by Michael Cunningham

This was a good story and a realistic depiction of middle age – a realistic middle-aged marriage, realistic middle-aged sex, realistic middle-aged insomnia. I loved that he woke up at 3 am every night and I love that he took pills for it. AND vodka.

by Delia Owens

Spoiler at the bottom.

Pros:
I like to read about strong independent women. I liked that she had a calling that involved both art and science.

Cons:
I had a bad reaction to an early scene. The young child Kya is hungry, and she gets a chance to go to school and have hot chicken pie for lunch. At lunchtime some kids make fun of her. So she doesn’t eat her pie. She stuffs it into her milk carton and brings it home – and feeds it to gulls. This reminds me of a scene in A LITTLE PRINCESS where the hungry girl Sara Crewe is given a penny by a pitying little boy – and she doesn’t use it to buy a loaf of bread, she “bore a hole in it” to wear around her neck. These authors know nothing about hunger.

And second, I saw the ending immediately. SPOILER IS HERE. This is chick lit. Of course she killed the guy and of course it was because he sexually assaulted her. It’s always like that in chick lit. If it’s not secret parentage and secret pregnancies, it’s secret sexual assault.

by Natalie Babbitt

Deep children’s book. To be immortal, to not change, is to not live, to be like a rock by the side of the road.

I bet it was a good movie.

by Teddy Wayne

Kind of rough – watch a man deteriorate one failure at a time, all the while listening to him blow kneejerk liberal sanctimony at every turn. Paul’s been demoted from senior lecturer to adjunct. His daughter is turning 12 and checking out of their relationship. He has to move in with his 80-something mother – and she’s started watching the fictional stand-in for Fox News. And then things get worse!

The short chapters kept me turning (swiping) pages.

I didn’t much like one of the subplots where he starts boinking a high-level employee at the faux Fox News, pretending to be a conservative misplaced in academia, in order to gain access… to what, for what? But it turns out to be key.

64 books read in 2023. Up from 58 in 2022 and 61 in 2021 and 59 in 2020. I am counting a few “Charlie Brown Cyclopedias” but why shouldn’t they count! 

Best book and best fiction was The Greengage Summer.

Best non-fiction was What’s Our Problem.

#64 for the year:

by Torie Bosch (editor)

It’s nice to read about coding. Usually in the world of books it’s like we don’t exist.

by Michael Allred

A comic book by someone with an obvious love of drawing David Bowie. Covers the years surrounding Ziggy. I particularly liked how the famous “Not only is this the last show of the tour” mini-speech was broken up over multiple pages, scattered throughout the story. I’d buy a sequel.

by Susan Neiman

This was a good defense of old-school liberalism – universalism, specifically.

by Joe Nocera & Bethany McLean

It needed to do a better job sticking to the topic. I strove and failed to be interested in how private equity took over all the nursing homes. I wanted to hear more about the science of lockdowns and masking, and was it ever possible we could have kept it all from becoming politicized?

Interesting to hear about the lack of science behind boosters. Pfizer and Moderna wanted to keep selling shots – is this why we were encouraged to boost ourselves so frequently? I have lost count of how many shots I’ve had by now. Were ANY boosters really necessary? Something about long-lived T cells being more important than short-lived antibodies.

On that topic, they didn’t explicitly mention “First Shots First” – which some were wisely calling for, while instead we boosted people who were first in line for the first shots. We should have been getting as many shots into arms, as they say, as possible, period. This is me talking now. We did need some order and prioritization, but doses going to waste, that was a crime.

Maybe the worst way we screwed up, in hindsight, was closing the schools for so long. But I worried about the teachers.

by Normal Maclean

I picked this up because I read that it was about Montana. I have a soft spot for Montana ever since I visited Bozeman and Yellowstone. I pictured the grand canyon of Yellowstone throughout all of this.

The story, though – haven’t we heard this one before? Troublesome kid brother?

by Paula Hawkins

If I had a dime for every time someone in this book made a bad decision. “It doesn’t feel right to say these words out loud” but of course she does. “I’m ready to hang up the phone, but” of course she doesn’t. I shouldn’t go buy a drink, but I do, I shouldn’t trespass and spy and lurk, but I do.

There are three women in this story and two men. The men are both awful. The women are all awful decision makers. Actually there are four women, if you count the bit part of Rachel’s flatmate Cathy, who probably makes the worst decisions of them all, since she tolerates the awful Rachel who pukes on her carpet. And there are three men, if you count the bit part of the red-headed man Rachel can’t recall how she knows from her drunken stupors. That guy is the only decent specimen of the male sex.

Oh well. It was supposed to be a mystery/thriller, not a character study. It was fairly exciting. Just, of course, not my kind of book. Obviously another book club pick.