Books Read In 2023

Another year has passed, so here is another annual overview of the books I managed to read during 2023.

Here is the list (as always, in the order I read them in):

  1. Humble Pi - Matt Parker

    This book talks through a number of real-life stories about when mathematics errors caused some real problems. From innocent things like lotteries and dating sites, to more serious cases like wobbling bridges and swaying buildings.
    Everything is written in an easy-to-understand way, so you don't need to be a maths expert or enthusiast to understand it. This made it quite an enjoyable read for me.

  2. Spring - Ali Smith

    I continued with the third book in the series. Since the previous book I knew to expect a completely different story, and that was indeed the case.
    This book centres around two main stories. One of a man dealing with the loss of someone close to him. And one of a woman working in a migrant detention centre, with all the challenges and dilemmas that gives. Eventually both stories come together.
    Since the stories are set in the post-Brexit referendum years, some of the topics are still really relevant. I enjoyed reading this one.

  3. Drawdown - Paul Hawken

    A book that looks at a number of possible solutions to climate change. The focus lies on things that allow carbon to be drawn down from the atmosphere. The solutions are from a wide number of areas like energy, transportation, agriculture and education.
    This book was a nice opportunity to learn more about the details of certain solutions that previously I only heard the name of (e.g. agroforestry and silvopasture).

  4. We Had To Remove This Post - Hanna Bervoets

    This novel is about the people working at a fictional social media platform as content moderators. They increasingly get exposed to extreme content, which affects their mental health and personal relationships.
    Over recent years various reports about the conditions of social media content moderators have appeared, so it's a very believable story.

  5. Planting: A New Perspective - Piet Oudolf & Noel Kingsbury

    Quite a different book to my normal choices. During a holiday in May we visited a garden designed by Piet Oudolf. I was already aware of his name as a garden designer, but not so much about his way of working.
    This book was a good read about the theory behind his natural planting styles using hardy perennial plants. This makes it more sustainable and better suited to extreme weather periods. It has inspired me to redesign and replant some of my own garden in this style.

  6. Another Country - James Baldwin

    James Baldwin had been on my list of authors to read for quite a while.
    This book centers around the suicide of a jazz drummer from Harlem. The first part of the book leads up to this. And the rest of the book looks at the evolving relations between friends and family of him.
    While the themes of interracial and homosexual relations in novels are quite normal these days, at the time this novel was published (1962) it was considered to be much more controversial.

  7. This Is Europe: The Way We Live Now - Ben Judah

    This was probably the best book I read this year.
    Only published this year, it is a collection of portraits and stories focusing on different people living across Europe. From Romanian long-distance lorry drivers, Latvian online sex workers and migrants from Ivory Coast facing a hellish journey to get to France. Each story is told from the person's own perspective.
    It was great to see a book that focuses on some of the margins of society. It really shows the human side of some of the difficult subjects of our time like migration.

  8. Summer - Ali Smith

    The last book in the series. And this time it brings together some of the characters featured in the previous books. As this book was written in 2020 it does feature Covid-19 lockdowns as another modern theme, with Brexit and migration being others continued from the previous stories.
    It was a nice read to finish off the series. Especially because it connects all the books together and makes it feel more like one series, rather than four seperate stories.

  9. The Climate Book - Greta Thunberg

    Another epic read about climate change. While the earlier Drawdown focused on solutions, this book has different sections looking at climate change from different angles. It covers what climate is, how it changes, how that affects humanity and what things we already have tried to do.
    Each section has a range of essays written by scientists, historians and activists. Some of the essays are hard-hitting and slightly depressing, making you feel that all hope is already lost. But that is exactly the reason why Greta Thunberg decided to curate this book, to urge people into more action.
    Even though I have read several books on climate change in recent years, this book still made me learn new things.

  10. The Satsuma Complex - Bob Mortimer

    And to finish off the year, an easy page-turner. This book has the comedic story about an ordinary legal assistant in London who gets involved in a missing person case.
    Being a fan of Bob Mortimer's comedy style, I was hoping this book would be the same. But there were only a handful of lines in the book that made me really chuckle. Still, an enjoyable and easy read after the previous more serious books.

All the books I read this year came from my local library again.

But there was also one book that didn't make the list.
It's very, very rare that I don't finish reading a book. Most times I'm stubborn enough to persist with a book, even if it isn't fully gripping me (yet). But when I started reading Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, it was different.
This book is written as the internal dialog of a woman living in the US. The style of writing means that there are hardly any punctuation marks in the book. In fact, the book has only eight sentences that spread over 1030 pages. That makes it a very hard read as you have to concentrate hard to dissect the various sections.
After a while I realised the whole reason that I read books is because I find them interesting or enjoyable. And this one was neither. It felt more like a chore. So then I decided to just give up and move on to another book instead.