Year in Reading, 2023

Last year, I managed almost one book a week—but this year was upended by a baby arriving four months in. Still, I got through 42 books and wanted to share them along with my bolded favorites.

If you want to know more about what I thought, I post my impressions/reviews over on Goodreads.

  1. Dispatches by Michael Herr
  2. Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures by Mark Fisher
  3. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning by Maggie Nelson
  4. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas
  5. China in Ten Words by Yu Hua
  6. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff
  7. James Baldwin: A Biography by David Leeming
  8. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump by Corey Robin
  9. The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter
  10. All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
  11. This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp
  12. Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick
  13. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison
  14. A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies by Martin J. Sherwin
  15. Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard Rorty
  16. Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder
  17. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson
  18. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon
  19. Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick
  20. No Name in the Street by James Baldwin
  21. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild
  22. Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness by Elizabeth D. Samet
  23. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
  24. Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick
  25. Uzumaki by Junji Ito
  26. The Wizards of Armageddon by Fred Kaplan
  27. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
  28. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes
  29. _Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War_by Samuel Moyn
  30. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
  31. Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 by Norman Mailer
  32. The City & the City by China Mieville
  33. Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons by Richard Rhodes
  34. A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick
  35. Only a Voice: Essays by George Scialabba
  36. VALIS by Philip K. Dick
  37. Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff
  38. The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick
  39. The Transmigration of Dr. Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick
  40. Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine
  41. The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin
  42. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

My standout experience this year was reading the last string of novels by Philip K. Dick; he had a mystical experience in 1974 that altered his style substantially, with a less plot-driven style and more humanist elements. A Scanner Darkly and VALIS both feel like precursors to Infinite Jest, full of burnt-out drug users and fictional films. He even seeded his last three novels (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Dr. Timothy Archer) with his own boutique cosmology, in a semi-skeptical fashion.

Like I said above, the biggest change was a baby arriving and my transition to stay-at-home dad lifestyle—which meant no more free time during weekdays until after she went to bed. It threw me off my pace, but I quickly learned to make reading a deliberate habit because it was keeping my brain fed and sane.

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