Books I read in 2023
July 1, 2024
This is a list of the books I read in 2023. ★ means I loved it.
The books are in reverse order of when I put them into Zotero; I read some books right away, while others waited around for five or ten months until the time was right. I read all but five of these books on my tablet.
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The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon
The Gadfly Papers, Rev. Dr. Todd Eklof
Greatest Works, Oscar Wilde
Another Day of Life, Ryszard Kapuściński
Humanitarian Ethics, Hugo Slim
Active Defense, M. Taylor Fravel
How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit, Joey Savoie, Patrick Stadler, & Antonia Shann
The Shadow List, Todd Moss
Ghosts of Havana, Todd Moss
Diplomatic Security, ed. Eugene Cusumano & Christopher Kinsey
The Mission Song, John Le Carré
Minute Zero, Todd Moss
Darfur: A 21st Century Genocide, Gérard PrunierFifteen years old, but sadly relevant again. Prunier avoids biography, but the portrait of al-Bashir in this book provides context for events across the Sahel.
The Dyer’s Hand, and other essays, W.H. Auden
Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors, Aravind Jayan
★ A City on Mars, Kelly Weinersmith & Zach Weinersmith
The Little Flowers of St Francis, St. Francis of Assisi, FlorilegiumRead aloud with JB.
The Golden Hour, Todd MossThe first of Moss’ fiction. It’s fun, and more technocrats should write fiction about their job, but even the interested reader should stop here.
The Birthday of the World, Ursula Le Guin
Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy
The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966-2006, Edward Said, ed. Moustafa Bayoumi & Andrew RubinThe Question of Palestine is the most interesting thing a confused, humanist Jew can read on the long durée.
The Soccer War, Ryszard Kapuściński
★ The Sum of All Fears, Tom ClancyRead because of this tweet.
The Origins of AIDS, Jacques Pepin
When We Were Very Young, A. A. Milne
★ What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, John Hanning SpekeRidiculous, true book. Little insight into East Africa; great insight into the late British colonial psychology.
The Strategy of Antelopes, Jean Hatzfeld
★★ Africa’s World War, Gérard Prunier
Elephantoms, Lyall Watson
France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Petain, Julian Jackson
Incest Diary, Anonymous
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery
The Worst Date Ever, Jane Bussman
The Politics of Reform in Ghana, 1982-1991, Jeffrey Herbst
Augie & the Green Knight, Zach Weinersmith
The Jesuits, Markus Friedrich
The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana MazzucatoImplausible and flawed; good to have to argue against.
★ A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit
Yellowface, R.F. KuangKuang’s next novel is reportedly about two magical PhD students who travel to Hell ‘to rescue the soul of their advisers so that they can write their job recommendation letters’. Instant buy.
Travels with Herodotus, Ryszard Kapuściński
To Be Taught if Fortunate, Becky Chambers
American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, Lisa Wade
Life in Crisis: the Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders, Peter Redfield
The Book of Strange New Things, Michel Faber
Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women in Space, Loren Grush
Last Letters from Hav, Jan Morris
Hav of the Myrmidons, Jan Morris
★ Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, C.S. Lewis
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry PratchettRead aloud with MWG.
A Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Right-Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin
Axiomatic, Greg Egan
★★ Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo
A Zoo in my Luggage, Gerald DurrellRead aloud with MWG.
Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas AdamsRead aloud with MWG.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton
And Then What? Inside Stories of 21st Century Diplomacy, Catherine Ashton
Autobiography, John Stuart Mill
The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse, Vikram SethInconceivable to me that the man who wrote A Suitable Boy wrote this next. I can’t think of two more different first and sophomore novels.
The Russo-Ukrainian War, Serhii Plokhy
The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
Black Hearts, Jim Frederick
On The Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald
HHhH, Laurent BinetApparently, boyfriends all over the world are thinking about the Roman empire at an alarmingly high rate. HHhH is about being a boyfriend who think about a single May morning in Prague way too much.
★ The Shadow of the Sun, Ryszard KapuścińskiThe archetypal Kapuściński, if not his best.
The Hunters, James Salter
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
Burning the Days, James Salter
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, Geoff Dyer
Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine
Samuel Johnson is Indignant, Lydia Davis
When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland, Sarah Phillips
Why We Fight, Chris BlattmanI was unimpressed, but finished out of respect for the project.
Parfit, David Edmonds
The Guest, Emma Cline
The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and Its Unquiet Legacy, Salil Tripathi
One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew Us to the Moon, Charles Fishman
★ What Is a Dog?, Raymond Coppinger & Lorna Coppinger
Stalingrad, Antony Beevor
This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
The Histories, Herodotus
Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence, Shrayana Bhattacharya
Our Kind of Traitor, John Le Carré
Admission, Jean Korelitz
My Education, Susan Choi
Disorientation, Elaine Hsieh Chou
★ A New History of Greek Mathematics, Reviel Netz
South Africa’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, Helen Purkitt & Stephen Franklin Burgess
★ Conundrum, Jan Morris
Your Driver is Waiting, Priya Guns
★ Oxford, Jan Morris
How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Univerise, Charles Yu
The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker
The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg
Red Plenty, Francis Spufford
The Written World and the Unwritten World: Essays, Italo Calvino
What’s Our Problem?, Tim Urban
Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation, Nick Seaver
A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, Robert M. Sapolsky
Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner, Alastair Reid
The War That Doesn’t Say its Name, Jason Stearns
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
South, Ernest Shackleton
★ The Disappearance of Joseph Mengele, Georgia de Guez
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John Le Carré
Eruptions that Shook the World, Clive Oppenheimer
All Souls, Javier Marías
★ Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, Chris Miller