#goodreads year in books

[fictional-worlds-are-exquisite]

my year in books...obnoxious post edition

orrr if you like https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2023/26792558 :)

[evilwriter37]

Well, Goodreads released the 2023 year in books! I’m still reading books though!

(I technically read 11, but it says 12 because it counted Good Omens twice for some reason. Maybe because it was a reread.)

I can do it though! I can finish 12 books by the end of the year. I want to finish The Rise of Kyoshi.

Also, can I just say how proud of myself I am? This is the most reading I’ve done since high school. I’ve been in a reading rut for 7 years. I really got out of it this year thanks to a librarian I met, and plenty of encouragement from @lifblogs!

[booksandboba]

My 2023 Reading List in Review

Best Book Series Finished in 2023: Heaven Official's Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu (Volume 8), Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Best First Book in a Series: The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air 1), Holly Black

Best Manga Started: The Apothecary Diaries (Volume 1), Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage

Best Biography/Best Audiobook: I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jeannette McCurdy

Best Manga Series Finished: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba (Volume 23), Koyoharu Gotouge

Best Web Novel/Best Isekai: Thrice Married to Salted Fish, 比卡比

Best Re-Read of the Year: Nana (Volume 1), Ai Yazawa

Best Comedy: Spy x Family (Volume 1), Tatsuya Endo

Best Ongoing Series: Noragami: Stray God (Volume 23), Adachitoka / Witch Hat Atelier (Volume 11), Kamome Shirahama

[podcastwizard]

modern day moby dick but my white whale is a middle grade fantasy novel i read when i was like eleven and haven't been able to find again

[nkincaid13]

2022 year in books

[no-where-new-hero]

omg I need your thoughts on the terminally o line author culture bc ngl it makes my eye TWITCH, there are authors I deliberately avoid even tho I've heard their stuff is good bc they're like that 🙈

HHHHH oh good lord, okay, from how I see it, there are two angles on this, both aggravating and sad: the official decree one and the spontaneous ecosystem one.

The officious one is that the nature of publishing nowadays demands an author have an online presence. You need Twitter/X. You need to let every potential reader know your book is coming out. You need engagement through reviews and pre-orders incentives (if you buy now you’ll get a special keychain!!) and word of mouth assurances from your peers that yes your book is as cool as you say it is. You need a newsletter with links (more buying! more voting on lists that are simply popularity contests!) and promises you’re still working on the next thing, don’t forget about me in the morass of everyone else doing the same thing. You need an Instagram and TikTok now to post pretty pictures and videos because one or two authors made it big off this kind of promotion and now everyone thinks it’s the ticket to the bestseller list (sadly, it seems to be working). You need an OnlyFans (a joke but I do recall a twt spat that was a joke/not joke about how rupi kaur will always be more beautiful than her critics and people who took issue with the conflation of beauty with talent). At the end of all this, you’re basically an influencer, a content creator creating content for the content you should be focusing on creating, the finished novel. And the novel itself seems to be disappearing behind the masks used to promote it (fanfic-style tropes, moodboards, playlists, memes) until I now no longer trust the book that I’ll pick up to have any resemblance to the enticements that brought me here. I’ve seen an author or two complain about the stress all this self-promotion generates, but it’s become such an entrenched part of the industry, I think people just accept it. And thus spend too much time online hoping that if they tweet just a little more, produce just one more reel, maybe that’ll be the difference between a sale and no sale.

The other side of this, distinct but obviously connected, is the ecosystem created by this panic of being perpetually visible coupled with the fact that so many of the new authors came of age during the rise of internet fandom culture. That opinionated community mindset that blurs the line between anonymity and friendship is the lens they bring to their own work. I mean, it makes sense I suppose—if you love yelling about characters and words, why wouldn’t you do that once you start to produce your own? This really came home to me hearing about that reviewbombgate “scandal” and how people involved were in reylo circles and that was used to provide receipts. You’re interacting with your readers and peers about your intimate work but they are also all strangers. They will not always give you the benefit of the doubt, and now—as opposed to the past when maybe the worst that could happen was a handful of bad reviews in newspapers—you will either be tagged in hate reviews, sub-tweeted, explicitly called out, demanded to atone for your sins. It’s no longer the morality of consumption but the morality of production. Of course, the easy answer is just log-off, touch some grass. But that can work only when you and everyone else are separated by anonymous accounts or when you have no platform to maintain. As an author trying to make your livelihood from this, suddenly it’s do or die. We’re in a strange moment of authorship bringing the Internet’s echo-chamber and claustrophobic into the real world (this is a lie: publishing now is no longer the real world. But it looks like it) and thus you can kind of no longer escape things.

Will the average reader who isn’t aware of all these machinations care about reviewbombgate? Would a reader browsing at Target think about the controversies around Lightlark? Very likely not. But the impression I’m getting more and more is that the average reader isn’t the one buying all the books. Or shall we say—a bestseller’s status relies on bookstore stock. Bookstore stock is only huge when they know a book will be a good investment. They’ll only know a book is a good investment if it and its author has street cred based on booktokkers, bookstagram, bloggers and reviewers (have you noticed how many books out these last maybe 1-3 years have these kinds of accounts thanked in the acknowledgments? Yeah), and THESE are also chronically online people who will Know. And decide the cast of fate.

Honestly, @batrachised, I see why you avoid these kinds of writers, though I wonder how long it’ll be before the disease becomes epidemic.

[eli-zab3th]

My 2023 Reading Year in Review!

For more details, see my Goodreads page or The Storygraph

[geryone]

Looking through my goodreads & trying not to be embarrassed by reading very serious poetry immediately after reading the Shrek romance book

[betterbooktitles]

Happy New Year.

[hedgehog-moss]

Some books I’ve enjoyed this year:

Fiction:

L’art de perdre, Alice Zeniter

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

Les enfants sont rois, Delphine de Vigan

Social Creature, Tara Isabella Burton

La vie devant soi, Romain Gary

Evolution, Stephen Baxter

La Princesse de Clèves, Mme de Lafayette

Nonfiction:

Espejos, Eduardo Galeano

The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan

She Said, Jodi Kantor

After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz

La Panthère des neiges, Sylvain Tesson

Becoming Beauvoir, Kate Kirkpatrick

Voices from Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich

I’d love to know what were your best reads of ‘22 !

[overthinking-snail]

happy 3 year anniversary to loveless :). this book was probably the first time I saw my aroace part of my self explicitly portrayed in media and means so much to me. thank you Alice so much and long live the shakespeare society

[marxistgnome]

On the one hand i think star trek not really having an internet equivalent is cool cos it shiws we developed an entire new and possibly better system, similar to how holosuites replaced film and tv, and it slso lets me speculate about whether internet connection as we know it works in deep space or 9ver long interstellar distances (idk how the internet works so i get to just imagine). But on the other hand it would be funny if data was a twitch streamer.

[utilitycaster]

thanks for the book answer! would you share your fiction favorites in general?

Hi anon,

I'll post a few but I think to clarify - this is also kind of just going to be a list. I meant more like...are you looking for book recs? If so are you looking for specific things (eg: queer characters, fantasy and if so which subtype, sci fi and ditto, literary fiction, etc.) Or do you just like, want a list of books I have liked.

Anyway this is a list of a handful of books/series/authors that I'd count as favorites, loosely grouped, but I didn't go into any details about anything.

Fantasy I read a teen and has permanently shaped how I interact with fantasy fiction; some of this is YA

a large swathe of what Diana Wynne Jones has written

The Belgariad and Mallorean by David Eddings

The Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix

Sorcery and Cecelia by Caroline Stevermer and Patricia Wrede (this came up on the comfort reads panel I watched yesterday and it is indeed a comfort read for me) and Mairelon the Magician by Patricia Wrede (set in the same sort of world)

Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

I read some of the Patternist series by Octavia Butler as a teen but then didn't revisit it until adulthood

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Piranesi is very different and also excellent but that came out when I was an adult, but it's still a favorite)

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley (I also read a bunch of her fairy tale-based books which I don't know if I'd call them favorites still but I do think they're an influence)

Sandman by Neil Gaiman

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Middlegrade/YA fiction I read as a kid that also permanently shaped something

Several Ellen Raskin books but especially The Westing Game

Elizabeth Enright's books but especially the ones about the Melendy family and Gone-Away Lake

Fantasy and SF I read as an adult and would consider exceptional/a favorite

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisen

The City and the City by China Mievelle

The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir

Phedre's trilogy of the Kushiel's Legacy series by Jacqueline Carey (have not read the others in the series so this isn't saying they're bad, I just can't speak to them)

The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin

Arcadia by Iain Pears

The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold

The Night Watch books from Discworld by Terry Pratchett; I have read like, one other Discworld book and it didn't have Sam Vimes in it so I didn't really care

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delaney

Literary fiction/not sf I read as a teen or adult

(there's notably a lot less of this because I do lean heavily towards fantasy but)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

[heartyearning]

@the3gracesshownattheirbath (don't think it's letting me tag you properly, soz!) basically what i use now is just a simple moleskine notebook in which i write down the title, author and date i finished the book, then a short summary in my own words (sometimes i forego this esp if it's a re-read) and jot down my thoughts on it, any quotes i liked from the book, whatever the lead-up to my reading it may have been etc. i also use it sometimes when i'm reading a play or smth for school, not always but on occasion just to make notes as i'm going through the text. i also compile little poems i like in there but i haven't done much of that this year!

it's taken on different forms since i've been doing this though, in my first official reading journal i also noted down DNF's or book acquisitions and sometimes made notes on audiobooks i was listening to, but i've found none of that really interests me so i ended up just simplifying it down to this which works lovely for me :)

[niishiinoya]

recently visited the cutest secondhand book store/cafe! bought a new book as motivation for this years goodreads challenge