Ranking Every Book I Read in 2023 

What a powerhouse set of books! And, my complements on pulling that off in one take. I always enjoy your lists. You bring interesting insights to the books in a cogent and concise way that always leaves me feeling informed rather than provoked. It's a rare experience on RU-vid, but I don't get worked up if you disliked a book I love or loved a book I dislike. I'm just walking away with a lot of interesting ideas for what to read next. Thank you!

The cow kept getting closer to listen!

John Nathan who was Mishima’s translator on many novels, once described reading a Mishima novel as visiting a museum of the world’s most ornate picture frames.

I’m not sure I’ve ever commented on a RU-vid video. Just want to say discovering your channel has opened up reading as a whole new experience to me. I have a bookcase half full of stuff to read based on your videos. I’ve discovered some amazing novels watching your reviews. Thank you for the effort you put into this channel for “newer readers” like myself. Hope your 2024 is awesome dude

I really like your willingness to find greatness in works with major defects. Not enough people read that way.

Excellent list and setting! I love that you not only bring attention to so many interesting books but also highlight lesser-known or discussed female authors.

i was waiting for the bull to charge 😂

Dude, that was not an easy thing to do, but you nailed it. Now I have to spend days dissecting this video and doing research! Good job, and thanks!

The Franz Werfel book is available as ebook in German, yay! I'm Austrian and never heard of this book (I knew the author, though) until you brought it up. Can't wait to dive into it, I have to push it up on my TBR.

Best back drop of any book tuber hands down. Beautiful background. 1st time to your channel... I hope you have more like this.

You've had a vintage year there Matt, great to see so many New Wave masterpieces -and some near misses- getting your attention. I received the Werfel by the way, thanks VERY much, enjoying it, expect an email soon. I don't keep a record of what I read when, but I have often felt since starting my channel that I've now discovered so many of the great works of SF that when tackling stuff new to me, I'm just mopping up the dirty corners at times....so this year I'm returning a lot to favourite authors for re-reads. Loved the cattle, personally....🙂

I ordered the Werfel in its german form. 1949 print and nicely bound. Definitely difficult to read, because of its sprawling and broad language. But I enjoy it so far, 40 pages in. Cant believe I found your channel. Have binge watched most of your vids in the past two weeks and I‘m really happy and love what you do! Please keep on doing this! Will definitely sub to the Patreon next month! Happy new year, and great video as always! All the best from Germany, Leon!

Really excellent flow there Matt . Tremendous memory and at quite a pace impressive stuff mate similar opinions on many of those books . All that and entertaining ! great stuff 🫡

Some sf royalty in your reading last year! Well done on that, and the single take, very impressive! I started my own sf channel last year, in large part because of folks like you. Well done again on a great 2023.

I was so intrigued by your comments on Farewell, Earth's Bliss in an earlier video I just had to read it and wow, it truly stunned me, stuck in my mind for days. Many thanks for leading me to something I was unlikely to encounter otherwise.

"One take!!!" Great list. Happy New Year from Ireland.

Amazing video, great job, and i laughed out loud when you gave Vance a kick when talking about The Word for World is Forest (which was my first Le Guin) :)

Good video! Waiting for the updated top 15 now.

You got me with the bull and the synthwave at the end. Subscribed!

Thanks for doing this. Really enjoyed it.

The outdoor nature backgrounds for these talks are a lot of fun. Always enjoy your reviews - it encourages me to try some writers I may have read at one time and I just didn't enjoy and forever avoid any of their other books.. I'm generally in agreement with your reviews; but I have noticed that you generally like your authors to be concise and downgrade their review when you feel they are too "pulpy". I appreciate your honesty and willingness to go against the grain with various authors.

This wase a great watch after 12h at work, thanks Matt!

I’m a huge Jack Vance fan, but I have to agree with your take on The Gray Prince…

Cow edging closer and closer like it had some opinions about Three Body Problem to add

oh! I just got Electric Forest and hope to read it soon.

I liked the the first two LotRs. Return of the king was a real trudge, as I felt that Tolkien lost interest the middle two thirds. Also, I read the Ragged Astronauts by Bob Saw. Entertaining read.

love the vids especially when you rip on a popular book, or find it a go meh, i might read it one day

Great video. I played the game The Invincible, which I thought was a masterpiece, and I'm looking forward to reading the book and his other works. Glad the game introduced me to Lem.

Another A++ for you. Now, speaking of "Ice", I'm hoping you'll get around to the Ice Trilogy one of these days. Great stuff from a contemporary Russian SF master. Thanks!

On your recommendation, I ordered the Downward to Earth and Electric Forest books today. I agree with you on Brian Aldiss Helliconia Spring…was blown away regarding the star systems dynamics and world building. I also just read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I thought it was an enjoyable read with interesting concepts. I realize you seem to have a dislike for Heinlein, but with novels like Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, etc I say cut the man some slack. ( Although I have to admit I have authors who annoy me to no end…ie James Patterson who shits out three garbage novels before breakfast with his ‘co-authors’ who do all the work and get minimum credit….don’t get me started on Clive Cussler either) …I LOVE your videos and respect your opinions. Keep them coming!

Good stuff here to add to the pile! I find Sheckley uneven, but at his best, very good. I would recommend the Penguin anthology The Robert Sheckley Omnibus and his early collection Untouched by Human Hands. I think his later stuff is not so good.

If someone says a Horror book needs to have a "scary monster" for it to be considered a Horror novel, they're obviously not a Horror reader and they are truly missing out. Sometimes the worst (best?) horror is the one you cannot see or clearly define.

Moving the book covers around so we can appreciate the cows is peak editing.

Best book review channel ever

My dude, I couldn't keep watching after your review of dune messiah, I'll come back and finish this video eventually but in my opinion it lives up to dune, from the rich world to the premises and writting style of Frank Herbert. I think coming into knowing it's a tragedy is helpful but I really like how he explores his premises and I think reading dune you can definitely sense this foreboding on his foreshadowing. Crazy good books!

nice list matt

Enjoying your recount of last years reading - I've just paused at the 21 minute mark where you mention you might read some more horror. Now I don't consider myself as a 'horror fan' but if you like older fiction maybe try some Dennis Wheatley novels - especially his Duke de Richleau 'The Devil Rides Out' Also stories like 'The Haunting of Toby Jugg' or 'The Ka of Gifford Hillary' Cheers!

Jeepers.... I just read The Funnel of God, your recommendation. I had never read any Bloch before and since I torrented The Best of Robert Bloch, I will read the others. I am a short story aficianado, and I maintain a great many long novels were actually good short stories that an author inflated so as to meet criteria in their contracts. I've heard you, and several others, use the phrase "economy of language" and I think with short stories, it is necessary or the venture is doomed. "The Funnel of God" had me captivated from the get-go. I especially enjoyed the segment of Harvey's life when he left each teacher or group or slice of society behind, bored, disgusted, or unconvinced. Good recommendation.

You should do outtake videos especially in this one where the cow starts to charge you, and you are running from the cow screaming obscenities, your beany falls off as you run away from the cow. The cow then eats falling beany.

I got the crime bug from Jim Thompson's more celebrated novels, i do recommend!

You DO KNOW that's a bull behind you in that meadow, BP? LOL. It injected an element of drama into this episode that I found typically unique to your channel. Perked up at your take on Gibson's 'Burning Chrome' anthology, because I've been looking for a way that isn't terribly time consuming to explore the authors of the 1990's onward but couldn't commit to a novel by any one of them due to a busy schedule. This one sounds like a good sampler of that era but through Gibson's filter. I laughed when you mentioned that the thing you remembered most from 2001 ASO was the gravity toilet! I still feel Childhoods End is my favorite Clarke if not his most melancholy. Great stuff here as usual, and much appreciated. Cheers.

"Star of the Unborn" can be downloaded from a website rhyming with Gibrary Lenesis...

Thanks for your reccomendation of 'Star of the Unborn' I've enjoyed my way through about 1/4 of it so far. It is also one of my luckiest book store finds. A well used paperback copy for $2.99!

Having loved the expanse series is the books worth reading. New to science fiction…friend got me in the show. I read wool, after watching silo. So I think I’m started to get hooked to the genre. I want to read the books first now

Thanks Matt

Great summaries of the books

My fave from Burning Chrome is The Belonging Kind with John Shirley... that creepy horror vibe mixed with tech.noir.. excellent

Wow, one take! Impressive summary of many difficult-to-summarize books, several of which I’ll add to my reading list. Suprised to see Ross Macdonald here; he’s much better than Raymond Chandler. Check out The Zebra-Striped Hearse and The Galton Case.

I was more impressed from Lem by The Return From Stars, because of its very human dimension of the characters, and I think it speaks a lot about the realities today. Also, Manuscript Found in a Bathtub is phenomenal absurd prose, really up there with Kafka and Eugen Ionescu . Both of them impressed me more than Solaris. His Master's Voice I put down. I re-read now Road Side Picnic because it left me with nothing in highschool. I don't even know if I finished it. I'm a third in, and I must say I like The Doomed City more (for the moment) which is again an astonishing portrayal of some of the realities we live today but which let me down towards the end when it dissolved in some ideological nonsense (typical for the era in which it was written) without reaching the conclusion which I thought is going to reach: THE EXPERIMENT IS MEANT TO FAIL. I found Negative Space really nihilistic, with really unpleasant characters to the point of really making me angry. If the youth today really has such a perverted, pointless and hollow existence, than I see a future for them as monkeys dancing to the tune of Yuval Harari as the organ grinder. Love the channel.

probably added 70% of this list to my already-longer-than-Santa's-naughtyandnice-list TBR. Thanks a lot man!

A video with Bull but no 💩 I feel I must read The Haunting of Hill House this year. Some other interesting ones in there.

Jack vance's THE DRAGON MASTERS has stayed with me since childhood. Give it a try.

Great review! Glad you went rather quickly instead of bogging down into detailed reasons. For Ian McDonals, try Dervish House (infuriating alphabet) and Brasyl (!). I set about finishing the rest of Clark this years in chronological order. The slow decline was rather sad - a few of the last were almost embarrassingly bad. As for politics, I avoid those who use recent events (anything with Trump, roe v Wade reversal, mega-ambiguousness. One book I had to have a notepad to keep up with the varous new terms and decided it just wasn't worth it. Sorry you don't like Heinlein - he's a big favorite of mine.

me adding all the books that sound good: oh dear lord we're only like 8 minutes in also, thank you for moving the books out of the way of the cow. important editing work.

If you're looking for more horror, I can highly recommend Richard Matheson and Robert McCammon. Amazing stuff from both.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="283">4:43</a> the bull grazing so closely and then looking into the camera is hilarious. Wonder what he thinks about I, Robot.

Great video, Matt. What’s the music at the end?

"Star of the Unborn" is my day to day train lecture. The German ebook version is perfectly priced and includes many other works. The book is the result of Franz Werfels own experience with coma. So it feels blurry and sharp at the same time. 1/3 through at the moment and the writing is masterclass.

A little correction on Helliconia Spring. You shouldn't think of the people on Helliconia as colonists. However implausible that may seem nowadays, they are supposed to be humans who just happen to have evolved indepedently from those on Earth. There is an unusual evolutionary history to Helliconia, which emerges particularly in the second book, if I remember correctly.

Heinlein's "Red Planet" is a pretty awesome book.

You got me hankering for The Sluts based on your (justifiably vague) review of it, even though I don't usually mess around with subject matter like that. (Aside: I couldn't find The Sluts at a library but I did find another Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm, and read it first, more or less all at once. Also worth checking out; very Lynchian, very Eurotrash.) Only last week did I check the Internet Archive and they do indeed have a scan of The Sluts. Jesus Christ. Also an all-in-one-go book. An excellent internet novel, not just for its examination of how truth can get distorted and lost but also in its explicit depictions of a very niche and extreme gay BDSM subculture. Somehow I didn't get triggered, which I often do while reading about extreme sexuality/sexual abuse, and I commend Cooper for that.

Good night. Bookpilled, totaal nice channel.

The settings for the videos of late have been fantastic! Where is this, is this on some kinda ranch or a farm? I can't imagine there's wild cattle roaming around the Californian countryside (or at least not near populated areas).

Recently got through Overlay and loved it. In a odd way, gave me "screw tape letters" vibes.

Again, like last year, I have read almost all of these and would have them in a different order. I agree wholeheartedly with the bottom five, and it's hard to argue with Kavan at the top. All good, the only headscratcher is Hodgson. Night Land, while a great feat of imagination, is a seriously flawed novel. Borderlands is, IMO, almost perfect. There's a rhythm to "weird" that not everyone gets. It most likely starts with this book. I have been reading weird fiction for about fifty years, and it's possible I have crawled up my own arse in this area. We are what our decisions make us. The cows were a nice touch.

The Bladerunner music at the end of this video made me wonder if robot cows dream of electric milkmaids.

I found Star of the Unborn in a used shop for a couple of bucks and then another copy fell in my lap that my kid brought home from a neighborhood giveaway. I tried it and found it a little too dense and abstract. I made it maybe a third of the way through and passed it along. Love the cover art. I also had trouble with Helliconia Spring. I tried twice and just couldn’t get into the world of it. I think I just wasn’t interested in the tribal setting and the bits of sci fi weren’t enough to keep me hooked in.

Still patiently waiting for the Phthor review

It sounds like it would be interesting to hear about those high school experiences that Negative Space brought back, if that is something you'd be comfortable talking about.

The cow: Why is that guy mooing so much? Let's check it out.

Didn’t even realize it was one take til you said it. HOLY SHIT

Haha. I read Moon/Mistress in the 80s.. don’t remember Jack Sh•t except the cover.

The Moon is a harsh mistress is one of my favorite books. I recommend the audiobook. I agree that Heinlein can be annoying. Heinlein’s characterization of women can be off-putting and has been indicated as a source or representation of hippie culture. The thing that I appreciate most about Heinlein’s work is his adoption of a thought experiment with very interesting follow-through to unusual results. Heinlein in some ways, reminds me of Nabokov for his immersive use of thought experiments as a premise and immersive storytelling.

I like these videos. Even though I consider myself politically centrist, when someone calls a book “too conservative” I’m often drawn to read it because it seems subversive or interesting to me. Just ordered the Vance book.

as someone who liked horror but never really read much horror, i took your recommendation of Bad Brains earlier in the year and read it and was blown away. Truly incredible, i immediately read The Cipher also by koja afterwords and really liked it too. I recommend The Haar by David Sodergran for another really good book thats a great twist on horror, really feels like a mix of genres like Bad Brains. found a lot of great new books thank to you over the past year, really appreciate the channel. also thank you for being one of the few people who shares my opinion of heinlien being an annoying gross loser. cheers.

Banger

Ok, but what will you take for that Patagonia jacket and can we talk about shipping?

I like House on the Borderlands quite a bit, but imo Hodgson's best thing, one of my favorite horror stories, is The Voice in the Night.

We who are about to: "not a crowd pleaser" lol. I feel like you said that just for me. Also dude you need to read The Cipher ASAP

I love Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but yeah, I can see it.

I finished Bad Brains on new years eve and I have to agree - that book kicks ass. Love the prose, love the grime. Great book.

Is there a particular reason, I‘ve never seen you talking about Alan Dean Foster? I‘d love your opinion on his work.

I like how Dune starts with woohoo he’s the hero to what the hell is happening. I enjoy all of them but I can’t wait to see how far into the books they go with the movies.

Btw. do you read only sci-fi and fantasy or do you also like other genres? I mean, you've read Tolkien so youve probably also read some classic novel authors like Jane Austen or Dickens or Dostoevsky too. I think it would be interesting to see a classic novels rank from you.

You might want to read Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks. It’s much better than player of games. Also consider The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers or Homunculus by James P Blaylock.

I think one of the problems with reading 60s/70s/80s science fiction and finding some of it slow or boring is comparable to the problems of watching some older 20th century cinema - but amplified because of the different active/passive balance of reading as opposed to watching. As a voracious young SF reader I had a similar problem with the plodding pace and over-explanatory aspects of some "golden age" science fiction (only some of it). As with film, the language and style of science fiction writing was still under development, what were once innovations are now tropes, subgenres were only slowly taking shape. Once the main patterns became largely recognisable, more easily understood and widely imitated, there were inevitably generational writing revolts with the new wave and subsequently cyberpunk to some extent tearing up the blueprints and starting again. Possibly science fiction is now too mainstream for another revolution any time soon (or more likely I won't be able to spot it). All I'm saying really is that, since we can't opt in to a cultural perspective or zeitgeist other than our own, we are locked out of enjoying some older works in the way they were appreciated at the time. Hey there's a cliche for that! Yep, the past really is a foreign country...

I got completely swamped and lost, trying to read Three Body Problem, so I had to give up. With all the hype about it, I thought the failure must've been mine as opposed to the author's or the story itself.

The bull and the horns, hell yeah.

Your takes on books I did read make me question the point of having my own channel with reviews at some point in the future, because you are speaking my own thoughts. So thanks, you are ruining my dreams! But also thanks, you make me add to my pile of shame books I would never consider. Keep them coming. Also, your care and concern with editing regarding cows is both nice and disturbing. Are they making you do this? Blink twice if yes.

"The short stories are narrow in their conception" is what you said about I Robot? I mean you have to put down the foundation for the house before you build it lol. Asimov isn't called one of the Fathers' of science fiction for nothing. I read this book two years ago and I think the topics are very interesting and insanely relevant, which is weird considering it was written in 1950. Man is a genius.

Cool video, lots of stuff to ruminate there. Refreshing to see that not all crytics think that JG Ballard is God's gift to science fiction...

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is excellent imo - I liked it better than Hill House... at least at this point in my reading life.

One take! Dude! Oldschool RU-vid over here.

Malzberg said "Overlay" was his best book.

Negative Space, o boy, that was something.

I found star of the unborn on internet archive

How amazing would it be if the video ended with the cow scraping the ground before charging into Matt and the camera.

I agree with you about Heinlein.

Picked up three body problem after seeing it bandied about as a "must read" for a year or so. Had to force myself to finish it. The fact that i did finish it means it's not relegated to the garbage tier, but i have zero interest in the rest of the trilogy.

That bull is the star of this video lol.