Books of 2023

I once again set a goal of reading 50 books for 2023, and once again fell short of that. I got to 26. But I did publish seven books of my own, which took away a lot of pleasure reading time for editing and proofreading. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Last year was the year of Ivan Doig. Yeah, I’d read several of his books prior to 2023, but last year was when Doig truly ascended to the status of one of my all-time favorite authors. I read six of his novels last year (and am reading another one now) and gave two of them 5-star ratings. Dancing at the Rascal Fair is up there with East of Eden and Angle of Repose as one of the best literary novels I’ve ever read. I loved everything about that book and can’t recommend it enough. It’s about two friends who leave Scotland in the late 1800s to go to Montana and create homesteads. But it’s about love and hate and settling for less, plus the hardships of life at the time. It’s as close to perfect as a novel can get.

The other Doig to get 5 stars is The Bartender’s Tale, which is an amazing story, but not as epic in scope as Dancing at the Rascal Fair. It’s set in the same fictional town, years later. So many of Doig’s books are centered in the Two Medicine Country of Montana. He makes me want to go there and see it all for myself.

The only other book to get 5 stars from me is S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. I know, I know, I should have read this when I was in junior high, and I tried, but all the copies were checked out of the school library and the public library, then I just forgot. But we read it as a class last school year and even the 8th graders really liked it.

Two of my favorite living authors had new books out in 2023. Phaedra Patrick published The Little Italian Hotel, about a woman who discovers her husband has a profile on a dating app, so she takes strangers with her on what was supposed to be an anniversary trip to Italy. I do not care that Patrick’s work is marketed as women’s fiction. I love her books. I gave this one four stars, but it deserves at least another half for the way certain bits keep coming back up in the cauldron of my brain.

The other favorite living author is Nina George and she published The Little Village of Book Lovers. This one only got three stars from me. I loved her first two books translated to English, but haven’t really liked the second two as much.

As I’m looking at my book list on GoodReads, there are several missing. There was one awful book set in the 1930s or ’40s about an insane street preacher. I can’t remember the name of it, but it was horrible. I’m not seeing Stephen King’s Fairy Tale, which I read and was “meh” over. The Echo of Old Books is another one not listed. I guess I got lazy and forgot to add them to GoodReads. I wonder how many books I actually read.

Anyway, the takeaway here is Ivan Doig. Read him!