My goal for 2023 was to complete 60 books. I completed 84. Thirty of those were manga; I track that not because they're somehow "lesser" but because they're just easier to read, they take less time, and I want a sense of how much long form prose I'm reading -- but also I want a sense of how many works I read, independent of that concern.
It's weird because my genre list includes both genres and modes, of course; so you have "fiction" at a mere 4.1%, but that's because "fantasy" is 18.9% and that's also fiction. So about a quarter of what I read last year was fiction, which sounds about right and is also somehow weird to me. In my unalloyed state I basically read nothing but fiction, but between getting back into poetry and my ongoing attempts to flesh out my magical practice and my reading in philosophy, here we are, I guess.
(Fun fact: I'm a particular kind of sicko and so the "religion" tag includes all the philosophy, because fucking Spinoza is religious writing. But also I might go so far as to argue all philosophy is effectively religion, I dunno. Not, I don't mean I'd do that in class, or a paper, but for my personal classifications, yeah, it's all one big thing. I really need a bigger umbrella word that takes in both, of course.)
I'm not going to go through every single thing I read; I've done that month-by-month. I just wanted to pick out the highlights for the year.
Novels
The best novels I read this year are probably Sartor Resartus, Many Dimensions, Always Coming Home, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. That's Carlyle, Williams, Le Guin, and Harrison. Also Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October but I read that every year.
Sartor Resartus is an incredible example of what a novel can do, what it can be. I keep thinking of writing about this at length, but I feel like it might devolve into ranting about "books these days" and no one wants that, least of all me. But in short, I'm very tired of people -- authors, agents, editors -- treating novels like movie scripts. Not every piece has to work towards the climax. Not every character has to be likeable, even the villains. Not every piece of "machinery" needs to move smoothly in a microcosm of the capitalist's dream. Novels are dark, and slow, and messy. They're complicated not because they're fully of mysterious moving parts but because they're full of things, of new things for us to encounter.
Now, look, there are plenty of novels in the history of the genre that aren't the way I say here. They work just like "potboilers" nowadays: in and out, careful composing of a few interesting characters, a masterfully plotted structure that gets us to the end with a minimum of distraction and a maximum of emotional manipulation. Of course!
But they don't have to be that. There are two strong contenders for "first novel" in history. One is Don Quixote. The other is The Tale of Genji. Both are marked by their length, their capacious space allowing for play, for poetry and satire, pathos and bathos, beautiful descriptions and essays on art.
This is actually a good thing to say about Le Guin's Always Coming Home as well. It was delightful precisely because there were things in it.
Anyway. There. There are the thoughts I had. Carlyle's philosophical-religious treatise on clothes and the man -- Le Guin's painstaking anthropology of a group that does not yet exist -- they're just so good.
Many Dimensions though isn't that; it's just good old fashioned "occult thriller," as I think Williams himself called these novels he wrote. The constant fizzing possibilities of god-given power are still bubbling away, pouring out in a generous stream. But mostly the novel tells you what's happening and what people do because of it.
I wrote about Harrison's book very recently so I'll avoid adding more.
Short Stories
Ken Liu's collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories has a lot of bangers, even if they had a weird fascination with uploading everyone to computers to save the planet -- something I have met literal actual people in literal actual real life advocating for.
Harrison's Come With Me Now was whip smart and sometimes genuinely a little disturbing. A lot of the pieces come from his blog, or were developed from things he did there, and so they're often very painfully about the contemporary world we're in now.
Magic
The Horary Textbook was probably one of the plainest, simplest "how to" magic books I read. If you're interested in horary I recommend it. Otherwise, I dunno. Probably not?
Now, even if you're only interested in magic as cultural material, you might get a kick out of Regardie's Tree of Life. It's a big commpendium of basically-Iamblichan Platonism with a hilarious chapter about sex that never admits it's about sex.
The House of the Hidden Light was good too, in part because it's funny and in part because it demonstrates that even earnest fin-de-siecle magicians can sort of make it up as they go along, too.
Manga
The best manga I read this year was probably Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, followed by catching up with Saint Young Men. I read a good amount of yuri, some good (reread Kase-san) and some bad (Qualia). Laid-Back Camp has hit this place where I prefer the anime, but of course there's more of the manga, and I read through volume 11 and part of 12 (the Isu trip).
The best comic that wasn't Japanese I read in print was Twistwood Tales, which is easily worth buying; the edition is stellar, with amazing blacks and a nice hardcover format. It's just a nice book to hold, never mind to read.
Other
Word Hord was a lot of fun.
click this for the list of everything I completed in 2023, should you want to see that. (It's literally copied and pasted from my spreadsheet so there are probably typos and such.
Complete I Ching (Huang)
Poems Philip Larkin
Castle of Otranto (Walpole)
A Vision (Yeats)
Mushishi v5 (Urushibara)
Collected Spinoza 1
Skull Face Bookseller Honda-san v4
The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun (Tolkien )
The Handbook of Contemporary Animism
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (Liu)
Vathek (Beckford)
Hakumei & Mikochi 4
Mabinogi (Ford)
Saint Young Men 7
Victory City (Rushdie)
Sentimenal Journey (Sterne)
New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (Lonsdale ed)
Etteilla, Theory and Practical Instruction in the Book of Thoth (Nitz trans)
Four Branches of the Mabinogi (Parker)
Essential Spinoza: Ethics &c (Morgan ed, Shirley trans)
Secrets of Doctor Taverner (Fortune)
Carmen Astrologicum (Dorotheus)
Trioedd Ynys Prydein (Bromwich)
Bright Messenger (Blackwood)
Saint Young Men 8 (Nakamura)
Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley (Dovzhyk & Wilson, eds)
Many Dimensions (Williams)
The Monk (Lewis)
What I Talk about When I Talk about Running (Murakami)
Mushishi v6 (Urushibara)
My Solo Exchange Diary v2 (Kabi)
Saint Young Men 9 (Nakamura)
Gateways through Stone and Circle (Chassan)
Titus Groan (Peake)
Twistwood Tales 1 Macdonald)
Tarot: Key to the Wisdom of the Ages (Case)
Word Hoard (Videen)
The Golden Dawn Tarot (Waite)
The Magical Plays of Florence Farr
She Likes to Cook and She Likes to Eat 1 (Yukazi)
She Likes to Cook and She Likes to Eat 2 (Yukazi)
Delicious in Dungeon 10 (Kui)
Book of Tokens (Case)
Writings from Ancient Egypt (Wilkinson, trans)
Tale of Sinuhe and Others (Parkinson trans)
Tree of Life (Regardie)
Magical Writings of Florence Farr
Gormenghast (Peake)
Book of Maps (Wen)
House of the Hidden Light (Machen & Waite)
Flying Witch 6 (Ishizuka)
You Should Come With Me Now (Harrison)
Always Coming Home (Le Guin)
Flying Witch 7 (Ishizuka)
The Old English Baron (Reeve)
Fatal Revenant (Donaldson)
Against All Things Ending (Donaldson)
Saint Young Men 10 (Nakamura)
Tales of Wonder (Lewis)
The Horary Textbook (Frawley)
Sartor Resartus (Carlyle)
Mansions of the Moon (Warnock)
How Do We Relationship 1 (Tamifull)
War of the Ring (Tolkien)
Egyptian Book of the Dead (Goelet et al)
Practical Elemental Magic (Rankine & d'Este)
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou 1 (Ashinano)
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou 2 (Ashinano)
Laid Back Camp v8 (Afro)
Delicious in Dungeon 11 (Kui)
A Night in the Lonesome October (Zelazny)
Hakumei & Mikochi v5 (Kashiki)
Egyptian Mythology (Pinch)
Real Sorcery (Miller)
Kase-San & Morning Glories (Takashima)
Kase-San & Bento (Takashima)
Kase-San & Shortcake (Takashima)
Kase-San & an Apron (Takashima)
Scribbles v1 (Mori)
Delicious in Dungeon World Guide (Kui)
Qualia the Purple (Ueo & Tsunashima)
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (Harrison)
Advanced Astrological Magic (Miller)
Hakumei & Mikochi 6 (Kashiki)
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou 3 (Ashinano)
She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat 3 (Yuzaki)