2023 Reading Wrap-Up

Wow, what a year 2023 turned out to be! I’m so pleased with my reading from 2023, so here we go with a hopefully-brief wrap-up!

Some Stats

Over the course of 2023 I read a total of 71 books, with no DNF’s! That is much more than I have ever read in a single year before, and I think it was also my best reading year yet, with so many new favourites. May was very obviously an anomaly month, and that was thanks to the Fantasy Fellowship readathon, The Battle of the Five Worlds. As a team captain, I wanted to set a good example for my team and decided I would read all 12 books required! I kept up a solid reading pace for most of the year with the exception of December, where I caught Covid and wanted to do absolutely nothing at all for a couple of weeks.

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, my top genre for 2023 was fantasy. Science fiction was second (though very far behind), and then I had a mixture of other genres where I read a couple of books. The slices with single books were horror, romance and literary fiction. I liked stepping out of my comfort zone a little during 2023 and I hope to read a larger mix of genres going forward.
My reading was majority series-based, which is not uncommon for fantasy books! I finished a handful of series over the year and started a lot more, oops!

A few other stats:

30 of my read books were gifted to me in some way
46 books were written by women, 21 by men and 2 by NB authors
I read from 44 new authors in 2023
My average page length was 394 pages
My longest book was 830 pages
My shortest book was 91 pages

2023 Book Highlights

My top book of the year is, without a doubt, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence (review here).
The rest of my top picks aren’t in any particular order:

The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao
Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan
The Shadow of the Gods by John Gwynne
Ascension by Nicholas Binge

I have read the currently-published sequels to Black Sun and The Shadow of the Gods and both of them were also truly fantastic.
I do have some honourable mentions that didn’t quite make my ‘absolute best of’ but are still pretty dang close!