2023 (I): A Quarter of Reading
I didn’t start 2023 with a reading resolution. But I found myself gravitating to books for a number of reasons: to fill a vacuum in my time and in my self, to awaken a creative writerly flame within me, and to fall asleep at night (certainly a better choice than my phone screen).
Just like that, I was suddenly devouring books. I read six books in January, five in February, and five more in March. I read kid lit, murder mysteries, a lot of Japanese authors, climate fiction, graphic novels, and nonfiction. I thumbed through physical books, swiped pages on my Kindle, and drove listening to audiobooks. I even kept aside a separate budget for book purchases so I wouldn’t feel guilty about buying so many.
Here’s the full list of what I read. You can see how I feel about them on my Goodreads page.
January:
1. George/ Melissa; Alex Gino
2. War Stories; Gordon Korman
3. The Guest Cat; Takashi Hiraide
4. Maithili and the Minotaur: Web of Woe; C.G. Salamander
5. The Honjin Murders; Seishi Yokomizo
6. Klara and the Sun; Kazuo Ishiguro
February:
7. Malice; Keigo Higashino
8. A Psalm for the Wild-Built; Becky Chambers
9. The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean; Susan Casey
10. The Lost Apothecary; Sarah Penner
11. The Devotion of Suspect X; Keigo Higashino
March:
12. The Flying Flamingo Sisters; Carrie Siem
13. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals; Oliver Burkeman
14. Savi and the Memory Keeper; Bijal Vachharajani
15. Night Flight; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
16. The Last Bear; Hannah Gold
Champaca (the Bangalore-based indie bookstore) runs an annual reading challenge. While I’m not currently choosing my books based off of this challenge, it will be fun to come back to it halfway through the year and then pick books to read in order to complete the challenge. Happy reading!
Finally, if you’d like to read some of the books I’ve written, here they are. Click them to buy them.
1. The Origin Story of India’s States; Penguin
2. My Appa and his Sounds; Pratham
3. Picnic on Grass; Pratham
4. The Piano Ghost; K12 Techno Services
