Late again…but I have a good excuse. I was meeting a prospective/probable new member of the household, a sweet lab/boxer mix. So…this takes a back seat.

Odds ‘n ends about books and reading that caught my eye this week. You’ve probably seen some/most/all of them, but just in case:
bullet On the Difficulty of Giving Books as Gifts
bullet The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2023—from BookMarks. I’m feeling much better about all my negative reviews.
bullet The best book covers of 2023 are the ones you’ll never see: The most interesting book cover designs are often left on the cutting room floor.
bullet 10 Things We Learned in 20 Years of Writing Mysteries—from the writers behind “Cleo Coyle”
bullet Ian [Rankin]’s end of year round-up: 2023
bullet Kevin Hearne also posted a Year-end roundup
bullet FALL BACK TO READING SERIES – Featuring Lee Goldberg—Goldberg shares Non-Fiction and Fiction recommendations
bullet The Biggest Literary Stories of the Year: 50 to 31—(at least according to LitHub)
bullet How about some more Year-End Best Of lists? (in no particular order). Several of my TBR reads are here and not enough things that I have read are, oh and the TBR has been made longer by these, too.
bullet CrimeReads’ The Best Crime Novels of 2023—Some great ones here (and in the Honorable Mentions!)
bullet The 139 Best Book Covers of 2023
bullet My Ten Favourite Reads of 2023—from Grab This Book
bullet FanFiAddict’s The Bookwyrm’s Best Reads of 2023
bullet Also from CrimeReads, The Best Debut Novels of 2023
bullet Also from FanFiAddict, Charlies Top Reads of 2023
bullet Top Five Powerful Books I Read In 2023—Stephen continues his trend of categorizing his lists in the best way
bullet And one more from FanFiAddict, Lord TBR’s Top Reads of 2023
bullet Rethinking the End of Year Book List—What better way to follow those up than with a reconsideration of the idea?
bullet How do You Measure a Year in Reading?—I’ve read this a couple of times now, and will probably do it a couple of more
bullet Maybe the Greatest Fantasy Standalones Ever—Not content with just looking at 2023, Peat Long tackles the Entirety of Human History
bullet Ideas For 2023 Book Gifts—for the second week in a row, I’m starting on the same topic I began on. I’d like to say I’m clever enough to keep this up, but we all know better.

A Book-ish Related Podcast episode (or two) you might want to give a listen to:
bullet Fully Booked Best Middle-Grade Books of 2023 with Zach Weinersmith—before digging into Kirkus Review’s Best Middle Grade books of the year, the episode features a chat with Weinersmith about Bea Wolf, Beowulf, and MG books in general. I really enjoyed this one

Bookstore Sign reading, Book Math: Buying the series means you really only bought 1 book