I couldn’t put the book down. It had a bit of everything, and it was fascinating. I loved the non-sequitur essays in the book and the rhythm of the language (I read the Julie Rose translation).

Later in the summer, when we were in Paris, I wanted to seek out the places in the novel, but we were there for only a short time, and I was a little sad that the city no longer looked way it was pictured in Hugo’s novel.

I estimate that I’ve read something in the neighborhood of 550 novels in my life (a little over 500 since 1996) and when I finished Les Miserables it instantly jumped to the top stop of best novels I’ve ever read.

It was also the longest book I read in 2023 but, as it turns out, only the 5th longest book I’ve read overall, beaten out by The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer (1,616 pages), Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows (1,423 pages), Executive Orders by Tom Clancy (1,358 pages), and The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York **by Robert A. Caro (1,345 pages).

3/4. Stella Maris and The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

I read The Passenger for our book club, and I really liked it. I just had to read the follow-on book, Stella Maris, which I enjoyed even better. It is one of those rare novels that could be done as a play. These were the second and third Cormac McCarthy books I’ve read and so far, I’ve thought all of his books were excellent.

5. Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments by Joe Posnanski

I had been looking forward to Why We Love Baseball ever since Joe Posnanski announced it. Recall that my favorite book of 2021 was Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100. I was not disappointed. Joe writes so passionately about baseball. He is a modern-day Red Smith. There is a reason why I love Joe Posnanski’s writing.

6. Doom Guy: Life In First Person by John Romero

I was never really a Doom player, but I’ve been a software developer my entire life and it was fascinating to read about someone who grew up with computers in a manner similar to me, beginning with machines like a Commodore Vic-20 and copying code out of computer magazines. Doom Guy was a honest, fascinating read.

7. Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart

Toward the end of each year, I tend to read Hollywood memoirs. They are a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Making It So by Patrick Stewart was one of these. This was a book that made me want to be an actor after reading it, always a good sign because it conveys its message so well.

8. The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

Really smart people fascinate me. I read a fascinating biography of John von Neumann back in 2022, The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya. So when I saw that there was a novel based on von Neumann’s life, The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut, I had to read it, and it was a fun, fantastic read.

Favorite articles of 2023

Early in 2023, I wrote a script that sends me an email each evening with a random article from the variety of print magazines I get in the mail. Here is an example email from last night.

I try to read a feature article every day of the year, and here are a few of the more than 300 that I read in 2023 that really stood out.

• Baseball and Time by Joe Posnanski — JoeBlogs (3/23)
• Down the River Roosevelt by Larry Rohter — Smithsonian (4/23)
• Judy Blume Goes All the Way by Amy Weiss-Meyer — Atlantic (4/23)
• A Love Letter to Riverside by David Danelski — UCR Magazine (Spring 2023)
• Why People Hate Open Offices (Psychology) by George Musser — Scientific American (4/23)
• How Baseball Saved Itself by Mark Leibovich — Atlantic (7-8/23)
• Postscript: Robert Gottlieb by David Remnick — New Yorker (6/26/2023)
• “How America Got Mean” by David Brooks — Atlantic (9/23)
• “17,517,490 Memories, Missing”[AliasDelimiter] by Megan Greenwall — Wired (9/23)
• Inside the Revolution at OpenAI by Ross Andersen — Atlantic (9/23)
• The Ones We Sent Away by Jennifer Senior — Atlantic (9/23)
• Dreams of My Father by Karl Ove Knausgaard — Harpers (9/23)
• The Golden Fleece by Joe Kloc — Harper’s (10/23)
• A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft by James Somers — New Yorker (11/20/23)
• Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He’s Built by Joshua Rothman — New Yorker (11/20/23)
• The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI by Charles Duhigg — New Yorker (12/1/23)

Summary of my 2023 reading

I read 101 books in 2023, once again hitting my Goodreads goal of 100 books. I read my 1,300th book since 1996 in 2023 and ending the year with a total of 1,330 books since 1996. About a third of the books I read were fiction, the remaining two-thirds non-fiction. I’ve recently been working on a two-level taxonomy for my reading, and here’s how it breaks down at the high level for 2023:

Within each of these top-level categories are about a dozen sub-categories, so that, for instance, the Literature and Fiction category breaks down as follows for 2023:

The next biggest subject area I read in 2023 was science and technology, the breakdown of which looks as follows:

Overall, here is the breakdown for the types of books I read in 2023:

My goal for 2024 is another 100 books and 300 articles, and so far, I am well on my way. Here are my best reads from previous years:

• My best reads of 2022
• My best reads of 2021
• My best reads of 2020
• My best reads of 2019
• My best reads of 2018