My Favorite Books of 2023

January 5, 2024 Top Ten Tuesday 4

Graphic: My Favorite Books of 2023 (The Bookwyrm's Hoard)

This should have been a Top Ten Tuesday post, but I was on the road and didn’t have time to post it on time. Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature/meme now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic was My Favorite Books of 2023.

My Favorite Books of 2023

I had very few 5-star books this year, but quite a few 4.5-star and 4-star books. I limited this list to books I read for the first time this year (with one exception—an audiobook which I had read in print, over 10 years ago.) I also decided not to base the list entirely on the number of stars I gave each book at the time I read it. Instead, the books on this list are the ones that shine brightest in my memory at the end of the year.

Audiobook cover: Hounded (Iron Druid #1), by Kevin Hearne, read by Luke Daniels

Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) – 5 stars. Probably the best book I read all year. Not only did I love it, I was also blown away by her mastery of the writing craft.

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries (Heather Fawcett; ARC) – 5 stars. Absolutely delightful! Emily Wilde is a grumpy academic who is brilliant at research but terrible with people. When she travels to a remote Scandinavian island to research the local fae, she is drawn in to the townspeople’s lives and troubles, as well as the machinations of the fae. And her charismatic and interfering colleague, Wendell Bambleby, is a complication she neither wants nor needs. Or does she? (reviewed here)

Without a Summer (Mary Robinette Kowal) – 4.5 stars. Third in a historical-fantasy series, and possibly the best yet. Kowal’s magic system (“glamour”) is unique and fascinating, and her use of actual historical events and trends is meticulously researched, but it’s the relationships, particularly between plain Jane and her handsome, highborn husband, that really make the book shine.

An Enchantment of Ravens (Margaret Rogerson) – 4.5 stars (though I may raise it to 5) Enchanting. The Fae are properly fae (unpredictable, tricky, and largely indifferent to human emotions), yet the author made the love story totally convincing.

Identity (Nora Roberts; ARC) – 4.5 stars. Well-written contemporary romantic suspense, but simultaneously a character-driven novel about a woman rebuilding her life after her best friend was murdered and her own identity stolen by a serial killer. All the characters are compelling, and there are strong family relationships on both the hero’s and heroine’s side.

Murder on Black Swan Lane (Andrea Penrose) – 4.5 stars. A strong start to a historical mystery series that became a highlight of my reading year. The Wrexford and Sloane mysteries are set during the Regency era, mostly in London, and involve both high society and the middle and lower classes. There’s a long, slow-burn romantic arc, strong friendships, and found family. I absolutely love them. I’m letting book #1 stand in for the entire series, though book #2 might actually be my favorite by a hair.

The Curse of Penryth Hall (Jess Armstrong; ARC) – 4.5 stars. I would have given this marvelous gothic mystery 5 stars, were it not for the frequent sentence fragments that sometimes threw me out of the story.

Role Playing (Cathy Yardley) – 4.5 stars. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this grumpy-sunshine romance between 50-ish online gamers. The author’s portrayal of both the bi demi hero and the Asian-American single mom heroine is sensitive and perceptive, and the ending is pure satisfaction.

Bound for Perdition (Celia Lake) – 4 stars. Celia Lake‘s historical-fantasy romances are my latest obsession (since 2022). She published 5 (!) novels or novellas in 2023, and Bound for Perdition was my favorite of this year’s releases that can stand on its own. (I should probably add that I reread her entire Albion oeuvre once this year, and reread about 2/3 of the books twice. Something about her characters, setting, and style really appeals to me.)

Hounded (Kevin Hearne; audiobook) – 5 stars. This is the exception to the “new-to-me” books. I read Hounded in paperback about 11 years ago, but listening to it on audiobook was a different and better experience. And as with Andrea Penrose’s mysteries, I’m letting the first audiobook stand in for the rest of the series. (Well, most of them. I’m not quite to the end of the series yet, and book #3 really irritated me, but other than that, I loved them.) (reviewed here)

I am embarrassed at how few of these I actually reviewed. I’ll try to do better in 2024!

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4 Responses to “My Favorite Books of 2023”

    • Lark_Bookwyrm

      I actually did have my identity stolen, and even though it was only used for petty theft (as far as I know), it was still a nightmare trying to get it all sorted out. Beginning with trying to explain to a skeptical local, rural policeman how someone could have gotten hold of my social security number without actually knowing me personally. (TL;DR: your SSN is out there; a bunch of companies and government agencies have it, and any of them could have been hacked from inside or outside the company. And the selling of personal data on the dark web is common, which I felt a policeman ought to have known. Though to be fair, it was clearly the first identity theft case he had ever dealt with. He ended up being more supportive than I initially thought he would.)