Top Books for 2023

This is, amazingly, my tenth annual roundup of recommended books that I read in the previous year. Ten years is a long time to keep something like this going, especially for me, though I've remained true to my mercurial nature by changing something about how I do it each year. My summary page links to all the previous roundups.

In the early years, I arbitrarily matched the number of top books to the number of the year (so I had 14 books on the list in 2014). I abandoned that practice after the first four years, and last year I loosened the criteria even further and included almost anything that I gave four or five stars to; this year's list has the largest number of books so far, at 88 (out of the 102 books I read in 2023; the high total number, which almost equals my 2014 record, is partly attributable to getting Covid, which meant I mostly stayed in bed and read for several days). I've left several short pieces and a number of books I started but didn't finish out of the total. I've also been reading some manga lately online, and it's difficult or impossible to find those on GR, so they're not reflected either.

Here are my figures in a table:

	5 star	4 star	3 star	2 star	Total
2023	6	82	12	2	102
2022	6	59	13	4	82
2021	5	54	29	3	90
2020	8	53	21	0	82
2019	11	36	17	1	65
2018	5	72	15	2	94
2017	10	56	19	0	85
2016	11	53	12	1	77
2015	11	68	19	2	101
2014	9	70	23	2	104
Total	82	600	180	17	882
Average	8	60	18	2	88

Tier Rankings

Since 2021, I have ranked the books in four tiers: Platinum (equal to 5 stars), and Gold, Silver and Bronze (which provide more gradation within the four-star space). Essentially, Bronze indicates that the storytelling and the emotional arc were sound and I enjoyed the book on the whole, but with caveats, usually to do with poor copy editing and/or weak worldbuilding; Silver indicates a sound, solid book with no serious flaws; and Gold is a sound, solid book that also has something a bit extra, usually depth of characterization or insight into the human condition, but somehow or other doesn't quite make it all the way to Platinum. Platinum means I thoroughly enjoyed it, no significant flaws, depth, originality, an all-around winner. Significant issues in a book that's strong in other ways can knock it down one or even two tiers.

Here's the link to all of my "Best of 2023" books, and here are my Platinum tier (6 books), Gold tier (8 books), Silver tier (38 books) and Bronze tier (37 books).

A note: I've figured out how to link to lists of books on Goodreads that have the same tag (or "shelf") and were read in the same year. I will take the risk of using these links, knowing that if GR revises their code - which is honestly long overdue - the links may well stop working. They changed their front end recently, increasing the number of clicks needed to do basic tasks and making it difficult or impossible to find notes and highlights, so I don't trust them to do a good job or make it backwards-compatible if they do a revision. But it saves me a lot of work to use those links rather than laboriously copying and pasting as I've done in previous years, and there are more books than ever this year. I will give brief rundowns on the Gold and Platinum books below, though.

Discovery/Sources

As with last year, I read a lot of classics, mostly from Project Gutenberg. This is partly because my previous best sources, Netgalley and BookBub, have been increasingly disappointing over the past couple of years, featuring a lot of unimaginative cookie-cutter books, many of them in genres I don't care for. I read 32 books from Project Gutenberg: one, H.G. Wells's The Wheels of Chance, ranked in Platinum, three in Gold, eight in Silver, and 15 in Bronze, with the remaining books earning only three stars each.

In contrast, 20 of this year's books came from Netgalley, down from 25 in 2022 and 41 in the previous two years: three Platinum, three Gold, six Silver, six Bronze, and two which earned three stars.

I bought only six through BookBub this year, down from 10 last year, all but one tagged "Needs-Editing" (the exception is by Lindsay Buroker); three of them made Bronze, and the remainder consisted of two three-stars and a two-star. You can see why I'm considering dropping BookBub entirely. (As an ironic indirect consequence of the poor showing from BookBub, I can no longer post reviews on Amazon, even though I'm a Vine Voice, because I haven't spent enough money with them lately.) By the way, BookBub claim on their website under their FAQ about how they select books for their newsletter, "We look for content that is well-formatted and free of typos and grammatical errors." I'm here to tell you that they absolutely do not.

I trialled Amazon's Kindle Unlimited for the free month in 2023, but, as I more or less expected, many of the books I want to read are not in KU, and those that are were mostly very poorly edited (with the exception of A.J. Lancaster's The King of Faerie, which went all the way to the Platinum tier and earned my rarely-awarded Well-Edited tag). Of the five books I read in KU, two were Bronze tier and two Silver tier, and one in each tier got the Seriously-Needs-Editing tag. They did all make the recommendation list, though.

In October, a friend kindly gave me his old Kobo when he upgraded, meaning I could access my local library system's ebook collection (for stupid licensing reasons, library books can't be read on Kindle in New Zealand), and that opened up a new source of books that would normally be beyond my admittedly very low price tolerance. I read 13 ebooks from the library, the high number being largely down to Covid, and they consisted of one Gold, seven Silver, and six Bronze-tier books. I also borrowed four physical books from the library earlier in the year to complete my reading of the Jeeves and Wooster series.

Speaking of price, I maintain a large wishlist (80-odd titles) on Amazon entitled "Await Ebook Price Drop," and monitor it regularly. I bought six books from my wishlist this year, a Platinum (Brandon Sanderson's The Lost Metal, from his Mistborn series, which I always seem to give five stars to), a Gold (The Burning Page, from Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series, which I also consistently rate high), two Silvers, and two Bronzes. The two Bronze-tier books reminded me why I wait until these books are on sale; it's Forrest Gump's box of chocolates.

I'm part of the Codex writers' forum, though I haven't been on there much lately, and I picked up five books from fellow Codexians in 2023, two of them via Netgalley and the rest directly from the authors. As I'd expect from Codexians, they consisted of four Silvers and a Gold, the Gold-tier book being Alex Shvartsman's Kakistocracy.

I bought two books based on Amazon recommendations, a Silver and a Bronze.

Best of the Best

Rather than summarize all 88, I'll just highlight the Platinum and Gold books this year - coincidentally taking me back to a list of 14, as in my first annual top books list. Don't despise the Silver or even Bronze tiers, though; those are still recommendations, still books I enjoyed.

Gold Tier

Let's start with the books I liked a lot but that didn't quite make it to the highest possible level. In alphabetical order by author (links to my Goodreads reviews):

• The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan #1), Robert Jackson Bennett. I enjoyed this author's previous series a lot, and this gives us another high-concept fantasy world, this time with kaiju, genetic manipulation, superpowers, imperial politics and a twisty murder mystery.
• The Burning Page (The Invisible Library #3), Genevieve Cogman. Cogman always writes well and brings great action with a competent, matter-of-fact, ingenious and principled female protagonist (my favourite kind). Here, she's struggling against a rogue Librarian who's trying to destroy the multiverse.
• The Lost Plot (The Invisible Library #4), Genevieve Cogman. One of the cool things about setting your series in a multiverse of alternate worlds is that you can have what amounts to time travel to different eras (in this case 1920s-style New York, with gangsters and Prohibition) without the complications of actual time travel, and with the option to have the worlds be different from ours in key ways. Cogman makes the most of that ability here, and throws in a dragon fight and a corruption scandal.
• The Kuiper Belt Job, David D. Levine. A heist, and what a heist; actually, a series of smaller heists as the crew is assembled, and then a big heist (and a huge plot twist) as the climax. The characters are instantly distinct and memorable, as well, which is a challenge to pull off when you're writing an ensemble cast. If "an Ocean's movie, but in space" makes you say "Ooh!", you'll want to read this one.
• England, Their England, A.G. Macdonell. A comedy classic from the 1930s, in which a Scotsman attempts to write a book about the English and discovers that they're all different, except that they're all mad. Some wonderful set-piece scenes, including one of the best examples of "show, don't tell" I've ever read.
• Kakistocracy, Alex Schvartsman. An urban fantasy underdog hero with a bad habit of speaking snark to power is inexplicably appointed as a mediator between angels and devils, while also trying to resolve several other tangled plots and keep from being assassinated by elves. To this end, he applies intelligence, courage, perseverance, generosity, kindness, courage and self-sacrifice, aided by assorted and sometimes surprising allies.
• Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, P.G. Wodehouse. The best Wooster books, for me, are the ones set at Brinkley Court, with Bertie's scheming Aunt Agatha and choleric Uncle Thomas and the selection of assorted lunatics who cluster around them. Wodehouse at the peak of his game.
• Meet Mr. Mulliner, P.G. Wodehouse. The shenanigans of the many relatives and acquaintences of the inveterate bar-parlour raconteur Mr. Mulliner are varied and hilarious, and he swears all his stories are true, even the highly unlikely ones.

Platinum Tier

And now, the best of the best of the best, also in no particular order.

• The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley. You can always spot a really intelligent author, and in this case part of her intelligence is the way in which she doesn't feel bound to current orthodoxies but can think in historical perspective - a useful skill when you're writing a time-travel novel, and a rare one. Alongside this, a powerful emotional arc beautifully executed in polished, but not overpolished, language.
• Dead Country (The Craft Wars, #1), Max Gladstone. Tara Abernathy is far and away my favourite character in Gladstone's Craft series, and in this first volume in the spinoff/sequel series, she is at her best. She's another competent, sensible, principled female protagonist, which is always a good start for me, but on top of that Gladstone layers bravura writing, action that has meaning, and both the highest and most personal of stakes.
• The King of Faerie (Stariel, #4), A.J. Lancaster. Another of those competent, matter-of-fact, ingenious and principled female protagonists I enjoy so much deals wonderfully with romance, the court politics of two worlds, and the mundane issues of being responsible for a run-down noble estate and also pregnant out of wedlock in a society that considers that scandalous.
• Charming, Jade Linwood. Not a heist, but a sting, in which Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Rapunzel scheme to take down the confidence trickster known as Prince Charming. Fairy-tale retellings can easily be kitschy, superficial and cliched; this is none of those things. The characters have depth and arcs of growth and change, the female protagonists are competent and principled and basically superheroes, and the comical narrative voice reminded me strongly of early Terry Pratchett.
• The Lost Metal (The Mistborn Saga, #7), Brandon Sanderson. Sanderson is great at describing action, but it's never mindless action; there's a good deal of reflection on the human condition that absolutely does not slow down the fantasy-superhero plot (and it's funny, at times hilarious). For maximum enjoyment you need to have read, and remembered, a lot of lore from several of the author's sprawling series, but it's not essential; I haven't read all of that and have forgotten most of what I have read, and I still loved it.
• The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll, H.G. Wells. A surprise entry in the list, this somewhat obscure classic by an author whose other works I've not always enjoyed is a tremendous celebration of the newfound mobility that the bicycle gave to the common man before the era of the car. It's partly inspired by Three Men in a Boat, and like its model it's a comedy, but there's more to it; there are reflections on how people outsource their thinking to the zeitgeist, for instance, and the protagonist is a terrific Everyman hero, a small-minded fantasist who becomes more through taking principled action on behalf of someone else. This isn't science fiction strictly defined, but it is partly about the social impact of a real-world technology.

Series

This year, I've been doing a lot of series reading. If you look at my 2023 list sorted by author, you can see this reflected clearly. A couple of the series I've read come from Project Gutenberg, but I've also read most of the Ethshar series via my library. The series I want to recommend are:

• Jeeves and Wooster, by P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse is someone you either enjoy or you don't; if you do, this is some of his best work. I was delighted to discover that I had not, in fact, read all of these books, and to rectify this in 2023.
• Ethshar, by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Sword and sorcery, and the author makes full use of the genre; these stories couldn't exist in any other setting. The characters are noblebright (usually), though the world is sometimes dark, and the author changes things up a bit in each book rather than sticking to a formula.
• Arsene Lupin, by Maurice Leblanc. I haven't read all of these, not even all of the ones on Project Gutenberg, but I intend to. They're thrilling pulp adventures with a remarkable, but also flawed, hero and highly intelligent, twisty plots, and no two of them are quite alike.
• The Invisible Library, by Genevieve Cogman. I started the series before 2023, but I read books 3-5 this year, so I'm counting it. It's a thoroughly enjoyable, well-edited series.

Conclusion

I'm not going to go through 102 books and look at the gender of the authors or the protagonists, as I did in previous years; I'm increasingly convinced that it doesn't matter (and the large number of classics I've read will skew the results male, compared to earlier lists, which doesn't reflect my taste so much as the sociology of the past).

This year, I continued the shift away from the increasingly insipid or poorly-executed offerings from BookBub and Netgalley towards more classics. At the end of the year, with my library's ebook collection newly opened up to me, I began reading some books that I wouldn't otherwise have access to, and that should continue in 2024, so I'm likely to review more recent fiction again. Still, I managed to continue several favourite series, and to pick up some new series starters and standalones, some of which will get the hype train treatment (because of their authors' connections rather than their quality) and some of which will not, but are nevertheless excellent books that I highly recommend.