Door No. 2
"The life you have led does not need to be the only life you have." -Anna Quindlen

Life Well Lived

2023 Reads

Last year I started keeping track of all the books I read and it is a practice I wish I had begun sooner. It’s fun to look back and remember all the books I read and the ones I most enjoyed or felt moved by. I try to mark my favorites as I go along, and the standards are high. Generally, my favorites are those stories or writings that moved me or rerouted by brain circuits in some way. And perhaps they are simply a feature of who I am and what I’m feeling in the moment. Looking back at the full list I find many titles that I really enjoyed or found important but weren’t enough to make my favorites list. These I’ve marked with a **. I also see a handful of titles for which I don’t recall the story at all; c’est la vie.

June was my highest reading month with 10 books and 3,309 pages. It makes sense as that is a month I typically am not working much and we spent half the month in quiet Alaska cabins with plenty of time to get lost in a book. One of my favorites for the year - Where’d You Go, Bernadette? - was picked up from a little free library in an Alaskan coffee shop and left again for another reader before we came home. October was my lowest reading month with just 2 books and 537 pages. This also makes sense as I was in the midst of the first trimester of pregnancy and spent most of my evenings laying in bed watching Elementary on Hulu and falling asleep at 8 pm.

There are so many interesting books to read, and my TBR list has no shortage of titles. My list from 2023 includes 66 titles and 20,976 pages.

Favorite Fiction

  • The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab

  • Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

  • The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

  • Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

  • Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

  • The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller

Favorite nonfiction

  • I’ll Show Myself Out by Jessi Klein

  • Ejaculate Responsibly by Gabrielle Blair

  • Weathering by Arline T. Geronimus

  • Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

  • The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore

  • Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Other fiction

  • Beach Read by Emily Henry

  • The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley

  • The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

  • The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

  • The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

  • You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

  • It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover

  • Confess by Colleen Hoover

  • The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

  • State of the Union by Nick Hornby

  • The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

  • Happy Place by Emily Henry

  • Reminders of Him by Colleen Hoover

  • A Dreadful Splendor by B.R. Myers

  • Late Bloomers by Deepa Varadarajan

  • The Good Lie by A.R. Torre

  • **Still Alice by Lisa Genova

  • Where the Forest Meets the Stars by Glendy Vanderah

  • It Happened One Summer by Tessa Bailey

  • **Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

  • The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

  • Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica

  • We Are the Brennans by Tracey Lange

  • Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

  • We Are All the Same in the Dark by Julia Heaberlin

  • Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo

  • Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum

  • Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah

  • The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

  • The Round House by Louise Erdrich

  • The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

  • Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Other nonfiction

  • Gichigami Hearts by Linda Legarde Grover

  • Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes du Mez

  • **Wild by Cheryl Strayed

  • **Under a Flaming Sky by Daniel James Brown

  • Bad Vibes Only by Nora McInerny

  • I Never Thought of it That Way by Monica Guzman

  • Distracted by James Lang

  • **Written in Bone by Sue Black

  • **We Came, We Saw, We Left by Charles Wheelan

  • Exercised by Daniel E. Lieberman

  • American Cartel by Scott Higham and Sari Horowitz

  • If You Tell by Gregg Olsen

  • All About Love by bell hooks

  • Organic Manifesto by Maria Rodale

  • **On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen

  • Mama’s Last Hug by Frans de Waal

  • Enchantment by Katherine May

  • All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley

  • The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuile

  • All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior

  • Where the Deer and the Antelope Play by Nick Offerman

Nicole TombersComment