Every Book I Read in 2023

Great expansion of the world. A little bit less of "definitely not firefly" and a bit more original worldbuilding. There's a cool pair of intertwined stories that work well here. Excited to see where this series goes.

Exciting spy thriller. Big focus on martial arts and maybe 3 too many similarly named characters, but it's a great mystery and a fun read overall.

A cool look into Reggie's career and the business side of videogames. It was more of a business book that I expected, but there was some interesting context behind why some of the marketing and positioning of games happens the way that it does.

Very interesting concept, but told very slowly. I liked the added political context of cultural revolution china, but lack of cultural competency on my own part made it a bit hard to follow. I think it definitely _can_ go somewhere cool, but I'm not sure how long that'll take. The physics was neat and the story ultimately an interesting one, it was just a bit of a slog to get through.

Riveting time loop book about relationships, memories, and reality. Heartfelt, but intense. Great characters and really nails the hopelessness of a time loop. Real page turner.

What's pitched as a "make the best use of your limited time" quickly pivots into "what even is time, really?". It's certainly thought provoking. It didn't go to the places I expected and helped me think about concepts that had never occurred to me (like when did we even start caring about time as a concept). Definitely an interesting read!

I loved the framing of magic as a series of rules. Fun, heist-y read and a good setup for more to come.

Very charming. Had lots of voice cameos by the cast and crew. Great behind the scenes stories and context on the making of the whole thing. Valuable too, since I lot of it was before I was born. I've always just known it as a beloved movie.

Really picked up after the first one. Characters are still bad and the writing is still pretty dry, but this one leaned much more heavily into the speculative sci-fi aspect that was promised. Loved the time jumps too- great to see how everything played out over years and years. No clue where the third one will go, but I'll definitely be reading it (eventually).

A fun world to explore and engaging characters I liked how they grew over time and information about the world was spooled out.

Great narration with all of the different characters. Lots of parallel plots made it a little hard to track, but it was still a great ride. Fun concept and very approachable hard sci-fi.

Just spectacular. Intricately planned, delicately spooled out, and kept me guessing until literally the final word. What a ride. Felt the closest to a modern Christie I've read in a while. I'm hungry for more.

A decent popcorn read, but the characters were sort of flat and the plot was fairly simplistic. That said, I _did_ want to know exactly what happened, so I burned through it. There was also a lot of repetition in the dialogue, which got repetitive.

Fun exploration on bigger world around Scooby Doo. I don't usually go for eldritch horror, but this was on the lighter side and had fun with it. I also enjoyed the thinly veiled character explorations. Really though, I wish we had an official version of this. In any case, fun little mystery!

Another knockout mystery. The characters are great and the plot is a ride, top to bottom. Setting it all on a ship makes the puzzle that much more intricate. Bits of it get pretty dark, but it's a fun read nonetheless. Can't wait for his next book!

Fun as always. The mystery was a little less satisfying this time around, but it's a good enough read.