That Was The Year That Was (In Books): 2023 Edition

So this year, as it does every year, Goodreads compiled a list of the books I read, making a nice little ― or not so little ― tapestry of covers, along with a few details. You can check out the list at Goodreads here, or look at the screen shots below. The advantage of visiting the list at Goodreads is that you can interactively click on individual books to see their entries; the advantage of viewing the screen shots is you get to go make a nice hot cup of tea while waiting for them all to finish loading. Let’s review a few notes about this year’s list!

• This year’s longest book, the “Quadrail” omnibus (★★★) that collects the first three books in Timothy Zahn’s SF series about an interstellar subway system (just go with it), clocked in at 1,117 pages. This is considerably shorter than last year’s longest book The Seventh Sword, another omnibus with a total length of 3,168 pages. I seem to read at least one or two omnibuses (omnibi?) every year, and they are almost always going to be my longest book, at least in years when I didn’t read Infinite Jest.
• My least popular book this year, Revelation: A Divided Elements Origin Story by Mikhaeyla Kopievsky, shelved by only 76 people, was also my shortest book of the year, coming in at a mere 60 pages. The astute reader will note that I did not rate this book; that’s because it is not really something that stands alone, you apparently have to read the “Divided Elements” series in order for it to make sense; since I didn’t do that and (based on what I thought of the origin story) have no plans to, I decided it would be unfair to rate it anything at all. But if I were going to rate it, you would not be wrong to surmise that I wouldn’t have done so very highly.
• My most popular book, All the Light We Cannot See, was shelved by over 3.6 million people, or nearly three times the population of San Diego. It’s also now a movie or a series or something on Netflix, I think. And I rated it ★★★★ stars on Goodreads (★★★★½ on The StoryGraph*), so I guess it deserves all the attention.
• I stayed pretty steady with the page count, with 21,443 pages read this year. Of course, some of that includes DNFs, which The StoryGraph will be calling me out on later in the post.
• The book I read this year that was most highly-rated by the Goodreads community was Perhaps the Stars, by Ada Palmer, the final book in the “Terra Ignota” series, which has an average Goodreads rating of 4.42. I rated this book ★★★★★ and it was my favorite book of the year, so the Goodreads community and I are on the same page for once.
• My average rating for this year came in just a shade above three stars, which makes it a pretty good year for me, since I grade books much more harshly than I do movies. This year, in addition to Perhaps the Stars, my two other ★★★★★ books were The Murders of Molly Southbourne (which I think I described as “a nasty little firecracker of a novella”) and New Watch, the penultimate book in the “World of Watches” series of Russian supernatural hijinx. (I also rated Doomsday Book five stars on Goodreads but 4.5 stars on The StoryGraph, where half stars are a thing. The StoryGraph will put in an appearance soon.)
• As previously noted, Perhaps the Stars was my favorite book of 2023. Here’s the complete breakdown of my ratings at Goodreads this year:

And now, without further ado, here is the Year In Books That Was for 2023:

This is also the year I started checking out The StoryGraph, a new-ish alternative to Goodreads that, among other things, actually still lets people look at it without requiring them to make an account (a restriction adopted by both Goodreads and Last.fm in the last year or two, possibly to stop their data from being scraped by bots, or possibly just to be dickish). This makes The StoryGraph much easier to use for sharing book information, and, as another benefit, the StoryGraph also supports fractional star ratings in 0.25 increments, allowing the obsessive data collectors such as myself to leave much more accurate scores. The StoryGraph also provides a year-end wrap-up, although theirs isn’t as pretty as the one at Goodreads. But look! It has, as the name of the site would suggest, graphs! (For the online version, which includes the ability to drill down into categories if you are that manner of data nerd, click here.)

And that was the year in books for 2023! Stay tuned next week for the year in music, with stats provided by Last.fm, which—unlike some music services I could mention—provides the year-end statistics at the end of the year, where they belong.

* The fact that I didn’t round All the Light We Cannot See up to ★★★★★ on Goodreads suggests that it wasn’t quite 4.5 stars for me, but that it was higher than 4.25 stars. I guess we need tenths of a star.
** Which, I mean, I can see why The StoryGraph does it this way, since maybe it’s unfair to rate a book you haven’t finished; but really, how big of a rabbit can a book pull out of its hat at the end if it’s been crap for most of the way through?