Books I Did Not Read in 2023

An anti-review of the year

I was recently in stitches at Kieran Healy’s list of books he did not read this year. Like Kieran, my “job”, if you want to call it that, consists in large part of reading books. Despite this, I manage to not read with an astonishing pace and ferocity.  

Just as Sherlock Holmes taught us to notice the dog that doesn’t bark, the books that one doesn’t read are an important intellectual influence. Many people – perhaps especially people my age – have been more influenced by authors talking about their books on podcasts than by the books themselves. And, as always, the ability of reviewers and critics to have strong opinions about books they have not read is astonishing.   

In any case, and in homage to Kieran, the following are my ten favourite books that I did not read in 2023. 

Criteria for inclusion are: having tried and failed to get into the book, feeling guilty about not having read it, and feeling left out from discussions with my friends as a result.

I hope this list is not misconstrued as a case against abandoning books. As far as I’m concerned, the more books you abandon, the better. I have observed many friends and family read at a snail’s pace, because they are unwilling to jettison books that bore them. I read about 70 books to completion this year, but read sections from or abandoned perhaps 100 others. To abandon a book is not to claim it is bad; You must ask not only whether a book is right for you, but whether it’s the right time to read it.  

1. The Iliad, Emily Wilson

I enjoyed reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey earlier this year. But not only have I not read her new translation of the Iliad, I haven’t read the Iliad at all. While not reading her book, I read (and enjoyed) the profile of her in the New Yorker. More pathetically, I learned all the basic plot points in the Iliad because of how often they come up in pub quizzes. I have been so committed in my non-reading of this book that I don’t even own it.

2. Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges

I was so confident that I would read this one that I told someone I already had read in a letter – fully believing it would be true by the time it arrived. Borges has been recommended to me scores of times, and I have listened to his short stories being discussed in-depth on one of my favourite podcasts. Despite this, I only made it three stories in.

(The Library of Babel is sublime, though.)

3. The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia

Music books are a genre that I am particularly adept at not reading. I can only recall reading one book about music to completion. Almost everything I know about jazz comes from a small handful of films, documentaries, and conversations. I grow increasingly embarrassed about this, and my listening grows increasingly stale.

4. Dracula, Bram Stoker

I have been not reading this book since Hollis Robbins started writing about it for the Fitzwilliam over a year and a half ago. I could have watched every Dracula adaptation ever made in the time that it took me to get 60 pages into this book. My favourite Romanian even gave me a nice paper copy for my birthday. But, for various reasons, I find it an order of magnitude more challenging to get into novels than non-fiction. 

5. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift 

My record when it comes to not reading Jonathan Swift is unblemished. I am interested in the claim that the Irish Enlightenment was as good as the Scottish one, and I feel some reflexive pride that so many of the great 18th-century intellectuals were Irish. But, how do I personally even know that they are great?

Follow-up question: How many “Burkean conservatives” have actually read a page of Edmund Burke?

6. India After Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha

I went to India earlier this year, and I greatly enjoyed my research in advance. I insinuated that I had finished John Keay’s India: A History and Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian as a commitment device to get me to finish them quicker; the gambit failed.

The queen of Indian history books that I feel myself drawn to but haven’t yet finished is India After Gandhi, which by all accounts (including mine) is excellent. I have brought it with me many places, despite still being less than 100 pages in. I now don’t read Ramachandra Guha almost everywhere I go. I’ve become somewhat of a scholar of not reading books about India, myself. 

7. American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Like every other ‘nuclear bro’, I felt guilty about not having read this book when Oppenheimer came out. I even ran a private screening of Oppenheimer and wrote a review – not that I think the source material is particularly relevant for evaluating the quality of the film. But alas, I only made it to chapter one.

8. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein

In what must be a first for humanity, I first started reading Wittgenstein to impress a girl on a dating app. 

(I had wanted to read him anyway, she adores him and wanted to discuss; I promise it made sense at the time.) 

I am still on the introduction, and honestly, I’m kind of lost. 

9. Wild Swans, Jung Chang

My record when it comes to not reading books about China is even more impressive than for India. Given that this book sold 13 million copies, it must be gathering dust on an extraordinary number of bookshelves. Having said that, Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast with Chang was beautiful, and I can recommend it as a companion to what little I have read.  

10. Modern Ireland: 1600–1972, Roy Foster

Roy Foster seems wonderful, and I believe people who say that he’s Ireland’s greatest living historian. But, Ireland at the beginning of the 17th century was not exactly the most exciting place in the world. 

My friend is a few chapters into a Napoleon biography, and he tells me that “it’s all going well so far”. So far in Foster’s book, the English and Irish are living in relative peace and harmony. I sure hope nobody upsets that. No spoilers, please. 

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