I read 84 books in 2023. This was down from 105 in 2022. Since I don’t think I do a lot of reading, these numbers really surprise me. Perhaps I am lying, but I don’t think so. For a while, I have kept a list of the books I have read. Sometimes they have on my computer. Sometimes they have been on paper.

Except for the last three years (where they all on the same computer document called Book Reports, I really don’t know where any of them are. But on Book Reports, for each book, I have listed title and author, four to six things about the book (otherwise I won’t remember most of them), and a rating from A to C. If a book is trending D or F, I will put it aside and it won’t make the list.

My reading is always eclectic. The last two years, it has been more so, because I have been going through my collection of old Penguin paperbacks, dating from the 1920s to 1960. My goal was to go through all 700+, but so many are so irrelevant that I gave that up. So, 2023 was a mix. 

Here are the books I rated A or A-. If you want to learn a bout them, Google them, look on Goodreads, or ask me. For me to be more expensive here would extend this post way too much.

Here goes:

1. “Foreigners” by Leo Walmsley.
2. “Brown on Resolution” by C.S. Forester.
3. “The Trespasser” by D.H. Lawrence.
4. “Clochemerle” by Gabriel Chevalier
5. “Jassy” by Norah Lofts
6. “Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man” by Thomas Mann.
7. “Anson’s Voyage Around the World” by Richard Walter.
8. “England in the 19th Century” by David Thomson
9. Three Plays by Euripides: “Hippolytus”, “Iphigenia in Taurus”, “Alcestis”.
10. “A History of the English Church and People” by the Venerable Bede.
11. “A History of the USSR” by Andrew Rothstein.
12. ” Agricola” and “Germanica” by Tacitus.
13. “Salome’, “A Woman of No Importance” and “An Ideal Husband ” by Oscar Wilde.
14. “Edmund Campton” by Evelyn Waugh.
15. “Life in Shakespeare’s England”, an anthology.
16. “The Cinema 1951”, an anthology.
17. “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky.
18. “Cyclops” by Euripides
19. “Ichneutai” by Sophocles
20. “Spencer Fullerton Baird” by William Hawley Dall.
21. “Britain BC” by S.E. Winbolt.
22. ” The Beginnings of English Society” by Dorothy Whitelock.
23. ” The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann.
24. ” Crump Folk Going Home” by Constance Holmes.
25. “Dew on the Grass” by Eiluned Lewis.
26. “The Sacred Balance” by David Suzuki.
27. “The Archeology of Palestine” by W.F. Albright.
28. “A Farewell in Arms” by Ernest Hemingway.
29. ” Book notes on American Character”, edited by Brian Lamb
30. “Fascism: A Warning” by Madeleine Albright
31. ” The Future is History” by Masha Gessen

Wow. 31 A’s out of 86? I wonder if I miscounted the total. Arithmetic is not my strong suit.