The True Love Experiment by Christina Lauren was a palate cleanser, summery beach read. Not a bad thing for me at this busy time in my school year. Amazon: “Felicity ‘Fizzy’ Chen is lost. Sure, she’s got an incredible career as a beloved romance novelist with a slew of bestsellers under her belt, but when she’s asked to give a commencement address, it hits her: she hasn’t been practicing what she’s preached. Fizzy hasn’t ever really been in love. Lust? Definitely. But that swoon-worthy, can’t-stop-thinking-about-him, all-encompassing feeling? Nope. Nothing. What happens when the optimism she’s spent her career encouraging in readers starts to feel like a lie? Connor Prince, documentary filmmaker and single father, loves his work but when his profit-minded boss orders him to create a reality TV show, putting his job on the line, Connor is out of his element. Desperate to find his romantic lead, a chance run-in with an exasperated Fizzy offers Connor the perfect solution. What if he could show the queen of romance herself falling head-over-heels for all the world to see? Fizzy gives him a hard pass—unless he agrees to her list of demands. When he says yes, and production on The True Love Experiment begins, Connor wonders if that perfect match will ever be in the cue cards for him, too.” This was a great rom-com. Fun, spicy, and engrossing. It might help that I like ridiculous dating shows too. If this genre isn’t for you, I’d give it a pass.

How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told by Harrison Scott Key was a good audiobook. I am not sure how it ended up on my list. It was too Christian for me, but overall, it was a good listen. “One gorgeous autumn day, Harrison discovers that his wife—the sweet, funny, loving mother of their three daughters, a woman ‘who’s spent just about every Sunday of her life in a church’—is having an affair with a family friend. This revelation propels the hysterical, heartbreaking events in How to Stay Married, casting our narrator onto ‘the factory floor of hell,’ where his wife was now in love with a man who ‘wears cargo shorts, on purpose.’ What will he do? Kick her out? Set fire to all her panties in the yard? Beat this man to death with a gardening implement? Ask God for help in winning her back? Armed only with a sense of humor and a hunger for the truth, Harrison embarks on a hellish journey into his past, seeking answers to the riddles of faith and forgiveness. Through an absurd series of escalating confessions and betrayals, Harrison reckons with his failure to love his wife in the ways she needed most, resolves to fight for his family, and in a climax almost too ridiculous to be believed, finally learns that love is no joke. ‘A fiercely memorable account of marital devotion against all odds’ (Publishers Weekly, starred review), How to Stay Married is a comic romp unlike any in contemporary literature, a wild ride through the hellscape of marriage and the mysteries of mercy.” (Amazon) I have to recommend this one, with the caveat that the religious piece might be a turnoff to some.

Immediately purchase The Postcard by Anne Berest! It’s so rare lately that I feel this way about what I have been reading. I was gifted this book for Christmas (and I so rarely get books as gifts – it was a double delight!) and was really excited to read it – it’s been recommended all over the place. WHAT A GREAT READ! Amazon: “January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself.” This was a true five-star book for me and I will be thinking about it for a long while.

Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan was a read for the equity book club at school. “Malaya Clondon hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings in the church’s stuffy basement community center. A quietly inquisitive eight-year-old struggling to suppress her insatiable longing, she would much rather paint alone in her bedroom, or sneak out with her father for a sampling of Harlem’s forbidden street foods. For Malaya, the pressures of going to a predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are compounded by the high expectations passed down over generations from her sharp-tongued grandmother and her mother, Nyela, a painfully proper professor struggling to earn tenure at a prestigious university. But their relentless prescriptions—fad diets of cottage-cheese and sugar-free Jell-O, high-cardio African dance classes, endless doctors’ appointments—don’t work on Malaya. As Malaya comes of age in a rapidly gentrifying 1990s Harlem, she strains to understand “ladyness” and fit neatly within the suffocating confines of a so-called “femininity” that holds no room for her body. She finds solace in the lyrical riffs of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, and in the support of her sensitive father, Percy; still, tensions at home mount as rapidly as Malaya’s weight. Nothing seems to help—until a family tragedy forces her to finally face the source of her hunger on her own terms. Exquisitely compassionate and clever, Big Girl is ‘filled with everyday people who, in Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s gifted hands, show us the love and struggle of what it means to be inside bodies that don’t always fit with the outside world’ (Jacqueline Woodson). In tracing the perils and pleasures of the inheritance that comes with being born, Sullivan pushes boundaries and creates an unforgettable portrait of Black womanhood in America.” (Amazon) I really disliked this book. I read it because it was assigned and in hopes that it would get better, but it didn’t. The character development was disappointing, there were too many “that would never happen,” and the ending wasn’t believable/good. Thumbs down.

As with many of my choices, I can’t remember how Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz was added to my TBR list. Amazon: “In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn’t find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.” It’s a brutal memoir which I really liked, but I wish it hadn’t jumped back and forth in time. The disjointed presentation mimicked her growing up, but it would have worked better for me if it had been more linear.

I don’t review these abandoned books, but let me know if I need to reevaluate any of these because they were SO awesome and I am missing out.

Cover Story – Susan Rigetti
Lessons – Ian McEwan
Before You Knew My Name – Jacqueline Bublitz
More than You’ll Ever Know – Katie Gutierrez
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida – Shehan Karunatilaka
This Other Eden – Paul Harding (audiobook)
Women We Buried, Women We Burned – Rachel Louise Snyder 
The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece – Tom Hanks (audiobook)
Chemistry – Weike Wang

Red Rising by Pierce Brown was recommended by a colleague. I really wanted to enjoy it, but I didn’t. It was like The Hunger Games but not as good. I did finish, though I blew through most of it since I wanted to finish more than anything else. “Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he toils willingly, trusting that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and lush wilds spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class. Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity’s overlords struggle for power.  He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society’s ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies . . . even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.” (Amazon) I was sorry I didn’t like it more, but now I have saved myself from hours more of the series! 🙂

Every year, at the end of the year, I look back on all the books I have read the year before and list my favorites overall. This year, my goal was again 100 books. I made it slightly above goal. The added bonus of this post is that you don’t have to bother to read any of my other posts over the course of the year. I celebrated the 10th anniversary of the blog in November (though I forgot to actually celebrate). This year I had six 5-star books and twenty 4.5-star choices.

2023 reading stats:

Books finished: 119
Fiction: 103 (87%)
Non-fiction: 28 (13%), including 11 memoirs
Authors of color: 23 (19%)
Male/Female authors: 91 female (77%), 26 male (22%)
Audiobooks:  18
Average rating: 3.9
Repeat authors: 46 (39%)

5-Star Books

4.5-Star Books

Links to my past years in review:

2022 Best Books
2021 Best Books
2020 Best Books
2019 Best Books
2018 Best Books
2017 Best Books
2016 Best Books
2015 Best Books
2014 Best Books
2013 Best Books

The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man by David Von Drehle was a sweet, sweet story of Von Drehle’s neighbor, Charlie White. Amazon: “When a veteran Washington journalist moved to Kansas, he met a new neighbor who was more than a century old. Little did he know that he was beginning a long friendship—and a profound lesson in the meaning of life. Charlie White was no ordinary neighbor. Born before radio, Charlie lived long enough to use a smartphone. When a shocking tragedy interrupted his idyllic boyhood, Charlie mastered survival strategies that reflect thousands of years of human wisdom. Thus armored, Charlie’s sense of adventure carried him on an epic journey of the Jazz Age, racing aboard ambulances through Depression-era gangster wars, improvising techniques for early open-heart surgery, and cruising the Amazon as a guest of Peru’s president. David Von Drehle came to understand that Charlie’s resilience and willingness to grow made this remarkable neighbor a master in the art of thriving through times of dramatic change. As a gift to his children, he set out to tell Charlie’s secrets. The Book of Charlie is a “genuinely original, formula-shattering” (Bob Woodward) gospel of grit—the inspiring story of one man’s journey through a century of upheaval. The history that unfolds through Charlie’s story reminds you that the United States has always been a divided nation, a questing nation—a nation of Charlies in the rollercoaster pursuit of a good and meaningful life.” It’s a truly lovely biography/memoir and an interesting tale.

Don’t judge. I LOVED Maybe Next Time by Cesca Major. Shallow? Yes. But, like “Sliding Doors,” it had real rom-com appeal and hit me at a moment when that was really great. “Dan is Emma’s person. She’s known it since the first time she saw him dressed in lederhosen on the tube. On their fifteen year ‘dateversary’, Emma texts a list of everything she should have told Dan that morning. Tell the kids to remember their homework…And their gloves. Can you defrost some sausages? Emma just forgets to write the most important words of all – I love you – and by the end of the day everything changes. Or does it? Emma is given the chance to rewrite their future – if she can just figure out their past…” (Amazon). This is a good cheesy read and one I really enjoyed.