Reflections on a year of reading: 2023

This has been a surprising and encouraging post to write. Without external prompts I have the memory of a goldfish. I’m continually astounded by things that astounded me six weeks ago. My recollections of what the children were reading at the beginning of the year proved to be nonexistent. Luckily, I had some help.

I’ve gone through our borrowing history at the libraries we use, order histories online, and the children’s reading records. I started their reading records in June, so they don’t cover the whole year, but it’s better than my nonexistent memory. Did I mention I have the memory of a goldfish?

As regular readers will know, we read a lot. Sometimes the children read half a dozen different books or more in a single day, and I certainly don’t record them all. For the reading records, a few times a month I jot down what they’ve enjoyed recently, and if they come to me positively fizzing with excitement about a book, I write it down and include notes about best bits/favourite characters etc.

So this isn’t everything we’ve read, but the books and series that have been consistently popular or acted like literary landmarks in our year. I encourage you to have a look through your own family’s year of reading. Even if your memory’s better than mine, you might well unearth some surprises!

The Time Chronicles

I can’t believe I only bought this series in January 2023. I thought we’d had it for at least two years. The Time Chronicles are first chapter books that follow on from the Biff, Chip, and Kipper reading series from Oxford Reading Tree. My two children adored this series and were bereft when they got to the end of it. They weren’t ready for ‘proper’ books, so I was delighted to discover The Time Chronicles. It’s a series of 18 books, carefully and gradually increasing in difficulty—longer chapters, more interesting vocab, more words. There are lots of full-colour illustrations, the characters are familiar, and the andventures are really exciting. They’re good enough that even though the children can now read them with ease, every few months they get them off the shelf and reread the whole lot, often in a single day. Ruinously expensive new, but usually available secondhand online.

Usborne Young Reading

You name it, there’s an 80% chance we’ve read it. Again, carefully graded (see this post for sample pages from Series 1, 2, and 3), and covering a multitude of subjects from silly stories about snowmen to detailed histories of the Plague and Pompeii. Particular favourites have included The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander the Great, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, The Railway Children…

iHero

Ugh. Do I have to include this on the list? Well yes, if I’m going to be honest. I detest this choose-your-own-adventure series, complete with gruesome illustrations, but the children adored it over the summer. Titles include Ninja, Fairy, Unicorn, Zombie, Blood Crown Quest: Dragon Mountain… you get the idea. There are also books about real-life sporting heroes for sports-obsessed children. Looking them up now I see the author/illustrator duo have also made graphic novels of Shakespeare plays. I shudder. I also strongly suspect my children will love them when we get to Shakespeare.

Ramona

In April I bought the complete set of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books after reading about them in Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading (a great source of book inspiration). For my daughter 2023 has been The Year of Ramona. The first time, she got stuck on Ramona and Her Mother, which she didn’t enjoy. I told her she could just skip it but she wanted to read them in order, and this book proved to be a roadblock. But subsequently she tried again (from the beginning of the whole series!), and has now read the whole series several times—and Ramona and Her Mother has become one of her favourites.

She’s also now read all the Henry Huggins books (which my son enjoyed too), Socks, and some of the Ralph S. Mouse series.

For my son, 2023 might have been The Year of Flat Stanley, though he fell head-over-heels in love with the Wizard of Oz in April and has also immersed himself in Norse mythology.

Secret Explorers

These are also first chapter books—illustrations, short chapters, really exciting. They’re educational, covering subjects including Ancient Egypt, space, volcanoes, oceans etc. The cast of characters is diverse. We’ve read lots (Jurassic Rescue was especially popular with my son), but they also make good audiobooks and in recent weeks have bought me whole hours of total silence while the children listened.

Ladybird Audio Adventures

Not sure if this counts as reading, as they’re only available as audiobooks, but this seems like a good place to slot them in. Factual introductions to lots of topics (we’ve enjoyed Big Cats, Human Body, Deep Sea Dive, Frozen Worlds, Vikings, Ancient Rome and more). Not cheap, but very good value. Also in the audio category, Greeking Out has brought me hours of peace and quiet (albeit punctuated with violence and rage because, y’know, Greek myths).

Daisy

If my daughter wasn’t reading Ramona this year, there’s a good chance she was reading the Daisy series by Kes Gray. They’re not what Charlotte Mason called ‘living books’—the vocab is easy, the sentences are short, the children are naughty and eat a lot of junk food. But they make my children laugh out loud, and they get through them faster than Daisy gets through sweets. There’s also a shorter series of books about Jack Beechwhistle, Daisy’s archenemy, if you have a boy who only reads books about boys. Both my children have enjoyed lots of these books this year.

Ronja the Robber’s Daughter

I never read any Astrid Lindgren as a child so she was completely off my radar. I came across this in A book gift guide for readers ten and under and gave it to my daughter for her birthday a few weeks ago. It has been made into a Studio Ghibli series and the Ghibli cover definitely drew her in. She raced through it and declared it the awesomest book ever, even better than Ramona. High praise indeed.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

I can’t quite believe that my daughter is reading this book/series. I read the whole series myself earlier this year and adored it. Recently my daughter wanted an adventure story and I suggested this. She said it was too difficult for her to read so I started reading it aloud. After a few chapters over a few nights, it was so exciting she just had to read it herself, and she did. We’re now on book two, Black Hearts in Battersea. It is quite astonishing to me that the girl who at the start of the year was tenaciously working her way through first chapter books is now reading 200+ page novels.

Illustrated Norse Myths

This might be the year’s most-read book. Other books from the same Usborne Illustrated series have also proved very popular (King Arthur, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Myths from Around the World), but this is the winner by a mile. What my son can’t tell you about Norse mythology isn’t worth knowing.

A couple of picture books

My daughter loved Can Bears Ski?, a story about a bear who gets a hearing aid. I don’t really understand her love for it but it’s a nice book. We all loved The Pigeon Needs a Bath, which is hilarious especially if you have a child who fights bathtime as if their life depended on it… and then refuses to get out. I read aloud The Girl Who Thought in Pictures once, in a reading room, and my daughter has remembered it ever since. I keep meaning to buy her a copy. It’s the story of Dr Temple Grandin, who is an expert on animal behaviour as well as a spokesperson on autism.

Non-fiction

The books my family falls in love with tend to be fiction. My standout non-fiction book from the year is Bringing Back the Wolves, about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone. It’s very information-dense, has great vocabulary, and connects to lots of subjects beyond science. Very close second is Amazing Earth, which has a couple of pages each on lots of incredible places around the world, many of which I’d never heard of before. Life Cycles, Water Cycles, and Great Adventurers all get honourable mentions.

When I looked through our library borrowing histories I remembered that You Wouldn’t Want to be a Secret Agent in World War Two was also very popular for a long time.

For other non-fiction recommendations, see An Ancient World Reading List, and October’s Resource List which had a lot of science books.

And what did I read?

Do you care? If not, skip it. I love hearing what other adults have read, so although this isn’t usually a newsletter about grown-up reading, here’s my own list. I’ve starred my favourites, and UF means unfinished—sometimes because I just didn’t like it, but often because I put it down at some point and never remembered to pick it up again. Goldfish, see? I also read some Charlotte Mason but don’t seem to have written it down in my reading record.

January

*Mr Skeffington—Elizabeth von Armin

The Travelling Hornplayer—Barbara Trapido

*The Ruin of All Witches—Malcolm Gaskill (history)

Cranford—Elizabeth Gaskill (UF, couldn’t bear any more after about 20 pages)

Learning to Dance—Michael Mayne (UF, God)

*Wolves of Willoughby Chase (and then the rest of the series over the next few months)—Joan Aiken

An Almost English Life—Miriam Gross (reread, memoir)

February

More Wolves

March

More Wolves

Bookworm—Lucy Mangan (memoir)

The Reading Promise—Alice Ozma (UF, memoir, couldn’t get on with it)

April

More Wolves

*The Remains of the Day—Kazuo Ishiguro

*A Black Boy at Eton—Dillibe Onyeama (memoir)

May

The Shortest History of England—James Hawes

Our Island Story—H E Marshall (UF)

The Secret Life of Trees (UF, natural history)

Changing our Minds—

Dr Naomi Fisher

June

Temples of Delight—Barbara Trapido

Light Perpetual—Francis Spufford

*Seven Myths about Education—

Daisy Christodoulou

Thieves of Ostia—Caroline Lawrence

July

The Children Who Lived in a Barn—Caroline Graham

Daily Rituals—

Mason Currey

(how lots of creative people have structured their days)

Romantic Comedy—Curtis Sittenfeld (I love anything this woman writes. Write more, Curtis! Write faster!)

August

*Black and British—David Olusoga (history)

The Secret World of Weather—Tristan Gooley (UF, reread)

Digital Minimalism—Cal Newport

How to make the world add up—Tim Harford (UF)

*Lincoln—Jan Morris (biography. Surely the shortest possible biography of Lincoln but amazingly vivid in so few pages.)

September

Perennial Seller—Ryan Holiday (UF)

Brilliant Abyss—Helen Scales (UF, marine biology, recommended but I wasn’t in the right mood for it)

*Middlemarch—George Eliot

October

*John Adams—David McCullough (Biography. Adams’ paragraph, ‘The Encouragement of Literature, Etc’ in The Constitution of Massachusetts is still in my head. I may well have to write a whole post about it next year.)

November

*Jane Eyre—Charlotte Brontë

December

*A Christmas Carol—Charles Dickens

Currently reading another Dickens: *Bleak House.

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That might be it from me for 2023. Thank you for all your kind comments, tips, support, and recommendations this year. I hope all you lovely readers can have a restorative break, with plenty of good books, and I’ll look forward to getting back into the swing of things in the New Year.