Happy New Year!
I did it! On New Year’s Eve, I finished reading FIVE books that were almost done. Two of those were daily devotional books, one was an audiobook, and two were children’s nonfiction that I’d been slowly reading. I never like to make my Stand-outs lists until my reading year is finished, and I got some great books in just under the wire.
I keep a spreadsheet of books I read during the year. I inevitably discover a few I missed as I list my Stand-outs, but these numbers will be pretty close. Remember, this is the year I was on the Morris committee, reading young adult debut books. A whole lot of those I didn’t finish, but here are the stats for those I finished:
Books read in 2023:
Fiction for adults: 11
Nonfiction for adults: 29
Fiction for teens: 86
Nonfiction for teens: 21
Fiction for kids: 51
Nonfiction for kids: 95 (many are picture books)
Picture Books: 213
Rereads (mostly Teen fiction for Morris): 10
Grand total: 516 books
In my Morris stats, I counted partial books read and pages read and got 126 books (or partial books), 20,843 pages and over 150 hours of listening.
So a lot of reading this year!
I’m hoping to post my 2023 Sonderbooks Stand-outs before tonight is over. And I always have to say that this is NOT ranking the books by literary merit. This is ranking the books by how much I enjoyed reading them. So there are quirky things like it turns out I love books where a couple falls in love via letter-writing. And I loved Jane Eyre as a teen, but am a little horrified by that now. And I really don’t like horror. So for a horror book to make this list took some extenuating circumstances plus really good writing.
All of our Morris Finalists will be in my Stand-outs list, but I’m not going to post any titles or reviews of those until after our winner is announced on January 22nd. I don’t want to give anybody the impression that they can tell from my review which is the winner. For one thing, I read the finalists multiple times, but also I am only one member of the committee — and my Stand-outs are listed in the order that I fell for them and not in order of literary merit — so not even in the order I voted for them, necessarily.
Every single book on this list is highly recommended — and they stood out among 516 books read!
I indeed finished just before midnight. Check out my 2023 Sonderbooks Stand-outs!