Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

This was the first year I actively kept a log (well, really just a list) of books I’ve read or listened to. In part it was for award consideration, in part to see what insights, if any, I might glean. Below is the list of all the books I’ve finished in 2023 (I intentionally leave off several books that I bounced off of, hard. I will often finish a book even if it’s a little meh, but there were several that were even worse.)

I finished a total of 55 books this year, though many of them were on the shorter side (novellas.) Most were SF/F, with a few classics thrown in. Some were read for research and writing purposes (for example, I re-read Winnie-the-Pooh so I could write a Pooh/Lovecraftian horror crossover story for an invitation anthology.) A handful of the books were in Russian (marked with an R on the list) and an overwhelming majority of these were consumed as audiobooks. In some cases they were re-reads. For example, I wanted to revisit Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse because the book, written over a decade ago, starts out in 2023; or re-read Zelazny’s A Night in Lonesome October in October.

I tend to like shorter books — only a handful of these were longer than 12-14 hours of audio, and many a lot shorter than that. Anyway, here’s the entire list in the order they were read:

Babel – R. F. Kuang
We Are Legion – Dennis E. Taylor
Children of Memory – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Candide – Voltaire
The Good Soldier – Nir Yaniv
KON – Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (R)
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet – Becky Chambers
Winnie-the-Pooh – A.A. Milne
The Tangled Stars – Edward Willett
Assassin of Reality – Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, tr. by Julia Meitov Hersey
A Night Without Stars – Peter F. Hamilton
Into the Real – Lydia Sherrer & John Ringo
For We Are Many – Dennis E. Taylor
Olympian Games – Tom Doyle
The Bone Shard War – Andrea Stewart
Lords of Uncreation – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Legends & Lattes – Travis Baldree
The Boss in the Wall – Avram Davidson & Grania Davis
Yellowface – R. F. Kuang
The Avram Davidson Treasury – Avram Davidson
Empire of Silence – Christopher Ruocchio
The Far Reaches – Anthology
Sandman full cast parts I, II, III – Neil Gaiman
Light Bringer – Pierce Brown
Torth: The Majority – Abby Goldsmith
Shakespeare for Squirrels – Christopher Moore
Heaven’s River – Dennis E. Taylor
The City of Last Chances – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Starter Villain – John Scalzi
Artemis – Andy Weir
Fool – Christopher Moore
The Master of Autumn Leaves – Andrey Kokoulin (R)
A Night in Lonesome October – Roger Zelazny
Kisa (1-3) – Vladimir Kunin (R)
Shop is Open Until Nightfall – Daria Bobyleva (R)
The Downloaded – Robert J. Sawyer
India Match – Tom Doyle
The Last Unicorn – Peter S Beagle
Bookshops & Bonedust – Travis Baldree
Fever – Jason Cordova & Larry Correia
The Icarus Plot – Timothy Zahn
Shop is Open Until Nightfall 2 – Daria Bobyleva (R)
The Management Style of Supreme Beings – Tom Holt
A Thousand Recipes for Revenge – Beth Cato
The Expert System’s Brother – Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Expert System’s Champion – Adrian Tchaikovsky
God’s Monsters – Esther Hamori
Soft Apocalypse – Will McIntosh
Typewriter in the Sky – L. Ron Hubbard
Walking to Aldebaran – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley