This year I set a goal of 50 books read. I passed that goal at the beginning of October, I think, when I finished one of my favorites of the year, The Incandescent by Emily Tesh. With a few days left, I’m at 66 books read this year, every single one of them an audiobook.¹ My “Read” pile grows slowly; my “To Be Read” pile grows much faster, and I try not to think about the fact that it is probably already impossible for me to read everything in my TBR pile with the days left in my life. But here’s a little retrospective on what I’ve read this year, including my Top 5 for the year.

In the last decade or so, there’s been a lot of talk about the “marketplace of ideas.” A prominent example of this is former executive editor of the NYT editorial page James Bennet’s 2023 article titled “When the New York Times Lost its Way”.

Obviously I’m a bit late to rebut this particular piece, but the same line of reasoning comes up again and again: from the people who enabled Trump’s rise by constantly decrying “illiberal college campuses”¹, to the Democrats acting as, at best, useful idiots for the right-wing campaign to eradicate trans people, by fretting to the media about “purity tests” within the party. The through-line in all this is: “we need to be willing to listen to ideas that we disagree with.” And it seems like on its face, of course we do! After all, isn’t liberalism (in the traditional sense) about tolerance and coexistence?

As I’m looking to import all my reading into my personal website, I’m coming face-to-face with my prior representations of JK Rowling’s work, and so I want to talk about it a little bit.