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Best and Worst, 2023

I read some fifty books in 2023. These are the ones that stood out, both good and bad, with links to my reviews. Thank you for reading!

PS: If you'd like to support my work, feel free to use this affiliate link at Amazon to do your shopping. I'll be paid a modest affiliate fee on anything you purchase, at no extra cost to you. I thank you!


Best (5/5 stars or close):

Worst (1/5 stars or close): 

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Broken Money by Lyn Alden

Our money is broken, and the sooner we wrap our minds around the implications, the better. In Broken Money, Lyn Alden, a lucid writer and gifted teacher, offers a highly readable grand tour of monetary history: she explains the emergence of money, what makes a good or bad money, how money gradually became more and more "abstracted" away from gold, and how the modern fiat financial system evolved. Most importantly, she explains, clearly, how inflation, purposely designed into the modern system, is used as a wealth extraction tool: "...the financial system in its current form is designed in such a way that 1) the money supply continually inflates, 2) purchasing power is gradually siphoned away from savers and toward arbitrageurs who sit near the source of money creation, 3) the system rewards large and well connected entities at the cost of small and poorly connected entities, 4) liabilities gradually shift from the private sector to the public sector to keep the system f...
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The Best Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham

This was my first experience reading this author. Competent short stories, some very good.  The author has a knack for creating a mood and for creating an arc of tension and release. See for example the short story "Rain" where the reader really feels the smothering monsoon on the islands of Samoa, or see the story "P.&O." with its atmosphere of genuine foreboding as one of the main characters lies ill in a ship's sick bay, but then an expiation and release of that tension as the story's central character puts her own mind right about a past wrong done to her. Finally, an auxiliary benefit to readers: we get a well-fleshed out picture of the British Empire in the early 20th century. If we had to name this era, maybe we could call it "post-peak UK." It was a time of clear class distinctions, obvious-but-unwritten proprieties and competent English functionality worldwide: on transcontinental train trips, on multi-week steamer passages--wherever ...
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The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy

This is a blatantly repetitive and poorly-organized book, and yet it's still highly useful: filled with good tactics and reminders to observe and control your thinking--and more importantly, to be attentive to the implications of your thinking. Thoughts are things! How you think and the beliefs you hold play an enormous role in your reality. And so, despite its flaws, I think The Power of Your Subconscious Mind is still worthwhile. Think of it as a book-length practice of autosuggestion, or even a sort of extended mantra. The book's repetitiveness then becomes a benefit: it helps you practice and build good mental habits, it gives you plenty of examples of affirmations and mental scripts to apply to various life situations, and so on. A minor warning: if you consider NLP , autosuggestion or visualization and affirmation techniques to be useless woo-woo silliness, do not read this book. It's not for you. [A quick  affiliate link to readers to the book here . You ca...
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