I read 183 books in 2023. In this post, I consider each book with a sentence-ish review. The books are not ranked but instead clustered based on what you, the reader, might like to read. I liked 175 of them (95.6%), so I recommend every book on this list with rare exceptions. The images are AI-generated from Microsoft Bing because AI-generated images were also a theme of 2023.

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Brilliance That Defies Classification (12)

All of these books were favorites of the year; they also don’t really stick to one genre, or they’re so unique I felt they needed to topline the list.

• Inherent Vice | Thomas Pynchon | Mind Control Real Estate Scams
  • Doc figures out the Golden Fang run a big piece of the drug trade, plus the police, and…woah, California real estate, man. It’s my fourth read, and it remains an all-time favorite.
• Monarch | Candice Wuehle | Beauty Pageant MK ULTRA
  • MK ULTRA beauty pageant queens rise up and destroy the Monarch program, my new favorite novel.
• Grief Is A Thing With Feathers | Max Porter | Tone Poem
  • A family’s mother dies, and a black crow comes to visit, linger, and represent raw sadness; it is an incredible read.
• A Visit From The Goon Squad | Jennifer Egan | Rock Music
  • Interconnected stories about the music industry, aging, and international regime change: I thought this would be stuffy, but I found it fun and strange.
• Amygalatropolis | B.R. Yeager | Hikikomori / NEET / Channer
  • The life of a 4chan person in all the gory detail; very dark, but an experimental work that forces empathy from the reader
• Negative Space | B.R. Yeager | Suicide Suburbs
  • It is a strange, Satanic horror novel about the empty suburbs and the drive to suicide; more traditionally a novel than the previous entry, but exceptionally good.
• Alice Knott | Blake Butler | Art Destruction
  • Exploring how burning priceless art would set the world on fire and the intellectual baggage associated with art preservation, I wrote about this here.
• How To Sell A Haunted House | Grady Hendrix | Haunted Will
  • It is a traditional horror story framed around the complications of dividing a parent’s estate with an estranged sibling; the relationship is so well rendered here that I wrote more here.
• Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion | Gianmarc Manzione | Bowling and Gambling
  • Turns out bowling had a vibrant criminal history associated with it in the middle of the 20th century, perfectly chronicled in this book straddling crime, sports, and New York.
• A Little Lumpen Novelita | Roberto Bolaño | Coming of Age 
  • A woman remembers when she tried to sleep with an old movie star to steal his gold that didn’t really exist in a beautifully written, wonderfully translated, meta-textually complex novel.
• Numero Zero | Umberto Eco | Fake News
  • A rich guy buys a newspaper to print blackmail of other rich people, and the reports uncover Operation Gladio and the Catholic church’s role in laundering money to fund anti-Communist violence, but then the BBC reports it; this is an incredible, hilarious, insightful novel that teaches readers to read the newspaper better.
• Supernatural Strategies of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Group | I. F. Svenonius | Rock Music Magik
  • A music journalist summons the ghosts of rock musicians to show how rock music is a propaganda tool of capitalism, and the ghosts teach readers how to make a spiritually charged, Satanic rock band informative and practical.

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Crime (63)

Crime is the most represented genre in my reading this year, just like in the previous twenty reading years. This time, I break up the list by name because crime authors marketed toward men always have real masculine-sounding names, and I think that’s fun!

Raymond Chandler (7)

• The Lady in the Lake | Raymond Chandler | Dead Wife Noir
  • Marlowe goes out to the San Gabriel Valley to look around the mountains at a murder; the reveal halfway through the book is emotionally wrought and interrogates marriage; the silly business at the end with the stage makeup made me guffaw with delight.
• The Little Sister | Raymond Chandler | Hollywood Noir
  • Hollywood Marlowe tries to solve the case of a missing actress in one of the best Marlowe novels with perfect tone, characters, plot, and vibe.
• The Long Goodbye | Raymond Chandler | Noir detective classic
  • Inarguably the best Marlowe novel, his long lost alcoholic friend shows up, needs protection, but gets hit, and Marlowe drinks until he discovers the shocking truth about human nature.
• Playback | Raymond Chandler | Noir Detective Classic
  • This one sucked; I think Marlowe got somebody’s briefcase back, but I can’t remember; this book totally sucked, and I hope it was ghostwritten.
• Trouble is My Business | Raymond Chandler | Noir Detective Classic
  • The Marlowe novellas are fine; it’s interesting to see how he would take these novellas, mush them together, and make a novel out of it. I preferred the stories that emphasized setting and atmosphere over plot, but all were better than Playback.
• The Little Sleep | Paul Tremblay | Narcoleptic Detective
  • I love the high-concept premise of a narcoleptic detective; the execution is sound but proves the idea is deeply flawed as a sleepy PI is obliged to black out whenever good stuff happens, and there’s no actual way to spin narcolepsy from a weakness to strength; fun try though.
• The Second Murderer | Denise Mina | Noir Homage
  • The first published Chandler fiction by a woman is exceptional; Marlowe’s back, he has a case that takes him all over Los Angeles, including neighborhoods he didn’t visit in the originals; there’s a cool, unrequited love interest; best of all, Marlowe hangs out at lesbian bars and befriends 1940s lesbians, which seems like exactly something he would do; this was good and inarguably a million times better than Playback.

Elmore Leonard (13)

• Out of Sight | Elmore Leonard | Prison Break
  • This book rules so hard. I’ve read it three times now, and it’s just one long, funny, effortless conversation between a bank robber and a federal agent: a charming crime romance.
• Mr. Majestyk | Elmore Leonard | Migrant Crimes
  • Mr. Majestyk is a badass who protects migrant farmers and kills the human traffickers that haunt them; an adaption of the movie (also by Leonard) is politically strange, like a tacit comment on borders and immigration.
• The Switch | Elmore Leonard | Kidnapping
  • The guys from Jackie Brown get the idea to kidnap a rich guy’s wife, but he’s an asshole, and he’s glad they do it! It’s one of Leonard’s best, a must-read for Jackie Brown fans, more essential than Rum Punch!
• Rum Punch | Elmore Leonard | Gun Smugglers and Bail Bondsman
  • Source novel for Jackie Brown; this was fun, more Ordell, Max, and Jackie, but Tarnatino’s changes are better, and Leonard had the voices better in the first book, but hey, Rum Punch is still alright!
• Freaky Deaky | Elmore Leonard | Bomb Squad
  • The Weathermen return to bomb stuff, but a cowboy bomb squad cop stops them; right, but it could have gone deeper into the Weatherman because Bomb Cop was a recurrent theme in the author’s output.
• Tishomingo Blues | Elmore Leonard | Leonard, Dixie Mafia
  • A novel about stunt-diving, the Civil War, Robert Johnson at his crossroads, Black Americans, and the Dixie Mafia, with excellent characters and dialogue, very good, American history nerd’s delight.
• Swag | Elmore Leonard | Armed Robbery
  • Two guys in Detroit realize it’s easy money to bust into liquor stores and stick a gun in somebody’s face and take all the cash; absolutely great, my second read, and almost gives a guy ideas.
• City Primeval | Elmore Leonard | Urban Cowboys
  • A dead judge, a crafty Detroit detective, and a fight across the city that has somehow been adapted into a Justified season? Despite my Leonard obsession, I haven’t (yet) watched any Justified besides the (excellent) first episode.
• 52 Pickup | Elmore Leonard | Blackmail
  • A simple blackmail story with rich characters and a paranoid outlook about pornographers and capital ownership; simple, Cain-like, really fucking good.
• Split Images | Elmore Leonard | Homicide Investigation
  • A tragic novel about an asshole factory heir who gets off on killing people, hires a mercenary, and doesn’t know he has a badass arson detective and a plucky journalist on his trail; great, fun, tragic.
• Touch | Elmore Leonard | Supernatural Conman
  • Some guy gets stigmata, and maybe he’s a conman, or maybe he’s the real thing; Leonard tries magical realism in a departure from his typical books that a surprising amount of people call his best book (wrong), perhaps because they don’t really like crime stories.
• Hombre | Elmore Leonard | Stagecoach Ambush
  • They call him “Hombre” because he was one tough hombre! Great western novella, absolutely feels like reading a legend.
• The Tonto Woman and Other Stories | Elmore Leonard |Tales of Bandits, Outlaws, Valor Thieves and Miscegenation
  • All kinds of great cowboy yarns, including 3:10 to Yuma, and tales of revenge in the American Frontier; Leonard realized that the frontier project was basically a Grudge Making Machine.

The Big Jims (3)

• Destination Morgue | James Ellroy | True Crime and Fiction
  • Ellroy’s short essays for GQ where he confesses to breaking into houses, huffing paint, being a teenage Nazi, getting into AA, and all sorts of salacious perv dog stuff that makes him literature’s one and only Demon Dog From Hell
• The Enchantress | James Ellroy | Marilyn Monroe’s Murder
  • The Demon Dog imagines himself Freddy Otash again and sets himself on solving the Marilyn murder, uncovers a blackmail ring, exonerates Jack the K, implicates J. the Edgar Hoover, and gives us a sequel that tops the also very good Freddy Otash book, Widespread Panic.
• Pop. 1280 | Jim Thompson | Crooked Texas Sheriff
  • A funny, satirical noir about small Texas counties, sheriffs, incest, and the brutal truth that law exists to protect the powerful; another favorite of the year.

The Donalds (12)

Donald Goines (3)

• Never Die Alone | Donald Goines | Black Power Fiction
  • A poor Jewish crime writer gets a hold of a Black pimp’s diary and struggles with what to do with it in an incredibly complex, meta-textual, and profound novel mediating on poverty, writing, and crime; Goines is undisputably a master of the form.
• Crime Partners | Donald Goines | Black Power Fiction
  • The first Kenyatta novel, a badass Black Panther-stylized Black militant who is out to expose whitey for dealing drugs in Black neighborhoods and collaborating with the police: get’um Kenyatta! Always wanted to read this series, long out of print but back in audio.
• Death List | Donald Goines | Meta Crime
  • In the second Kenyatta novel, the cops and the Italian gangs strike back at the Black radicals and attack their farm compound. This answers a question: what if Black people were allowed to publish pulp fiction in the racist American 1970s, and the answer is it’s one of the best crime series protagonists I’ve read.

Donald Westlake (9)

• The Fugitive Pigeon | Donald E. Westlake | Nephew Novel
  • A hapless nephew wants just to run his mafia front bar, given to him by his uncle, but the New York mafia has different plans when they pin a bum rap on him: a wonderful nephew novel, a genre I discovered this year, of which Westlake is a literary champion, and the nephews need a comeback.
• The Busy Body | Donald E. Westlake | Nephew Mafia
  • Another nephew, this time a mobster-enforcer nephew (hardly a nephew, IMO), must investigate a missing corpse to discover a hilarious money laundering scheme.
• God, Save The Mark | Donald E. Westlake | Nephew Novel
  • Fred Fitch is the dictionary definition of a mark, and he’s also the definition of a nephew, plus the protagonist of one of a very funny comedy caper: the platonic ideal of nephew fiction.
• The Ax | Donald Westlake | Unemployed Serial Killer
  • A fired paper mill floor manager realizes he will only get a new job by literally killing the competition, one of the author’s best and most powerful indictments of capitalism.
• Firebreak (Parker 20) | Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark) | Heist/Hackers
  • Parker teams up with a hacker to break into a .com billionaire’s stupid mansion and steal his art; while the consensus is this one isn’t great, I actually loved it, and it’s a favorite; I liked the hacker, and I thought it was funny that Parker had to react to technology and how it would affect heist professionals.
• Breakout (Parker 21) | Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark) | Jailbreak
  • One of the best Parker novels, certainly the best late one; Parker breaks out of jail, plus two heists! Read it out of sequence if you must; this one is so good.
• Nobody Runs Forever (Parker 22) | Donald E. Westlake | Bank Car Heist
  • A decent Parker novel that ends on a down note and, unfortunately, becomes a trilogy where the first entry is obviously the most interesting.
• Ask The Parrot (Parker 23) | Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark) | Racetrack Heist
  • It is one of the worst Parker novels; all coincidences, no planning, and a lot of reaction. I enjoyed the talking parrot (a Perry Mason reference?), but was interesting to consider how robbing a racetrack would go, a crime also seen in Kubrick’s The Killing; this felt pastiche, which maybe was where the series was headed, and that might have been really cool once the kinks got worked out, as it certainly worked better in the Dortimer series.
• Dirty Money (Parker 24) | Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark) | Botched Heist
  • The final Parker ends with a whimper; he cleans up the mess from the last two books; this doesn’t seem like the end to a series because the author died unexpectedly. And yet, an unexpected death does kind of seem like death, like what would eventually take down Parker; he’ll just drop dead of a heart attack or something and is suddenly no more. Though Westlake died, Parker didn’t. He’s still out there, he just hit this dime truck the other day.

Don(ald) Winslow (1)

• City Of Dreams | Don Winslow | Irish Mafia
  • The Irish Mob Goes to Hollywood is the second in a trilogy. I much preferred the first novel and found this one uneventful, but I will read the third. Will Winslow go through with his retirement to prevent Trump 2?

Maxs, Mickeys, Mikes (6)

• Dead Street | Mickey Spillane | One Last Case
  • It’s a passable nuclear noir; I still wonder what’s so great about Spillane, but it took me a few years to come around on Block, so I’ll persist in reading.
• Hard Cash (Nolan 5) | Max Allan Collins | Heist series
  • Just fine: the bad guys from a previous volume return and make more trouble.
• Scratch Fever (Nolan 6) | Max Allan Collins | Heist series
  • Honestly, didn’t like this at all; too much Robin (Jon), not enough Batman (Nolan). But I only have three left in the series, so I’d be crazy not to read them!
• The Lincoln Lawyer | Michael Connelly | Lawyer Detective
  • I love the Lincoln Lawyer. I usually find court procedurals dull, but I appreciate how Holler works on multiple cases, makes deals behind the scenes, and gets involved in crimes and LAPD disputes. he’s very eccentric (like Monk or Sherlock).
• The Brass Verdict | Michael Connelly | Lawyer Detective
  • Love Rehab Lincoln Lawyer, helping surfers, solving cases, and continuing to piss off his ex-wives. While my shortest review, my favorite of the three.
• The Reversal | Michael Connelly | Lawyer Detective
  • Love DA Lincoln Lawyer; when he argues for the state, it was pretty fun to see how they build a case; the end is absolutely bonkers, silly, and kinda dumb but also very fun and full of explosions.

Larry (4)

• The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes | Lawrence Block | Cain-like Cop Detective
  • A decent Cain-like that was hilariously pornographic and a solid 8 on the steamy rating scale.
• Killing Castro | Lawrence Block | Cuban Assassination
  • Just as funny as the myriad of attempts to assassinate Castro; apparently, the pulp presses buying anti-Cuban agitprop, but Block gives a fairer shake to Castro’s Republic than most American media.
• The Girl with the Long Green Heart | Lawrence Block | Conman
  • A great Conman story where feelings for a beautiful femme fatale lead to everyone’s downfall; I finally got this guy after this one, it’s really good.
• A Diet of Treacle | Lawrence Block | Beatnik Bad Boy Romance
  • This was hardly a crime novel, more of a hippie romance set in the East Village, and I liked it more than most of the author’s books.

The Lone Domestic Thriller (1)

• Beware the Woman | Megan Abbott | Domestic Thriller
  • A slow burn to a shocking finish that felt like a true neo-Gothic novel; I’m a huge fan of Abbott and found this book to be a significant departure from previous work, excited to see what she puts out next.

Regional Crimes (9)

• The Guns of Heaven | Pete Hamill | Irish Independence 
  • 80s potboiler about a journalist who gets involved with gun smuggling and the Troubles of Northern Ireland and helps some righteous Irish freedom fighters.
• Lowdown Road | Scott Von Doviak | Hicksploitation! 
  • Two good old boys steal an ice cream truck full of weed and try to sell it at an Evel Knievel bike jump, but the cops, a smooth brother-man, and meth-smoking biker Nazis try to stop them—a romp, just like 70s exploitation movies.
• No House Limit | Steve Fisher | Las Vegas Noir
  • A period-perfect potboiler about an incredible gambler who comes in to bet the house and the one pit boss who can stop him.
• Miami Purity | Vicki Hendricks | Miami Noir
  • A steamy, erotic noir about Florida, incest, and industrial dry cleaning equipment; a favorite of the year for sure.
• Don’t Know Tough | Eli Cranor | Football Crime
  • A California boy comes to coach Texas Football and ends up getting a gentle giant as a quarterback, very voicey with a good last twist.
• More Better Deals | Joe R. Lansdale | Texas Cain-like
  • A used car salesman helps a drive-in owner kill her husband, and everything goes sour in a historical crime novel that felt period-authentic.
• The Dog of the South | Charles Portis | Road trip | Mexico Meets the American South
  • A hilarious romp through Mexico as a man chases his wife, her boyfriend, and his stolen car.
• The Siberia Job | Josh Haven | Oligarchy
  • Set immediately after the fall of the USSR, this book gives a compelling look at how oil oligarchies concentrated wealth by buying vouchers of publicly owned energy companies, functionally the point of dismantling the Soviet state.
• Tokyo Ueno Station | Yu Miri | Nostalgic Ghost
  • A ghost haunts a train station he helped maintain throughout his life. It’s really sad that there are crimes against humanity and a good, vivid book with a Buddhist parting ritual beautifully described.

“Cozy” “Mysteries” (9)

• Up to No Gouda | Linda Reilly | Traditional Cozy
  • After opening her dream of a specialty grilled cheese restaurant (lol, literally love that), our hero is privy to a murder, and she finds a dog (Yorkie Poo, I think); her best friend moves back to town, and so does her boyfriend, and she meets a homeless soldier, and there are nefarious real estate interests afoot, and I enjoyed this one a lot, and the dog on the cover is very cute.
• Scene of the Grind | Tonya Kappes | Traditional Cozy
  • The dog is cute, and the mystery and sets were fine, kinda of predictable, but that schnauzer-wearing Sherlock Holmes outfit is honestly enough for me.
• Bookshops & Bonedust + Legends & Lattes | Travis Baldree | Cozy Fantasy 
  • I adore these cozy fantasy stories about an orc that opens up a coffee shop with a harpy and a Ratkin; I also enjoyed the prequel.
• Feel the Bern | Andrew Shaffer | Cozy Politics Parody
  • A silly story about Bernie Sanders, Vermont, and a maple syrup murder mystery, exactly what it promises to be.
• Not Forever, But For Now | Chuck Palahniuk | Transgressive?
  • A strange novel that the author described as a take on cozy mysteries but about secret incest twin Hardy Boy assassins; there are some standout passages but I don’t think anyone who likes cozy mysteries would like this at all.
• Time’s Undoing | Cheryl Head | Generational Murder
  • Outstanding book that uses generational research, the police’s systemic killings of Black Americans, cozy troupes like an amateur sleuth, a community coming together, and romance to tell a unique story.
• Killing Me | Michelle Gagnon | Cozy Noir
  • The tone, character, tempo, and lesbian romance of a cozy but sleazy Vegas set dressing: a con woman, strippers, a serial killer, a super spy trying to stop him, and I loved how it all came together in a satisfying way.
• Tom Lake | Ann Patchett | American Family Novel
  • While there’s no crime, and the mystery is just a mom taking a while to tell a detailed story, and literally no one is calling this a cozy mystery, I think it qualifies with a plot based in mystery, centered around running a rural business, with generational implications on a character-focused domestic setting. I will be pestering the reading public with this hot take soon. 

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History (of Class Struggle) (18)

We continue to live in a hellish age because of billionaire wealth inequality. Exactly how this happens is obscured, but books bring clarity and truth. Not all of these books are written from a leftist perspective, but I read them like a Marxist interested in class struggle, history’s engine.

• The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine | Rashid Khalid
  • An exceptional primer on Palestinian history in the 20th century and America’s culpability for Israel’s colonial settlement.
• A Spectre, Haunting | China Mieville | Marxism
  • A history of Marxism from Marx until now and an impassioned plea for all of us to remake the world into something fairer and better.
• Correction: Parole, Prison and the Possibility of Change | Ben Austen | Prison Industrial Complex 
  • Considers the parol system in the 20th and 21st centuries and passionately argues for all prisoners to have the chance to plead their case for release; I wrote more here.
• Easy Money | Ben McKenzie | Crypto Fraud 
  • The guy from the OC convincingly argues that Bitcoin is the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history with hundreds of examples.
• Dumb Money | Ben Mezrich | Meme Stocks 
  • A Reddit RoaringKitty hagiography and the basis for the middling movie.
• The Revolution That Wasn’t | Spencer Jakab | “Retail Trading” As Hedgefund Fraud 
  • A much more thorough look at GME, showing how all the hedge funds reported record profits in 2021 because dumb money poured into the market and lost all their savings (wrote about it here).
• The Jakarta Method | Vincent Bevins | Regime Change 
  • A carefully researched retelling of American imperialism and regime change throughout the 20th century focused on Jakarta, where the CIA invented ways to persecute (murder) the left.
• If We Burn | Vincent Bevins | 2010-2020 
  • Seeks to answer how the 2010s had the largest mass protests in history yet also saw the election of right-wing, reactionary regimes across the world; vital reading, and I wrote more here.
• The South | Adolph L. Reed Jr. | Jim Crow/Civil Rights 
  • Personal history explaining how Jim Crow shaped American racism and the legacy still lasts within class relations and who receives opportunities in America.
• Internet for the People | Ben Tarnoff | Internet 
  • A primer into Internet history and how the military and capitalists; a little too surface level, rely too much on established easy-to-find secondary citations.
• Blackshirts and Reds | Michael Parenti | Communism 
  • Reconsidering World War II as a battle of Fascism vs. Communism, where America made an unstable alliance and then hired all of the Nazi party officials into the American military system with something like Operation Paperclip. A short, but eye-opening reinterpretation of WWII.
• Freewaytopia | Paul Haddad | Los Angeles
  • The history of the Los Angeles freeway system and how Cal-Trans development shaped the development of the city; incredibly researched, discusses almost every exit on the LA freeway system; kudos to this author.
• The Ins-N-Outs of In-N-Out Burger | Lynsi Snyder | Company history
  • The Bad Burger Billionaire’s book is surprisingly good, with interesting company history, revealing anecdotes and strange California circumstances lurking in the background.
• The Bill Gates Problem | Tim Schaub | Gates and the NGO Industrial Complex
  • Describes how the Bill Gates Foundation has allowed one of the world’s richest billionaires unfettered access and control to pharmaceutical research, patents, intellectual property, and then by extension, control of public media coverage, public policy, and pioneering a new way of using a charity to uphold capitalist colonialism.
• Doppelgänger | Naomi Klein | Rising Fascism
  • After getting repeatedly confused with Naomi Wolfe, a reactionary author, the leftist author of The Shock Doctrine, considers how a fascist second self lurks in American politics, media, medicine, and history. I wrote a long review here.
• How to Do Nothing | Jenny Odell | Attention Economy
  • Reconsidering doing nothing as an act of resistance in an economy that demands productivity; inspiring book, yet advocates nothing.
• Golden Gulag | Ruth Wilson Gilmore | Prison Industrial Complex
  • A history of California private prisons that is funded by the state in tandem with labor offshoring, ” The War on Drugs,” and gentrifying urban communities; one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read; sadly out of print.
• Killers of the Flower Moon | David Grann | Indigenous Americans & the FBI
  • The basis of the film, the book has exceptional research, weaving together primary sources and tribal oral history to learn the truth; I wrote about this in-depth here.

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Species-Scale Science and Fiction (15)

After a friend took me on an enlightening tour of the Museum of Natural Science, I have been considering life development on million-year scales.

Species-Focused Science

• Entangled Life | Merlin Sheldrake | Fungi
  • Fungal life and its history on Earth; I can’t wait to buy the illustrated version.
• Being You | Anil Seth | Consciousness
  • A wide-ranging, scientific study of consciousness, including mammalian and fungal, defines consciousness as finding stasis, trying to be in criteria of temperature, heartbeat, and more activity seen across lifeforms; fascinating, but maybe implying computers or neural networks are alive.
• A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching | Rosemary Mosco
  • A history of the domesticated pigeon, why people raised them, how they migrated across the planet, and how to identify pigeons in your neighborhood; a favorite of the year that gave me a new hobby, pigeon watching.
• Your Inner Fish | Neil Shubin | Evolution
  • The anatomist who discovered the Tiktaalik looks at the geological record and describes the evolution of species from reptile to mammal.
• Breath | James Nestor | Breathing
  • A treatise on breathing claims how humans evolved and how our breathing habits are causing illness.

Species Scaled Fiction

• The Cretaceous Past | Cixin Liu | Dinosaurs and Ants Civilization
  • Ants and Dinosaurs coexist for centuries and develop complex societies until a tragic turn ends the Cretaceous Age, one of Liu’s underrated best.
• How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe | Charles Yu | Time Travel
  • A meta-fictional novel about the past, memories, science fiction, and a time machine that keeps breaking; surprising and fun.
• To Hold Up The Sky | Cixin Liu | Chinese Sci-Fi
  • A story collection including galactic extermination, a sarcastic ice artist, poems in galaxies, gene editing, a big mirror in the sky, and all kinds of wonders only imaginable by Da Liu.
• Expert System’s Champion | Adrian Tchaikovsky | Future tribal society
  • I liked the first novella better, but this sequel about autonomously managed robot worlds is fascinating, and learning more about the history was interesting.

A.I. Robocops Cyberpunk Style (FEAR THE MACHINES) 

• All You Need Is Kill | Hiroshi Sakurazaka | Military
  • A teenage mecha super-soldier gets stuck in a Groundhog Day loop until he kills every alien on the battlefield; the source material for Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow
• BadAsstronauts | Grady Hendrix | Citizen Space Expedition
  • A redneck astronaut sends a homemade rocket to space to get his cousin back in a choppy, but fun, re-edited first novel.
• All Systems Red | Martha Wells | A.I.
  • Reread the first Murderbot book about the security AI that becomes self-aware and starts solving mysteries.
• Artificial Condition | Martha Wells | Robot PI
  • Murderbot is back on a ship, negotiates a labor truce, and proves that Ash from Alien is not representative of all ship AIs.
• Rogue Protocol | Martha Wells | Robot PI
  • Murderbot goes to a planet and discovers an illegal mining operation
• Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence | Rafał Kosik | Cyberpunk Party Heist
  • A group of net hackers go after a corporation, and I realized I’m tiring of this universe.

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Deeply Unhinged Literary Fiction (9)

Strange books by narrators who do not share the same reality as everyone else; my girlfriend said 10 deeply unhinged books is a slightly distressing amount, but I find them cathartic.

• No Longer Human | Osamu Dazai | Ennui
  • The second most popular Japanese novel of all time, and it lives up to the hype; a sad young man drifts through Japan and fails at everything until he disappears.
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation | Ottessa Moshfegh | Pilling & Chilling
  • A New York model decides she hates everything and herself, so she takes a bunch of pills and sleeps for a year until her cells regrow a new one; this book was so mean and hilarious, cannot believe it was so popular!
• Eileen | Ottessa Moshfegh | Strange Christmas
  • Eileen is an old woman who tells the story of one week that set her life off course from her small town into strange places; the movie is good, but the book is amazing with the narrator’s closely observed thoughts.
• McGlue | Ottessa Moshfegh | Sailors
  • They accuse a sailor of getting blackout drunk and murdering his lover/best friend, a strange, angry, homoerotic novel.
• Pizza Girl | Jean Kyoung Frazier | Bildungsroman
  • A Korean girl in K-Town delivers pizza, gets pregnant, falls in love with a single-mother customer, breaks into her house, and gets drunk in her car in a loving portrait of people who make bad choices; really enjoyed this.
• Your Driver Is Waiting | Priya Guns | Disgruntled Uber Driver
  • A second-generation immigrant in LA drives for Uber and becomes Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver; I liked this main character.
• Queer | William S. Burroughs | Non-Normative Desire
  • A strange, hateful, profane book more about assault and child desire than anything resembling queerness in 2023. I must hand it to Burroughs; he confesses to true degeneracy and crime.
• My Sister, The Serial Killer | Oyinkan Braithwaite | Serial Killer
  • A sister is jealous of her serial killer sister; I didn’t like this.
• Harold | Steven Wright | Comedic Bildungsroman 
  • A second grader with ADHD goes to school a day in the 1960s; this book is very funny, perfectly read by Steven Wright, and while Harold isn’t unhinged, he sees the world askew.

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Poachers & Pirates (9)

I did not intend to read so much about poachers and pirates, but I ended up reading a lot about this topic, a long-held fascination.

• Swamp Story | Dave Barry | Florida Man Comic Caper
  • Some rednecks say they found a monster in a Florida swamp, but some gangsters buried their money there; this was cool, like Donald Westlake.
• Gator Country | Rebecca Renner | Nature Crimes
  • The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Force set up a sting to capture alligator thieves with an undercover agent, just like a typical Fed.
• Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods | Lyndsie Bourgon | Tree crimes
  • A sympathetic look at the poachers and the trees in Northern California and Washington; on the one hand, people are poor, but on the other, Redwood trees are some of the oldest lifeforms on earth.
• The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession | Michael Finkel | Art Heists
  • A guy who lived with his mom in France stole over 300 paintings from European museums and got caught in a tragic, brilliantly told story, a favorite of the year.
• The Ransomware Hunting Team | Renee Dudley/Daniel Golden | Ransomware and their amateur sleuth adversaries
  • Ransomware: what it is, who’s making it, who’s fighting it; and it turns out the only people fighting it are a bunch of random working people, a guy from Bloomington Normal, a guy from Germany, a lady in SF, all cracking malicious encryption and helping people for free.
• Fake Money, Blue Smoke | Josh Haven | Heist
  • A counterfeiter gets a scam to rip off some Arabian princes with fake money on a yacht to pull off an art heist on a train.
• The White Darkness | David Grann | Arctic Exploration
  • A well-told tale about a man so obsessed with Antarctic **exposition **it kills him; this reminded me of Herzog’s Grisly Man
• The Wager | David Grann | British Navy Mutiny
  • The story of a ship’s mutiny, brilliantly told, weaves together all the diaries, memoirs, contemporary accounts, and context about British shipping and sparked my further interest in Naval stories.
• The Devil and Sherlock Holmes | David Grann
  • A breakout year with the success of The Killing of the Flower Moon, this New Yorker essay collection actually has four film adaptations.
• Villains of All Nations | Marcus Rediker | Class Conscious Pirates
  • Can we read pirates as sailors unwilling to accept the feudal hierarchy of the British Imperial Navy and those against colonialism? Yes!

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Boxing (8)

I’m a fan of boxing and researching the sport for a writing project.

• Fat City | Leonard Gardner | Boxing Novel
  • A depressing story about the end of regional amateur boxing in the late 1960s
• Undisputed Truth | Mike Tyson | Boxing Memoir
  • The funniest boxing memoir, with plenty of gossip, raw, honest self-analysis, and admission to multiple crimes.
• The Greatest | Mohammad Ali | Boxing Memoir
  • Hands down the greatest; an incredible, hilarious, deeply honorable person brilliantly written by the greatest boxer.
• Championship Fighting: Explosive Punching and Aggressive Defense | Jack Dempsey | Boxing Technique
  • A brilliantly written explanation of how to punch and take a punch.
• Boxing and the Mob: The Notorious History of the Sweet Science | Jeffrey Sussman | Boxing & Crime
  • A primer summary of the relationships of boxers and mobsters with generic summaries of each.
• The Murder of Sonny Liston | Shaun Assael
  • Sonny Liston’s death is highly suspicious; he was involved with Las Vegas mafia elements, and the police didn’t investigate correctly; this book details the strangeness.
• The Sweet Science | A. J. Liebling | Boxing
  • Essays about boxing from the 30s, 40s, and 50s by a guy who pines for the Donnybrook heyday of the 1800s; the voice is so perfect in this book.
• The Fix Is In | Brian Tuohy | Gambling
  • An eye-opening book that makes a compelling case for professional sports leagues rigging major games and team dynasties.

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Cinema (5)

Books about movies so I can get better at watching movies, my second favorite thing to do.

• Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir | Eddie Muller | Noir
  • The genre of film noir is broken up into subgenres and laid out onto a mental map of a noir city, a favorite film book.
• Chainsaw Confidential | Gunnar Hansen | Texas Chainsaw Massacre
  • The inside scoop on the production of Texas Chainsaw, like how they filmed on a cannabis farm, they had mafia financiers and the actors didn’t get paid.
• Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family | James B. Stewart & Rachel Abrams | Sumner Media Empire
  • Succession, IRL: the Redstone family-controlled CBS, and passing down the company proved to be very tricky.
• The Last Action Heroes | Nick De Semlyen | 80s Action Movies
  • 80s action movies, the rivalry between Stallone and Schwarzenegger, Willis, Norris, the classics, and some obscure ones; a well-told, while not critical, look back at late Cold War propaganda.
• Cinema Speculation | Quentin Tarantino | Moviemaker Memoir
  • Tarantino writes a book that’s part memoir, part cinema criticism, and part linear notes for his films; very entertaining and explains how his strange, singular personage came into being.

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Hot Properties (8)

Media tie-ins, movie inspiration, and a few odd series I felt compelled to sample.

• Elvis & Me | Priscilla Presley | Elvis
  • Priscilla Presley’s memoir from childhood until Elvis’ death; an avid journal writer, Presley’s telling is crisp, full of detail, and one of the unique stories in the 20th century; the film is also fantastic.
• Who Censored Roger Rabbit? | Gary K. Wolf | Cartoon Parody
  • I always liked the movie, but the book is not as good; it seems like a good idea, but the cartoons on the page, the characters being able to copy themselves, and the lame reveal of the actual culprit made me prefer the movie any day.
• Star Wars: Death Troopers | Joe Schreiber | Stormtrooper Zombies
  • Zombie Storm Troopers are haunting a Death Star until freaking Han Solo and Chewie himself come and save the day; fun!
• The Night Stalker (Kolchak 1) | Jeff Rice | Urban Fantasy Mystery (Early)
  • Kolchak, the reporter, hunts a vampire across Las Vegas even if it ruins his life; this unpublished novel was the basis of the show and is pretty great!
• The Night Strangler (Kolchak 2) | Jeff Rice | Urban Fantasy Mystery (Early)
  • The Kolchak sequel is less good; the Seattle setting is fine, but the monster is vague, and the plot is the same as the first one.
• Cold Case Revenge Jessica R. Patch | Missing Child Suspense
  • A little girl gets kidnapped, and her hunky dad has to save her, so he teams up with a National Park cop, and they fall in love; the main character of this had the same name as a guy I know, so I had to read it.

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Fantasy (3)

Not much fantasy this year, although I finally read a classic and started a contemporary trilogy.

• The Colour of Magic (Discworld 1) | Terry Pratchett | Fantasy Series
  • I’ve read other Discworlds, but I went back to the beginning to finally read the D&D parody books; I like Rinceworld, he’s an odd nut.
• A Deadly Education | Naomi Novik | Evil Harry Potter 
  • What if Malfoy was the main character, Hogwarts was evil, there were no teachers, and instead of 
• The Last Graduate | Naomi Novik | Evil Harry Potter
  • Loved the first book; the second felt like a wheel spinning, more of the same Dark Hogwarts story from the first, but thankfully it sets up the third well.

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Self-Help (10)

When I was depressed and needed help quitting my job, self-help books came through. They’re corny, but this section includes some of the most impactful books I read all year.

• How To Win Friends And Influence People | Dale Carnegie | Self-Improvement
  • A moronic book that gives advice that equates to be nice to manipulate others; useless, commonsense knowledge.
• Thinking in Bets | Annie Duke | Probabilistic Thinking
  • A very fun and approachable guide to thinking in probabilities like a gambler, with personal examples and scientific evidence, is an interesting way to consider happiness and your daily choices.
• How to Decide | Annie Duke | Decision-Making Strategies
  • A continuation of ideas in the first book put toward a more concentrated purpose of deciding when multiple options are available.
• Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away | Annie Duke | Quitting
  • My favorite of the three books explores when to fold them, when not to hold them when to cut your losses, and when quitting is winning.
• Atomic Habits | James Clear | Habit Forming
  • Interesting way to conceptualize productivity and change your own mind.
• Wherever You Go, There You Are | Jon Kabat-Zinn 
  • A Zen book about meditating and mindfulness that’s a calming listen.
• The Cow in the Parking Lot Leonard Scheff and Susan Edmiston
  • A Buddhist understanding of anger: anger is hitting the hand with a hammer, and if stopped, one will feel better.
• Never Get A “Real” Job | Scott Gerber
  • Reconsiders money making as a series of skills instead of a series of jobs.
• Unleash the Power Within | Tony Robbins
  • I had to know what the fuss was about, and despite his menacing, eerie presence and voice, he made some interesting points about motivation.
• Awake the Giant Within | Tony Robins
  • A recorded seminar explaining the giant within all of us, and Tony used to be a janitor at this very building, but now he passes it every single morning on his helicopter—and you can too.

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Writing (13)

I added more writing guides to the brain stew, focused on narrative frameworks and inspiration, and considered some specific guides. 

• Wired for Story | Lisa Cron | Story Framework
  • Considers neuroscience and reader expectation to explain what consumers expect in a conventional story.
• Story Genius | Lisa Cron | Story Framework
  • A holistic drafting system to create a beat sheet, characters, detailed outline, and general story shape.
• Story | Robert McKee | Story Framework
  • All of McKee’s thoughts on the story, a taste of the other books.
• Character | Robert McKee | Character Framework
  • A detailed and deep method of character creation that applies to any medium.
• Dialogue | Robert McKee | Dialogue Framework
  • A series of revision and generation strategies to improve dialogue and what to look for when cutting and fixing.
• Bird by Bird | Anne Lamott | Writing Inspiration
  • When her little brother was writing a report on birds, her father suggested he take it bird by bird; Lamott suggests similarly to pace oneself and to accept the process.
• Write for Life | Julia Cameron | Writing Inspiration
  • The Artist’s Way for writers, including specifics about what to write in one’s pages and writer’s dates for writers.
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron | Artist Inspiration
  • A popular book that suggests an artist can find inspiration and direction from daily journaling, weekly intense study, and a spirit open to God’s wisdom, daily journaling is a cathartic, helpful exercise.
• Steal Like An Artist Trilogy |  Austin Kleon | Writing Inspiration
  • Ideas, truisms, inspiration, and post-it note-type ideas helped me reboot negative thought loops around writing.
• How to Write and Market a Christmas Cozy Mystery | T. Lockhave | Self-Publishing
  • Ideas and outlines on generating the story and a great tutorial on marketing a niche content ebook around a holiday.
• Several Short Sentences About Writing | Verlyn Klinkenborg | Sentences
  • Klinkenborg’s sentences strive for a short, clear, relatable style, and this book was fun.
• Writing Tools | Roy Peter Clark | Grammar Reference
  • A useful grammar refresher and desk manual; a dull read.
• Content Fuel Framework | Melanie Deziel | Blogging Guide
  • Brainstorming lists and frameworks for blogposts; very helpful.

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Stuff I Didn’t Like (8)

I am not a harsh grader. I liked almost everything I read this year except for a few works. I redacted the names of some folks because I’m not looking for trouble nor grief.

• The Silence | Don DeLillo | Mediation
  • All the world’s cell phones turn off in a quick, mostly boring novella presented as an overproduced audiobook, like a below-average play.
• The Last White Man | Mohsin Hamid | Race satire
  • All the white people wake up black one day, and they hate it and start killing themselves, and the entire world ends. while the page count is very short, it is much, much too long and has kinda “equal opportunity offender” South Park vibes.
• Blonde Rattlesnake | Bank robbers
  • A poorly structured look at a crime from the 1920s that over-reproduces primary sources and doesn’t go deeper than citation.
• Fully Automated Luxury Communism | Techno-Optimism
  • This hasn’t aged well. The idea that people can somehow spontaneously start “owning” automation technology seems impossible just seven years later, and now sounds like reworded in a Silicon Valley press release; the analysis is not sufficiently critical of billionaires and mostly buys their bullshit, the author embarrassingly praises Elon Musk’s promise for space mining programs, a wacky fantasy; this is not serious analysis.
• The Donut Legion | White Separatists 
  • I found all the characters obnoxious.
• Maeve Fly | Psycho Lady
  • American Psycho for Disney women; perhaps I didn’t get it.
• REDACTED 
  • An awful “small press” (two guys) produced a writing guide; the people who made this over-rely on secondary sources. I suppose it is useful as a bibliography with blockquote but right on the cusp of plagiarism.
• REDACTED
  • A self-published guide to becoming a Kindleprenuer explaining how she did it, but I have a hunch her unrevealed secret is “Hire ghostwriters.”

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In Conclusion:

Thanks to Tech Layoffs 2023, I’ll probably never read this many books in a year again unless I win the lotto. This was a fun, if somewhat mentally exhausting, exercise.

Writing something about every book was practically required to keep all the information straight in my head. The concept of reviewing every book forced new ideas. Some sublists could be expanded posts. Careful readers will see that happen in the coming months.

I also did this as a rough process of practicing data analysis. This is the raw data that makes the analysis possible. Within it was all the real insight, but through the aggregate, change happened. Each data point is built into an interlocking whole.