Favorite novels I read in 2023

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”

George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

I am starting the year re-launching my Substack newsletter named “SinAgenda” which translates to No Agenda in English. This is nothing else but another way for me to commit to do more writing and share things I learn and read every week. It’s free, but if you want to support my writing, you can subscribe for as little as $5 a month – but for a limited time, you can take advantage of a 20% off discount for an entire year. This is my way of thanking you.

Last year I spent a great deal of time reading novels and memoirs, more than in any other year. Most of m reading has been non-fiction, I like reading about current events, history, software engineering, philosophy, etc. But last year I decided to read more fiction, primarily novels and I am glad I did. A few of my favorites are from Japanese writers who I hadn’t read before, and my only regret is not having learned about them before.

My favorite was Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, a surreal and touching story about a homeless person (or ghost) who wanders around one of Tokyo’s busiest train stations. The book starts with a description of a moment in time in someone’s imagination (or not), and bringing more questions than answers. Then the next paragraph is both beautifully written and intriguing… it made me want to continue to read the entire book – and I was not dissapointed.

I used to think that life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there’s the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.

Tokyo Ueno Station

Another book that I really enjoyed was The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. Wow, what a book. If you like fiction from writers like Ray Bradbury or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you’d like this book very much. It’s about an unnamed island where things disappear, all sorts of items and then there is the Memory Police whose task is to ensure that disappeared items remain forgotten. I don’t want to share more details as I think everyone who enjoys fiction should read this novel, it’s truly a gem.

Japan Sinks by Sakyo Komatzu was another work of fiction I enjoyed last year. I found this book while browsing for technical books in one of my favorite bookstores in the Seattle area, Ada’s Technical Books. It caught my attention as it was definitely misplaced in the book shelve, and after reading the first page I was hooked. It’s an old book, written in the 1970s about an island that apparently vanished overnight. Read it, it’s worth it and its story foreshadowed, in a way, the consequences of the 1995 Osaka-Kobe earthquake and the 2011 Took earthquake and tsunami.

In a future post I’ll be sharing my favorite non-fiction books as well as a lit of all books I read last year. I’ll also create a list of interesting books I bought last year but that I hadn’t read yet. No shame on sharing that I also, buy books and do not read them right away, but I do read them at some point. There are some that I buy just to look at the beautiful content inside, such as photos and drawings in photography, travel, and art/design books.

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