Books I Read in 2023

And why they were great

In 2013 I set myself the challenge of reading 50 books in a year. This was to combat a lack of reading on my part in the preceding years. A significant lapse for someone who considered themselves to be a writer. I managed it and wrote about the experience here. I really enjoyed it and discovered a lot of books I wouldn’t have otherwise read but the demand to read a book a week was more pressure than was comfortable for something supposed to be for pleasure. Since then I wish I could say I kept up healthy reading habits but I didn’t. It actually sent me on a spin to not just read but write, what I thought to be ‘proper’ or ‘mature’ books. This led me to write more than a few things I didn’t like, and tackle notoriously long and/or difficult books. I read Ulysses, Middlemarch, The Count of Monte Cristo and some others of the ‘Canon’, and, while not without their pleasures, I can’t say enjoyed any of them (except Monte Cristo, that was great). But because these texts took so long to read, and were such a slog, along with research texts for stuff I was writing either for Wisecrack or my own writing, I’d basically slowed my reading habits to a crawl again.

It was just after the pandemic and watching the animation series Primal which I loved, the creator, Genndy Tartakovsky, mentioned he was inspired by the original Robert E. Howard stories of…