Another year… of books

Happy 2024 to my 12.5 readers!¹ I hope you had a wonderful 2023 and an even better start to this year.

_{A New Year’s tradition in Venice is a concert at La Fenice theater. Click through to watch a tiny bit!}

My 2023 was unexpected, and less productive than I hoped for, but still full of fun and spice and everything nice. At the beginning of the new year I’d like to take stock and share a few of the good things… in book form.

Best books of 2023

My first Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches, and my first Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, were probably the absolute best reads of the year for me. I can’t wait to read more from both. As a reader, because it’s just a fantastic experience, and as a writer, because there’s so much to learn from.

This was the also year I discovered (and binged on) Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, which is funny and wholesome and has an incredible voice. (When you get to #4, be warned, though: the blurbs say it’s funny, witty and full of humor, and it is. But it is also very much… not.)

From non-Anglophone writers, I fully recommend Black Water Lilies by Michel Bussi (with a plot twist that you just won’t see coming! It’s a rare book that leaves me breathless with surprise). If you can read Italian, or if the series ever gets translated into English, do check out Alice Basso’s Anita Bo series, about a girl that works for a crime story magazine in Fascist-era Italy and ends up solving crimes herself. Her latest was out in 2023 and there’s one more coming. Anita is another incredible (and fun!) voice, and the books are choc-full of things: social commentary, well-researched history, great plotted crime stories, a touch of romance… what more could you ask for?

The best of the rest of 2023

Short stories! Audio series! General fun! In no particular order:

• Victoriocity!
• “Like Ladybugs, Bright Spots In Your Mailbox” by Marie Croke
• “Re: Your Stone” by Guan Un
• Murder We Wrote
• “The Eel Singers” by Natasha Pulley

Looking forward to in 2024

• I’m starting the year with The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune (late to the party, I know…)
• John Wiswell (he of the extraordinary “Open House on Haunted Hill”) will have his debut novel Someone You Can Build a Nest in out in April!
• Before that, in March, comes High Vaultage, the first Victoriocity-based novel!
• Also in March: The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton (I’m hoping it’s more like The Devil and the Dark Water and less like The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, but I’m happy with both)

_{Happy 2024! – Image by Gary Lee on Unsplash}

1. (Hoping for twenty-five would be presumptuous of me…) ↩︎