The 2023 reading year was a good one, so many different reading experiences. I didn’t quite check off all my goals as planned, but new and exciting reading opportunities came up along the way.

Once again, I traveled around the world with The Book Girls‘ Book Voyage: Read Around the World reading challenge. I visited 19 countries (not including the USA), three of which were new to me in reading (Albania, Argentina, and Italy), and I traveled to more of South America than in previous years. Books in translation made up 50% of the Book Voyage books.

I didn’t complete my 2023 Nordic Lit Reading Challenge as planned – a unique Nordic country for each of the six categories – but I still felt good about how it played out.

What I thought would be a simpler approach with fewer categories (in the past it’s been 12) turned out to require too much research and planning for all the pieces to fall into place. Also, I was distracted by new reading challenges.

I did read two new-to-me Nordic authors, Denmark’s Kim Leine (Reading Lately, May) and Finland’s Emmi Itäranta (Reading Lately, March). I also read two Norwegian authors long on my radar, Brit Bildøen (Reading Lately, August) and Abid Raja (Reading Lately, September) as well as a highly anticipated Swedish Sámi novel (Reading Lately, April). Looking back now, all I needed to do for the pieces to fall into place as planned was to read a Swedish book by or about a marginalized group or another book by or about the Sámi people and their history and culture, fiction or nonfiction. Goals for 2024!

Somewhere in the middle of 2023, I picked up the #DiversityAcrossGenres reading challenge, which I greatly enjoyed participating in. I read many diverse authors and different genres that I wouldn’t necessarily have read if I weren’t on the lookout for them. Click here to see my 2023 reads. I ran out of time to complete some categories, but I have those titles on my TBR for 2024’s challenge.

What have you been reading lately?

The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong (2016) 📖🎧
Translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim (2018), narrated by Johnathan McClain & Elizabeth Liang

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with this one. It had been on and off my radar for a while as a book in translation by an Asian woman, and I finally read it now since I needed a thriller/horror by an Asian author for #DiversityAcrossGenres. It’s about a 26-year-old man who wakes up to find his mother dead in their home. He does not remember much from the night before, but as he tries to figure it out, more and more is revealed, both about what happened and about his past. The author really takes the reader inside his mind as he pieces everything together from bits and pieces of memories. It’s a dark and disturbing story (decent amount of  violence) but intriguing to see it all come together. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

• #DiversityAcrossGenres: Asian / Thriller/Horror
• Book Voyage: Read Around the World: Asia – North (South Korea)

People Like Them by Samira Sedira (2020) 🎧
Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud (2021), narrated by Susan Nezami

This story by a French-Algerian author is loosely inspired by a quintuple murder that happened in 2003 in France. In that case, racist motives were completely overlooked. In this novella, the author takes into consideration race, which she believes to be an essential key to understanding that tragedy. The story begins mid-2015, a significant year for France with terrorist attacks both in January and November.

A wealthy Black man and his family move to a newly built chalet in a remote French mountain village. A little over a year later, they are murdered by a local whom everyone described as “normal”. The story opens with a retelling of the brutal murder. There is no doubt of the defendant’s guilt, just questions about his motivation. The story is from the point of view of the murderer’s wife. Reflecting on the tragedy and her husband’s role in it, she alternates between the trial and how she and her husband met and life in the village before the murder. It’s a thought-provoking look on human nature and race and class relations. The translation and the narration were both excellent. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

• #DiversityAcrossGenres: MENA/Arab / Thriller/Horror
• Book Voyage: Read Around the World: Europe – Western (France)

Our Last Days in Barcelona (The Perez Family #5) by Chanel Cleeton (2022) 🎧
Narrated by Almarie Guerra, Elena Rey, and Victoria Villarreal

I read and enjoyed Next Year in Havana, the first book in the Perez Family series. I started but had to set aside the second one, When We Left Cuba. Now I skipped ahead to the last in the series, which was not a problem, but the family tree I found in the back of the book was helpful.

This is the story of Isabel, the oldest of four sisters. She travels from Palm Beach, Florida, to Barcelona in 1964 to track down her younger sister, Beatriz. The story jumps between Isabel in Barcelona in 1964 (unhappily married in Palm Beach) and the sisters’ mother Alicia in Barcelona in 1936 (at her parents’ home after leaving her cheating husband in Cuba) with some chapters from the perspective of Alicia’s cousin in Havana in 1936 (husband went to fight in Spain). There were many similarities, too many, between the storylines which made it hard to distinguish them at times. What I appreciated the most was the historical aspect of the novel. It takes place during the Civil War in Spain and also explores the historical relationship between Cuba and Spain, both of which have been rare topics in my reading. However, at the same time, I wish there had been a stronger sense of place in Barcelona. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

• #DiversityAcrossGenres: Latine/x / Romance
• Book Voyage: Read Around the World: Europe – Western (Spain)

What have you been reading lately? Do you have any reading challenges planned for 2024?

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