Longest book read this year: The Weather Woman by Sally Gardner (457 pages) – not very impressive compared to last year’s 720-page To Paradise. That means I didn’t get through a single doorstopper this year. D’oh!
Shortest book read this year: Pitch Black by Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton (40 pages)
Authors I read the most by this year: Margaret Atwood, Deborah Levy and Brian Turner (3 books each); Amy Bloom, Simone de Beauvoir, Tove Jansson, John Lewis-Stempel, W. Somerset Maugham, L.M. Montgomery and Maggie O’Farrell (2 books each)
Publishers I read the most from: (Setting aside the ubiquitous Penguin and its many imprints) Carcanet (11 books) and Picador/Pan Macmillan (also 11), followed by Canongate (7).
My top author discoveries of the year: Michelle Huneven and Julie Marie Wade
My proudest bookish accomplishment: Helping to launch the Little Free Library in my neighbourhood in May, and curating it through the rest of the year (nearly daily tidying; occasional culling; requesting book donations)
Most pinching-myself bookish moments: Attending the Booker Prize ceremony; interviewing Lydia Davis and Anne Enright over e-mail; singing carols after-hours at Shakespeare and Company in Paris
Books that made me laugh: Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson, The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt, two by Katherine Heiny, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
Books that made me cry: A Heart that Works by Rob Delaney, Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout, Family Meal by Bryan Washington
The book that was the most fun to read: Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Best book club selections: By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah and The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Best last lines encountered this year: “And I stood there holding on to this man as though he were the very last person left on this sweet sad place that we call Earth.” (Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout)
A book that put a song in my head every time I picked it up: Here and Now by Henri Nouwen (Aqualung song here)
Shortest book title encountered: Lo (the poetry collection by Melissa Crowe), followed by Bear, Dirt, Milk and They
Best 2023 book titles: These Envoys of Beauty and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis
Best book titles from other years: I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, The Cats We Meet Along the Way, We All Want Impossible Things
Favourite title and cover combo of the year: I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore (shame the contents didn’t live up to it!)
Biggest disappointment: Speak to Me by Paula Cocozza
A 2023 book that everyone was reading but I decided not to: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
The worst books I read this year: Monica by Daniel Clowes, They by Kay Dick, Swallowing Geography by Deborah Levy and Self-Portrait in Green by Marie Ndiaye (1-star ratings are extremely rare for me; these were this year’s four)
The downright strangest book I read this year: Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
Such an enjoyable post, Rebecca! Your Little Free Library makes me think I need to find a weatherproof alternative for the book box I put out on my street.
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Even just a plastic crate with a lid would do the job. (That’s what our temporary LFL was housed in one summer.) Under a porch would be good to guarantee no rain gets in.
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This is a fun list. Book-statistics aren’t my thing to compile, but I do enjoy other people’s.
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Oh, this is just some fun trivia. The real statistics don’t come until early January!
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I think 457 pages counts as a doorstopper!
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I’ve always defined it as 500+ pages. But perhaps a rebranding is called for!
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Agreed! Anything above 400 pages goes on my “thiccc” shelf on Goodreads 😀
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I love your fun categories. Reminds me I must get to Dewitt and Sally Gardner. We have an Abingdon Facebook Book Exchange page where you post photos of what you’re offering and people come to pick them up. It works fairly well if you ignore the no-shows. We have a shelf at School in our staff room which has a pretty good turnover too. I hope your little free library continues to be a success.
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That’s fun! Books sometimes get offered on our community Facebook page, but more often people just add them to the LFL themselves, or dump them (with my permission!) on my doorstep. I can’t complain, it gives me first dibs and makes it easy to organise them into F, NF and children’s piles to take over when those shelves are looking empty.
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Hoorah, such nice memories of the Booker Prize! Thanks again for taking me 🙂
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Love your little library. I have thought about putting one up for my neighborhood, but we only have about a dozen houses and some children that aren’t very well behaved. I’m a little afraid someone would wreck it or they wouldn’t use it.
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Oh, that’s a very small neighborhood! We have many hundreds of houses in just a cluster of a few streets. There was one time we suspected vandalism, but we have chosen to believe that it was the wind that broke the door off the hinge and my friends/neighbors who built the box then added a chain to keep the door from flying wide open. Even if you don’t start a proper LFL, you could always put a crate of free books outside your house?
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No, we’re very rural. Someone would have to drive up a long driveway to get to the house, and down by the road is quite untamed. I was thinking more of putting something at the entrance to the neighborhood, which is a one-lane gravel road, by the mailboxes. But the other difficulty is that where the mailboxes are located is technically someone else’s property. But it is just such a nice idea.
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I guess I’ll have to satisfy myself as I usually do, by taking my books to donate to Friends of the Library.
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Oh, I see. That’s very different from anywhere I’ve ever lived. The patch of land where our LFL is is owned by the local town council. My friend did the paperwork to apply to take over the space.
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We had lots of crossover this year 🙂 Katherine Heiny also made me laugh; I thoroughly enjoyed Romantic Comedy; and the Delaney made me bawl. My favourites for the year go up tomorrow.
I haven’t listed my ‘worst’ books for the year but for the record: Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant; Dinner Party by Sarah Gilmartin; The Modern by Anna Kate Blair; The Hemsworth Effect by James Weir; and Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here by Heather Rose.
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Huh, I really enjoyed Gilmartin’s Service this year and had thought I’d catch up on her first novel, but maybe not. Linda Grant has been hit or miss for me.
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Well done on keeping up the little free library! Those short titles are such a contrast to the trend of titles these days, hey? They catch the eye, but I think I prefer the longer lyrical titles. You’ve piqued my interest in LUCY BY THE SEA, with that cover and last line alone. Happy New Year 🙂
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Happy new year!
I think I prefer punchy titles to “The [Quirky Noun] of [Quirky Full Name” style!
I did love Lucy by the Sea. That and Olive, Again are my favorites by Strout so far.
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What fun! And you looked so glamorous at the Booker Prize ceremony!
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Thank you 🙂 In my £7.50 charity shop dress!
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That is an exceptionally tidy LFL! There should be an award for that with a cute LBD dresscode and fancy photo backdrop. hee hee
Perhaps 2024 will the year in which doorstoppers resurge in popularity in your stacks. Who knows.
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When I’m not on vacation, I do try to swing by daily to give it a quick tidy. The nominal organization is top shelf fiction, middle shelf nonfiction, bottom shelf children’s, but there are always stragglers.
They already have, it appears! I’m currently reading Wellness and Babel, both significantly over 500 pages. I’m considering rebranding doorstoppers as 400+ pages, in which case I’m reading 3.
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I agree that everyone should happily follow their own definitions of technical terms like “doorstopper” because everyone reads so differently, but I think it’s always going to be 500 for me. And I don’t even know how that took hold! Curious to hear what you think of Babel. I love the buildings on the cover of the Canadian edition and the concepts as established in the opening bits.
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Anything over 400 pages, especially if edging closer to 450, will now go on my virtual “doorstoppers” shelf, mwa ha ha! By which definition, I’m currently reading SIX. I’m racing through Babel, which is such nerdy fun (loads about translation and etymology).
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