Favorite Books read in 2023, in no particular order:

 Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier — A classic I knew I would love. The Hitchcock film is also wonderful and very true to the book. 

 Half-Life of a Stolen Sister by Rachel Cantor — I wouldn’t recommend reading this unless you’ve already spent some time with the Brontë sisters but if you are familiar with them this book is a trippy Victorian fever-dream.

 Anne of the Island by Lucy Maud Montgomery — This was my favorite of books 2-5 in the Anne series, which I am planning to pick back up with next summer. 

 Legends & Lattes + Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree — Cozy fantasy at its best. Worth all the grassroots hype. These books never rush the small stuff yet manage to be page-turners.

 We Have Always Lived in The Castle by Shirley Jackson — short classic horror novel, spooky and atmospheric. 

 The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter — beautifully written, un-sanitized, un-disneyfied fairytales with Red Riding Hood leading the pack, joyfully succumbing to the wolf (isn’t it nice to know a lot). 

 Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel — I wish I read these as a kid but it’s alright, I’ve got enough child-like wonder to spare. 

 [and there was a Shakespeare project] In February, I decided that I wanted to invest time reading more Shakespeare. It felt like a big gap in my cultural understanding and I knew I was missing references to Shakespeare in other art. I got to most of what I wanted to this year which amounted to 14 plays. Favorites included: Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus, MacBeth, and The Tempest. There were also plenty that I didn’t like. I also rewatched Kiss Me Kate, 10 Things I Hate About You, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet, and West Side Story. I found a bootleg of the musical Something Rotten on youtube. Saw Fat Ham; a Hamlet retelling on Broadway as well as Shakespeare in a battle of wits with George Bernard Shaw in a re-staging of Sondheim’s Frogs and ABT’s The Dream at Lincoln Center with Eric. I discovered Joni Mitchell, Mumford & Sons, and 2pac all borrowed from the Bard. I also read Shakespeare adjacent books; Christopher Moore’s bawdy Fool Trilogy, Angela Carter’s Wise Children, Bob Smith’s memoir Hamlet’s Dresser, and Ian Doescher’s Much Ado About Mean Girls. Actually, about a third of what I read ended up being Shakespeare related. Yet, there is still so much more. I haven’t touched the Sonnets or Histories, I want to read Atwood’s Hagseed and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and listen to the Verdi, Bellini, Britten, and Rossini’s operas. While I am going to ease off the major focus on Shakespeare, I do think I am going to continue with a ‘long term, long distance, low commitment, casual relationship’ with Will.

 [In 2024] I am going to suspend writing reviews and posting them on instagram at the end of each month. I started it as a way to collect my thoughts and remember the book afterwards but I want to shift away from reading so publicly though I might change my mind if I miss it. I plan to spend the year getting into some longer books.

 What were your favorite reads of the year?