Devils, samurai and Vikings. Actually, it wasn’t a hellish time. Look down for my list of 46 books read and rated in 2023.
(* Indicates it has been read before.)
Five stars
Two on a Tower, Thomas Hardy, 1882
The God Equation, Michio Kaku, 2021
The Golden Ass, Apuleius, 2nd cent. AD
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Unknown, c. 2100 BC
Military Dispatches, The Duke of Wellington, 1808-15
The Night of the Hunter, Davis Grubb, 1953
On Architecture, Vitruvius, 1st cent. BC
Macbeth, Shakespeare, c. 1606-7*
The Tempest, Shakespeare, c. 1610-11*
Four stars
The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction, Jerry Brotton, 2002
The Satsuma Complex, Bob Mortimer, 2022
Hell Screen, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 1915-27
The Devil: A Very Short Introduction, Darren Oldridge, 2012
Ice, Anna Kavan, 1967
Catholicism: A Very Short Introduction, Gerald O’Collins, 2008
Black No More, George S. Schuyler, 1931
Twentieth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction, Kenneth O. Morgan, 2000
The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire, Andrew Wheatcroft, 1995
Tokyo Express, Seicho Matsumoto, 1958
American History: A Very Short Introduction, Paul S. Boyer, 2012
Big Blonde, Dorothy Parker, 1922-41
The Castle, Franz Kafka, 1926
Medieval Britain: A Very Short Introduction, John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths, 1984
Medieval Women, Henrietta Leyser, 1995
Road Dogs, Elmore Leonard, 2009
Seven Samurai, Joan Mellen, 2002
The Vikings, Else Roesdahl, 1987
Beast in the Shadows, Edogawa Rampo, 1928
A Voyage to Arcturus, David Lindsay, 1920
The Futurological Congress, Stanislaw Lem, 1971
The Franchise Affair, Josephine Tey, 1948
Chess, Stefan Zweig, 1942
Three stars
The Odessa File, Frederick Forsyth, 1972
The Creation of King Kong, Bruce Bahrenberg, 1976
The Lipizzaners, Sonja Klima, et al., 2021
Next to Mozart, Grosspietsch, Ramsauer and Greger-Amanshauser, 2011
Later, Stephen King, 2021
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata, 2016
A Room with a View, E. M. Forster, 1908
Wasp, Eric Frank Russell, 1957
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell, 1936
Mrs Caliban, Rachel Ingalls, 1982
Two stars
Chéri, Colette, 1920
The Fourth Hand, John Irving, 2001
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, 1984
One star
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho, 1988
Previous years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.
