Some More of My Favorite Books That I’ve Read in 2023

With two weeks left in 2023, I’m thinking about all of the books I’ve read over the past year. Back in September I wrote about four of the books I’ve enjoyed this year, and today I want to highlight some more. I don’t want to provide a list; instead, I just want to talk about some of the books that stood out and connections I found between the books that I read. At its core, as I put it in a previous post, “reading causes us to encounter the world around us and to interact with it in a way that leads us to examine our position within society. It also expands our understanding of others, seeing the world from their point of view, thus creating, hopefully, increased empathy within ourselves.” The books I have read this year do just that.

By the end of the year, I will have read, hopefully, seventy eight books. I am finishing up Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, Let Us Descend, right now, and that is book number seventy five. Based on my StoryGraph stats, of the seventy five books I have read so far, twenty three are nonfiction and forty eight are fiction. As well, I have read twenty four graphic novels/comics ranging from superhero comics such as Walter Mosley’s The Thing: The Next Big Thing to historical graphic novels Tian Veasna’s Year of the Rabbit, a graphic novel about a family surviving and fleeing the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Sadly, I only read twenty…