I'm writing this 2023 post here in 2026, three years late. For the last three years I've been tracking all of the books I've read, so that I can share them here on my blog for the readers that have commented how much they enjoy these lists. Sadly, I've let those same readers down, because I haven't kept current with the lists themselves and publishing them. That ends today, as I'm working to get caught back up with 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 lists. I have them, I just haven't done the posts. Here they come!

I predicted in my 2022 What I've Read post that 2023 was going to be rough for reading, and I was right. Without 75 Hard running in the background forcing daily pages and daily workouts with Audible, the structure that drove two books a month just wasn't there. I finished 5 books in 2023 — and all of them came in the first half of the year. The back half of 2023 was a reading zero. It's a little embarrassing to write that, but it's honest. Fortunately, things picked back up in 2024 even though there were lots of changes coming (foreshadowing).

What was my breakdown of genres for the year?

In reviewing the books I read this year I found I read only 5 titles. That's down about 77% over 2022 and they were broken down in the following broad genres:
Entertainment - 60%
Non-fiction - 0%
Computing - 0%
Biographies - 0%
Self-improvement - 40%

Books I've completed in 2023:

January

  • Atomic Habits (Audible) – James Clear's framework for building good habits and breaking bad ones, built around the idea that small, consistent improvements compound dramatically over time. The core argument is that habits are better shaped by identity and environment than by willpower. Practical and well-organized — one of those books where you find yourself mentally auditing your own routines as you read it.

  • North of Havana (Doc Ford 5) (Kindle) – Tomlinson sails to Cuba with a woman and ends up with his boat impounded by the Cuban government. Doc Ford goes to bail him out and walks into something far more complicated — an assassination plot with roots in Ford's own covert past from the Mariel boatlift era. The series takes on a different texture here, with Havana providing a backdrop unlike the usual Florida coastal settings.

April

  • Start with Why (Audible) – Simon Sinek's argument that the most influential leaders and organizations communicate from the inside out — starting with purpose before moving to process or product. The "Golden Circle" framework (Why, How, What) is the central idea, illustrated through examples like Apple, Southwest Airlines, and Martin Luther King Jr. A companion piece to Leaders Eat Last in some ways, though it covers different ground.

  • Ready Player Two (Kindle) – The sequel to Ready Player One. Wade Watts discovers a new technology hidden by Halliday — a full-immersion neural interface — that triggers another high-stakes quest inside the OASIS, this time with the fate of millions of users hanging in the balance. It leans harder into the pop culture references than the first book, which will either work for you or it won't.

June

  • Critical Mass: A Delta-V Novel (Kindle) – The second book in Daniel Suarez's Delta-V series. After an unsanctioned commercial asteroid-mining mission goes wrong and leaves two crew members stranded, the team that made it back to Earth has to design and build a rescue spacecraft from scratch — on a timeline dictated by orbital mechanics. Hard science fiction that takes the engineering seriously, set against a backdrop of geopolitical tension and competing national interests in space.

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