Here's my 2023 In Books end-of-year list, published on the cusp of the end of something old and the beginning of something new. Despite having much less time to sit down and read this year because of birth of our daughter, I still managed to finish 22 books in 2023. That's 2 books more than the previous year! Granted, some of them I eventually shoved aside before the last page was turned, and some of them were thin and/or very easy reads, but still, I'm glad the rhythm is still more or less intact. Books are one of my primary sources of inspiration---for anything---so they're very important to me.

Previous year: 2022 In Books.

The following collage came to be by quickly grabbing covers one by one and using ImageMagick's montage magic (or magick?). My personal notes/review of each of them reside in my analog journals. Some of them make it to Brain Baking if I think it's worth it to publish their story or promote them, but I'm glad I abandoned the GoodReads-style systematic publications of useless opinions.

I don't care about book statistics anymore, so I won't put in effort to summarize average page length and so forth. Instead, read the following posts I wrote this year about one of the books:

• Herodotus And The Pyramids (15 March)
• The Philosopher, The Dog, And The Wedding (28 April)
• Bread, a Historian's Viewpoint (27 July)

As with the 2023 in video games list, I rate each book from 1 to 5, adhering more or less to the classic GoodReads labeling system---meaning a 2 is still considered an "okay" book, but nothing more. The following books were awarded a 4 (I liked it a lot) or 5 (It was amazing!):

• 💖 Histories (Herodotus)
• 💖 Art As Therapy (Alain de Botton and John Armstrong)
• 💖 Shareware Heroes (Richard Moss)
• 💖 The Philosopher, The Dog, And The Wedding (Barbara Stok)
• 💖 Amor Fati, Filosoferen tegen het einde (Philosophizing at the end) (André de Vries, Erno Eskens)
• 💖 De Wijsheid van de Tandeloze Glimlach: Gelukkig Ouder Worden met Epirucus (The Wisdom of the Toothless Smile: Happy Aging with Epirucus) (Daniel Klein)
• 💖 Brieven Uit Genua (Letters from Genoa) (Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer)

I have the fealing that I read a lot of mediocre books in 2023. Perhaps my New Year's resolution should be to put down the ones I don't like much faster: life's too short. Only 7 of the 22 books were very engaging. That's not to say that the rest was bad, but towards the end of the year, I yearned for a compelling story and simply reverted to David Eddings' Malloreon saga I already own for 20 years (the last two covers in the above collage are the Dutch hardcovers). Books that I hated that everyone seems to love include Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir and Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust---primarily because of their unnecessarily long-winded intricate writing style to showcase their amazing diction knowledge.

If I had to recommend just one book, I'd go with Art As Therapy without a doubt. It's not the first time we read it, but the first time I decided to buy a copy and put on the shelf to give it a permanent place in our book collection. I'm a fan of Alain de Botton's approach to popularize philosophy, and this work together with John Armstrong is one of his best. If you've ever wondered how to go about visiting a museum or looking at art, you're not alone, and Art As Therapy is there for you.

As for what to read in 2024---I wrote at the end of 2022 that I have unopened cookbooks patiently waiting to be picked up. That's unfortunately still the case. I am thinking about them, though, so this year will hopefully be a year where my cooking and baking gets the needed inspiration boost!