Reading Archive // Volume 12 // 2023
The Map Keeps Expanding.
In 2023, Sean O'Leary's reading archive stretches across Stormlight and the Cosmere, classic literature, myth, civil-rights history, far-future science fiction, old kingdoms, Ringworld, Dune and the stranger edges of fantasy.
The year feels less like a single route than an atlas: returning authors and long-running series provide familiar coordinates, while Baldwin, Goodall, Vonnegut, Rushdie, Hawthorne, Campbell and others keep widening the map.
Mapped Constellations
Thirty-eight completed books and audiobooks.
Travel through the year in reading order, from Stormlight and classic literature to Dune, Pern, Ringworld, strange futures and enduring works of history and myth. Each title marks another coordinate in a reading year built from very different worlds.
Origins, Memory & Oaths
A Conjuring of Light
Nobody Knows My Name
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Oathbringer
Swords, Systems & Stormlight
The Sword of Destiny
Dawnshard
The Expert System’s Brother
Faust
Rhythm of War
Classics, Hope & Strange Worlds
Midnight’s Children
The Lost Years of Merlin
The Lost Metal
Grimoire of the Lamb
Breakfast of Champions
A Wrinkle in Time
Theft of Swords
The Scarlet Letter
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The Book of Hope
Half a King
Skin Deep
Dune, Zombies & Distant Frontiers
Paul of Dune
Aftermath
Zombie Fallout
City of Golden Shadow
The Long War
Ringworld’s Children
The Good Neighbor
The Last of the Mohicans
Airships, Magic & the Hero’s Path
The Aeronaut’s Windlass
Warriorborn
The Olympian Affair
Defiant
The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall
Dead Man’s Hand
Long Past Dues
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Uncharted Coordinates
The next books waiting beyond the mapped year.
Twenty-two more titles waited beyond the completed 2023 journey. Together they reveal the routes already forming toward Wheel of Time, Pern, the Witcher, Dune, future worlds, old magic and stories that would become part of later reading years.
The Eye of the World
Robert Jordan
Rise of Empire
Michael J. Sullivan
Dragonsdawn
Anne McCaffrey
Half the World
Joe Abercrombie
Stephen Leeds: Death & Faxes
Brandon Sanderson
Blood of Elves
Andrzej Sapkowski
The Expert System’s Champion
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Hounded
Kevin Hearne
The Seven Songs of Merlin
T. A. Barron
The Winds of Dune
Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson
Arcanum Unbounded
Brandon Sanderson
The Last Question
Isaac Asimov
The Harbors of the Sun
Martha Wells
Odd and the Frost Giants
Neil Gaiman
One More for the Road
Ray Bradbury
Lord of Mountains
S. M. Stirling
Fate of Worlds
Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner
The Long Mars
Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter
The Sandman
Neil Gaiman
A Plague Upon Your Family
Mark Tufo
River of Blue Fire
Tad Williams
Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington
Ground Truth // The Human Record
History, civil rights, memory and witness.
Beyond imagined worlds lies another essential shelf: twenty-six works confronting race, civil rights, Indigenous history, testimony, power, identity and the lives behind public memory. Here the atlas turns toward the histories that shaped the world outside the page.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown
Capital and Ideology
Thomas Piketty
Four Hundred Souls
Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain, editors
Geronimo: His Own Story
Geronimo
Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Nobody Knows My Name
James Baldwin
Racial Formation in the United States
Michael Omi & Howard Winant
So You Want to Talk About Race
Ijeoma Oluo
Stamped from the Beginning
Ibram X. Kendi
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You
Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi
Stamped (for Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You
Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
James Baldwin
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. • edited by Clayborne Carson
The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek
Richard Kluger
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin
The Journey of Crazy Horse
Joseph M. Marshall III
The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
The Life of Black Hawk
Black Hawk
The New Jim Crow
Michelle Alexander
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington
Continue the Archive
Follow the reading record beyond this page.
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All Reading Years
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