After reading a ton of books in prior years I fell off doing a lot of reading in 2022, so for 2023 I made it a priority to read more again, and as part of that I began tracking my reading. Because I wanted to keep it simple, and I sort of strongly dislike using sites like Goodreads, I made myself a spreadsheet with three tabs to track my reading; the first tab tracking the book-books I read this year, the second tab tracking single issue comic books (“floppies”), and the third tab tracking comic collections, trades paperback, omnibuses, graphic novels, etc.
Some basic numbers: I started 25 book-books in the past year; I finished all but one of them. I didn’t keep track of genres but for the most part it is a mix of science fiction, detective novels, and science and history non-fiction. All but two of the books were first-time reads for me. The publication years, when averaged, comes out to 2000, so it was a mix of contemporary books and books published latter half of the 20th century. Once I finished a book, I gave it a basic 1-5 star rating, mostly a sentiment of how much I enjoyed reading the book vs a reflection of the book’s quality itself. The ratings for the year average out to 3.25 stars, which isn’t bad on the whole.
Towards the end of the year work got busier and the days got shorter and I did admittedly lose steam, but I ended up turning that around somewhat by working my way through a back log of Star Trek novels that I purchase digitally for a $1 through the publisher’s deals page (updated monthly with new cheap Star Trek books [not an affiliate link]), and to my slight annoyance I ended up burning through those at a decent pace.
The one I did not finish, a book about encroaching surveillance, was not particularly bad; it was a book I had purchased some time ago and sat on my shelf. I think at the time I had purchased it I was under the impression that it was more about general surveillance in society rather than specifically military drone surveillance which as a subject is less interesting to me and why I fell off reading it.
I had four 5 Star books this year, which as you will see had shared some themes, which may not be surprising.
The first was Encounters with the Arch Druid, by John McPhee. Published in 1971, it’s a narrative non-fiction book wherein McPhee invites arch-environmentalist David Brower and some of his ideological enemies (a mineral engineer, a real estate developer, and Floyd Dominy, whose career at the Bureau of Land Management was responsible for so many major dam projects in the United States) to go on camping trips, and let them argue and get to know each other on a personal level. The book employees a narrative style that nowadays I think you only see in magazines’ boring celebrity profiles (think “I spent a week traveling with George Clooney on GQ’s bill”-type long-form articles) but back then I think people were better at this sort of writing.
The next two books were Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents (1993 and 1998 respectively). These were at the time near-future post-climate collapse novels. 30 years on the themes of the books do not seem far off from what we’re facing now; in the first book the protagonists deal with collapse of the energy grid and food safety net, and in the second book far right religious authoritarianism and police state get added into the mix. They are masterfully written but definitely hit a little too close to home now.
The final book was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future (2020). It’s another near-future book about climate change, in which many parts of the world face even more heightened extremes of weather than what we’re seeing now. The book’s primary protagonist is an agent of the UN responsible for seeking solutions, and for much of the book she faces a real lack of political will to make changes, at least until people start taking more guerrilla tactics to change the minds of the powerful.
Curious about the rest of the books I read? View the Book Tracker spreadsheet on the web.
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