Books of 2022
Listen. 2022 did something to me. I do not know why. I was able to read and be productive in 2020 (a very stressful year) and in 2021 (with at-home schooling), but in 2022 I lost all ability to focus. Work and writing postcards/texting voters and either falling asleep at 10 or staying up until 2 playing Pokemon Snap or Civ VI was how I made it through the year. Thinking at the end of the work day was just not an option. And I don’t think it helped that the whole family caught Covid in there somewhere. It wasn’t as bad as many people have had it, but it took a solid month before I didn’t feel like collapsing after a few hours of activity. So I didn’t *quite* meet my reading goals from last year. And wrote even less, which I didn’t think was possible. But I did get to 75 books! And even reviewed a few of them. You’ll find them here.
First Cosmic Velocity, Zach Powers
An alternate history where the Soviet Union has been the first to launch humans into orbit but hasn’t *quite* mastered bringing them down and so relies on sets of identical twins to fool the public. The book jacket and description sound like it’s going to be a dark satire, but it is actually quite bleak and poignant. The book focuses in particular on a set of Ukrainian twins who lived through the Holodomor so this might be a good book to hand people who seem inclined to think Russia would never act in bad faith towards Ukraine and just engage in genocide out of spite.
Raising Steam, Terry Pratchett
This was the year I finished the Discworld series, one I’ve spent so much time with. This is the second to the last book of the series, and the final one in Ankh-Mopork. I had enjoyed the Moist von Lipwig books, bringing Ankh-Mopork into the industrial era, but this one feels a bit overstuffed. In this one the railroads have come, and Lipwig is, of course, tapped with bringing them to fruition. And with that we have international intrigue, and dwarves, and golems, and goblins, and gender politics, and it’s just a lot. I suppose it’s likely Pratchett knew he was nearing the end and there were a lot of things to weave together. The book was still fun, just a bit overstuffed.
Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe, Simon Singh
This is one of the best science-for-the-layperson books I have read, and I read a lot of them. Simon Singh sets out to explain not just the Big Bang theory, which he does admirably, but the steps that needed to happen in science to get to the point where we could theorize it, the challenges it faced in gaining acceptance, and why it is widely supported as the likely origin of the universe today. And it’s really readable; I flew through the 500 pages in just a few days. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know more about cosmology or the history of science.
I was definitely tricked. The back of the book and my husband’s review both suggested that this was a humorous alien look at humanity a la Douglas Adams or other British humor. But turns out it’s a romantic story on the importance of love and the beauty of humanity. I suppose it’s pretty good if you like that sort of thing, just know what you’re getting into.
After the Fall: Being America in the World We’ve Made, Ben Rhodes
Okay, this book is one I’m still thinking about a full year later. Rhodes is a former speechwriter and key advisor for Obama and definitely a technocrat who thought, as so many of us did, that things were really going to keep getting better. We’d turned some sort of a corner as humanity and now we’re here. He grapples with a lot of the failures of that line in this book and it is really insightful and honest and terrifying in some parts, acknowledging how much so many people ignored of the anger at the changing world, the danger of ignoring small bits of fascism for trade deals or other wins, and growing inequality. And yet it still has huge blind spots, and ignores that there were voices that were calling out for more attention to the dangers of globalizing money and ignoring democracy and labor and other pieces, and the opening it created. These voices are still ignored, and this book doesn’t fully acknowledge the class war we are in that Robert Reich and others have written about. I don’t know how to solve the problem if we can’t be honest about the scale. Still, though, this was a fascinating and scary book. I would like everyone to read it and we can have a national book discussion, because there is a lot here.
Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky
This is the sequel to Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, and while I don’t think you have to have read the first one, it will help it make a lot more sense. In this iteration, we follow other spaceships who have launched in search of somewhere liveable for humanity. They do discover a planet with life but there are… complications. Our ship with the combined civilization from the first book eventually find the new planet and the remnants of the original searching ship. It continues exploring the different ways that civilization and sentience, if not intelligence can look. The book is good enough as a book, but it’s fairly repetitive of the themes of the first book.
Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead
This drops you in to the early 1960s New York with a Black man who is a striver who wants to move up in the world and build up his legitimate business. His father was a criminal, but well-known and respected in the community, and his cousin is ambitious and criminally inclined but not nearly smart enough to pull it off. Our main character is also married to a lighter-skinned Black woman from a wealthier and more respected family, who has thrown her lot in with him and works on a travel agency that helps Black tourists and eventually those doing civil rights work travel as safely as possible through the country. The book takes us through some of the general tropes and stories of a smart guy who wants to go straight and keeps being pulled back in, along side the corruption of the ’legit’ business world, and the civil rights movement and riots. It was engaging and fascinating and a really great take on some of those tropes.
Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr
Lots of people loved this book. I thought it was fine. Doerr loves to pull at heart strings, and he also knows how to craft a compelling story. This was a tale of a book, a lost play of Diogenes, that has brought joy and hope to people in a Byzantium about to fall to the Muslims, to one of the conscripted invaders and his wife, to a Greek immigrant in more-or-less present day U.S., a 21st century eco-terrorist, and a girl on a space journey in the future. It was enjoyable and sweet at times, definitely a solid 3.5 out of 5, I just didn’t think it was as inspiring as some others did. The best part was the girl on a space journey, and her story ended in a way that was 1) predictable, and 2) didn’t entirely hold up. If you liked All the Light You Cannot See you’ll probably like this book; if like me you found it a fun way to spend the time but a bit superficial, you’ll probably feel the same way here.
How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe is hilarious, and What If? is still one of my favorite books –I’ve stopped counting it on these lists, but I probably read it once a year and my son reads it more. How To flips the script, with absurd answers to common questions. It was fun, too, but I thought that some of the answers dragged on for a while when being dragged to their most absurd conclusion. It’s worth leaving out to read off and on, but probably not taking time to read cover to cover.
The Hakawati, Rabih Alameddine
I guess you can put this down as another entry in the “sprawling multigenerational magical realist post-colonialist novel” category. The book takes its name from a traditional position of a story teller and tells the tale of a family in Lebanon for several generations, while being interspersed with a tale being told within the story. I’ve read quite a few books in this genre and I do usually enjoy it, for whatever reason this one just didn’t capture my attention the way others did.
The Sentence, Louise Erdrich
This was a fantastic book. Erdrich perfectly captures the weirdness of 2020—the pandemic, the election, Black Lives Matter, White America grappling (or not) with all the things they’ve done. The titular character is haunted both by her previous jail sentence, and a bookstore customer who may have been killed by a sentence in her book. The haunting, though, takes place as everything is breaking down and falling apart around us. Erdrich is Native American and this also explores the way both Native peoples and White Americans show up and engage with Indigenous culture. It was fantastically done and encapsulates its time admirably. Absolutely recommend, and I will be reading The Night Watchman this year, for sure.
Red, White & Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston
Okay, I am not normally a romance person, but after The Ex Hex I felt a little more open minde. I read this book for a friend in return for her reading a book I recommended. And this was also so fun! The son of the American president (a Latina woman from Texas) and the second-in-line prince in the United Kingdom fall for each other. Now, I will say, this is not at all a political book, but I do get the sads whenever I read a pretend world where a woman could be president and U.S. politics are functional and we do not have a strong pro-fascist party. If you are like that, too, you might get depressed reading this. But putting that aside, again, it was just a ton of fun.
The Line Becomes a River, Francisco Cantu
The memoir of a former border guard on the U.S.-Mexico border. Cantu himself, of Mexican and Anglo heritage, seems to be an interesting character. This tale of the way he grappled with the work he was doing and why he chose it is engaging. But it’s hard not to think he’s still sugar coating a lot and avoids grappling with the heaviest criticism of not just policy but the border patrol itself.
The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry Pratchett
This is the last of the Discworld books. I read all 41 of them, and I loved the whole journey. The series ended early when Pratchett died in 2015 of early Alzheimer’s, and this book does feel a little less polished. But overall this Tiffany Aching novel is a very fitting goodbye to the characters and world we love. I wish we could have seen where else the Witches would go, and wrapped up other characters as well. But still, a very satisfying conclusion.
Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, Kelly & Zach Weinersmith
I imagine most people who like xkcd will enjoy Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and therefore this book. Soonish was a very engaging discussion of some emerging technologies such as nanobots, CRISPR, brain implants, programmable hardware and others. The Weinersmith’s are pretty clear that everything is uncertain, and what the potential benefits and pitfalls are of the technologies they consider. It was a great read, and my 11yo and I both zipped through it.
The Book of Longings, Sue Monk Kidd
An entry in the genre of “Jesus’ wife” books, but it definitely stands out in that it really focuses on the main character, Ana, and a life far outside of just her time as ‘wife’, which is relatively short. I liked Ana’s story. I have complicated feelings towards the Jesus’ wife genre of books. I know they are seen as feminist, but I think they are a fundamental misunderstanding of Jesus’ message, and its radical message that a woman could be a follower of Christ, and have value outside of their belonging to a man. And that the only way to care for and give value to a woman was to marry her, rather than celebrate her intrinsic worth and choices on her own. This was a radical message that should be celebrated, and I’d far rather read a book of a woman who was a follower of Jesus, than of his wife.
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Starry River of the Sky, and When the Sea Turns to Silver, Grace Lin
Last year I read When the Sea Turns to Silver, a new fairy tale that in itself has several Chinese fairy tales interwoven. These are the last two of the trilogy. Each book stands on their own, but they also are united by people who have been oppressed by and are trying to both save and save people from a greedy magistrate, the Tiger. My 6th grader loved these books, and I had a good time reading and discussing them with him as well.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber & David Wengrow
I had higher hopes for this book, written by a radical anthropologist and one of the architects of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Graeber and Wengrow seek to rewrite the ‘arc of history’ narrative, the evolution from hunter gatherer societies to more ‘complex’ Eurasian style nation-states and the belief that this is what humans are moving towards. They showcase how many Indigenous societies were far more complicated than we believe, and how some experimented with many different modes of governance and the societies with looser structures were a choice rather than an unfamiliarity with more strict and hierarchical (Western) modes of government. But the book was just very long, and the more examples they gave the more it muddied the ultimate point to me. I found myself wondering what the thrust of the book was, and its central thesis.
After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, Ed. Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, & Marshall Steinbaum
Capital in the 21st Century was such a seminal book that really set off many of the current left wing economic discussions. After Piketty is a collection of essays and papers by other economists spurred on by the book, and highlight areas of increasing inequality and policy choices. It’s very long and covers a lot of ground. Not all of it spoke to me (some because of levels of interest, some because of levels of knowledge), but a good 70% grabbed me. I was most interested in some of the discussions around the issues with subcontracting, the damage to countries by tax avoidance, and the way fascism throughout the ages has relied on wealthy individuals who preferred fascism to a higher marginal tax rate – that last one may have some bearing on our current situation.
Velvet Was the Night, Silva Moreno-Garcia
This is a turn from Mexican Gothic, but not to0 dramatic of one. Velvet is the Night is a noir set in Mexico in the 70s, during a time of dangerous political intrigue. Maite is a lonely legal secretary with bigger dreams and an interest only in her own life, when she is thrown into political intrigue by a neighbor who goes out of town and asks her to cat sit. The neighbor disappears, and Maite starts to search for her at the same time as a crime lord and the government. It’s full of twists and turns, tinged with romance, and highlights the attempts to live and work while your society is in crisis. It was a new exploration of some noir-ish tropes, and I really enjoyed it.
Sea Loves Me, Mia Couto
Couto is a celebrated author from Mozambique, but I was unfamiliar with his work- or any other authors from Mozambique, honestly. But this is a collection of short stories and the titular novella that have recently been translated into English. They tell short tales of the Portuguese, African, and Indian inhabitants of Mozambique, living in a changing world with changing people and animals and cultures as well. I feel like I need to reread this as I can’t remember the stories themselves perfectly, but I do remember enjoying the feel of them as I did and it is definitely a book that transports the listener.
The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle, Catherine Webb
I wanted to like this! It feels like I should! It has an eccentric scientific genius solving mysteries and crimes for the Victorian British government, and a puckish, bright, street urchin with trust issues. Lots of capers, goings-on, and danger. Yet it all felt rather dull. It just wasn’t all I wanted it to be.
Redshirts, John Scalzi
This book is about as meta as you can get, and really for people who have been sci-fi fans for a while. A new crew member on the flagship cruiser for an organization very like the Federation notices that there are some strange things happening on this voyage, especially to any low-level crew members who end up near the Captain or Chief Officers. It was a fun read, but then the epilogue goes yet another level meta and seemed to add some more complications. I would have been happy with the ‘main’ ending.
The Tangled Lands, Paolo Bacigalupi & Tobias Buckell
Four stories about people trying to survive in a land where yes, magic exists, but every time it’s used it seems to bring forward a toxic, thorny weed that chokes out the village. And so magic is highly regulated; in some areas they want to kill all magic users, in some just anyone who is unauthorized. This was a creative new fantasy world, and the writing was excellent. One of my top books for the year.
Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism, Laura E. Gomez
Once people come to the United States they tend to get lumped together into larger groupings, but of course immigrants from Latin America don’t see themselves as one people, but as Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Argentinians, Brazilians, etc. It’s only recently that there has been a Latine identity. Gomez explores how that has come to be and race and immigration in America in a very insightful book.
Alice Adams, Booth Tarkington
Booth Tarkington is one of only two people to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice – the other is Faulkner – and yet he is all but forgotten today. I also find it odd, as I read through past Pulitzer winners, that this time period in the 20s is so glossed over as well. Alice Adams, about a striving young woman whose family has fallen on harder times, was barely relatable because the rules and goals at play seemed so foreign, even more foreign than a Victorian British book. I’d almost recommend bringing this and some other books back as part of our history class just to give shape to these lost decades.
The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington
And this is the other Pulitzer winner from Tarkington. He was quite interested in social class, people striving in America, and the changes in society. This book takes place around the advent of an automobile with the richest family in town as their fortune wanes, and the pretty terrible heir to the fortune as he lives as the center of his universe and eventually learns to make his way.
The Book of Cold Cases, Simon St. James
A pretty standard thriller. A girl who has hidden past, having been kidnapped (and ultimately escaped) as a child, spends her time curating a blog about past cold cases. In her day job, though, she comes face to face with a reclusive woman who happens to be at the center of one of the biggest local unsolved cases as a suspect and survivor. The two meet for an interview, and as things develop we find things are not all that they seem as the past literally haunts the present. It was sort of clear where the turns were, but I still really enjoyed reading this one.
Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People, Kekla Magoon
It’s sort of hard to say who this is for. It’s definitely written at a level for late elementary/early middle, but a lot of kids aren’t going to have other political background needed to make sense of it, and it’s pretty long. But besides the fact that I felt a little talked down to as an adult some time, it’s still a great primer given that we really learn so little about the Black Panther’s and the true story of revolutionary movements in the 60s. Just that as white people we should be scared. This was a really great overview of the society at the time, the goals of the Panthers, and how they came apart. Spoiler – the same thing Russia is doing to sow misinformation and discord now is what the FBI did back then!
Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, Angela Saini
Because a) there have not historically been a lot of women scientists, b) no one ever wants to believe women about their own lives and bodies, and c) we’re hard to study what with our hormones and risk of getting pregnant during a trial, women have often been erased from medicine. Not just in a “scientists don’t always believe in women’s diseases like endometriosis and fibromyalgia” way, but in a, “we didn’t test aspirin on women because we didn’t want to account for menstruation changes in our trial” way. This book tries to take a more objective view of women, health, and medicine.
The Philosopher’s Flight, Tom Miller
In this, practical philosophy is the magic system, and there is some science and theory around it – about inherent power, sigils that have to be drawn certain ways, ways to layer spells. It also for some reason primarily is found in women, and men make more practical philosophers. There’s also a lot of people who want to ban philosophy and burn witches, naturally. One young man, Tom, has grown up as the son of one of the best emergency fliers around and a veteran of the previous philosophical wars and wants nothing more than to break the barrier and become a war flier. It’s an interesting thought experiment, and a perfectly fine book. But even though it came from a good place, for some reason the “what if sexism … but for men!” piece never clicked for me.
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga
I don’t remember how I became acquainted with this book, but it is a coming of age novel by a girl in post-colonial Rhodesia and considered one of 100 books to change the world. Tambu is a young girl with an alcoholic father and poor family with no prospects, but her uncle is fairly well off running a missionary school. After her older brother is killed, Tambu becomes the best hope for the family and is able to go to the school, and the book goes through her attempts to make her life better, the work she does to navigate two worlds, and her challenges. I really loved reading it, and the glimpse of life in a world different from my own. One of my top books the last year.
Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, and Maus II: My Father Bleeds History, Art Spiegelman
I actually don’t think I had sat down and read both of these together, cover to cover, before, even as I was very familiar with them. But then Republicans went and banned this book – and not for the reasons you’d think. Spiegelman’s mom committed suicide and you could sort of tell she’s naked (and is also an anthropomorphized mouse) in the scene. This was considered far more inappropriate for students to see than pictures of people in concentration camps and reading about a boy getting murdered. But I digress. Spiegelman’s books are, of course, a story of the Holocaust, but also family and his relationship with his wife, his father, his stepmother, and his deceased mother. The books are moving and an important piece of history, and changed what graphic novels should be. They should be required in every school.
Hell of a Book, Jason Mott
Yeah, this is a Hell of a Book, and with a very unreliable narrator. The narrator is an unnamed Black author who has written a beloved book, but one he cannot bear to think about – everything about it is spoken of abstractly, and he goes on autopilot when doing his interviews. At the same time, we also drift in and out of the story of a boy named Soot, a very dark-skinned Black boy in the rural South not too long ago, who also seems to be related to a hallucination that The Author seems to be seeing. The stories converge and blend in confusing ways, but the heart of the story, about the need to look – really look – at the people who are being hurt by this racism every day is relayed powerfully throughout.
Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World, Peter S. Goodman
You really can’t beat Rutger Bregman’s take down of Davos (longer version here), but if you really want to get in to the problem with global philanthropy and relying on billionaires’ charity to save us, this will help you out. The issue is that billionaires and trillion dollar companies have too much money and power, and will do almost anything to keep it that way. And, do we really want to have to rely on this charity? Goodman mentions that Marc Benioff, of SalesForce, started “Air Bridge” to deliver ppe to the UK during the pandemic. This was celebrated, but no one asked the key question: “why was the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth dependent on the charity of a profit-making software company to outfit its medical personnel with basic protection in the face of a pandemic.” Goodman also discusses how billionaires have been so effective at turning people’s anger towards refugees and immigrants and others with little power, rather than fact services are cut because of a lack of taxes – it’s not that the pie is being shared by too many, it’s that it got too small. I could go on, but I encourage everyone to read this book critiquing “the lofty pledges for change voiced by the people most invested in preserving the status quo.”
Tell Me an Ending, Jo Harkin
Ooh, this was so good. Technology exists in the future that can remove very specific and harmful memories, similar to Eternal Sunshine. It is highly regulated, though, and people can choose between open or confidential patients – whether they retain the knowledge that they had the procedure. After a lawsuit forces the company to tell confidential patients that they have had the procedure, many ethical dilemmas for the company and individuals exist, and it uncovers some potentially shady business. The story tells the tale of four patients and an employee of the company, and it is really, incredibly well done and has stuck with me throughout the year.
The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk
This tome, over 900 pages, tells the tale of Jacob Frank, his predecessors and his followers. Frank was a Polish Jew who claimed to be the messiah. He was also a Sabbatean, a sect following Sabbatai Zevi, who also claimed to be the messiah. The book is a fictionalized account of a very true story. It was really interesting, and very long. My main issue is that there is a lot of history and weightiness in this book, and I felt like I didn’t quite have enough of a grasp of all of it. I love Umberto Eco, who does the same with the Christian sects proliferating in the medieval ages, but I have more background there. I have joked that I like to have my Handbook of Heresies handy when I read some of Eco, and I felt like I needed a comparable volume to really understand all the nuance in The Books of Jacob.
The Country of the Painted Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett
I picked this up at a used bookstore, based on the premise on the back that Jewett was a quintessential author to capture a disappearing way of life in Maine. It’s a slim volume written in 1896 deeply imbued with a sense of place, namely northern Maine and in particular on the water, with almost everyone making a living from the water and some still living almost entirely alone on rocky islands, eking out an existence. It was evocative, and while it didn’t have much of a story – very much a slice of life book – it did capture a love for a place and community that is now gone and was from a different part of America.
Nine Magic Pea-Hens and Other Serbian Folk-Tales, Vuk Stefanovic Kardzic
My mom’s family is Serbian, and in her retirement my Mom has been rediscovering stories of her family and trying to learn more about her heritage. And I love folk tales, both as themselves and part of society and culture. My mom learned about this book when researching the Slavic version of Cinderella, and got me a copy. The problem with the book is that when you cut down to the bone in a lot of fairy tales they’re actually pretty short – it’s the color, and the embellishments, and the added songs, that pad them out and make the telling so fun. This book doesn’t have any of that. Most of the tales are just a paragraph or two. So, it’s probably fine as, like, and index of Slavic tales, but it’s not particularly fun to read on in its own.
Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, David Quammen
Quammen is an author I have really enjoyed for a long time, since I had to read Song of the Dodo in grad school. This is actually a fun collection of essays he wrote for magazines early in his career, everything from kayaking competitions to parrot- and pearl- smuggling to urban coyotes. They’re a bit dated, but still a good, solid collection of outdoors and nature essays.
Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi
This is an incredibly fun book about a world next to ours with honest-to-goodness Kaiju. Nuclear blasts weaken the barrier, and there is an intergovernmental group of scientists studying and protecting Kaiju. And listen. Scalzi makes a solid effort to explore their biology and everything, but really it’s just a fun book about Kaiju and interdimensional travel and how much we all hate late-capitalist society. (The main guy loses his job in the pandemic after his boss steals his idea and fires him.) Anyway, highly recommend it if you need something not too serious, which we could all use.
A very odd tale about a woman who appears one day in a graveyard outside a small midwestern town in the 1920s. No one has ever seen her before or learned anything about her, she has no apparent injuries, but she does have a bunch of gold and a passion for duckpin bowling. The story takes you through the life of the town through the depression, prohibition, and world wars, and was entirely unexpected in the way the story unfolded. It was a very unique book in so many ways.
This one was not a unique book. It was very highly acclaimed as a mystery/fantasy novel, and the craft was fine enough to get the job done. But the book itself was only okay. I’m not sure some of the central conflict/secrets ever made sense (although I will admit I am never going to buy in to a conflict that could easily be solved by two characters just having a short conversation. Communication is important, people!) And it was pretty easy to see where things were going early on. It passed the time, but I was not enamored with this book.
One of Ours, Willa Cather
Reading so many Pulitzer winners from the 20s has been an experience. For one thing, this is one of the eras that’s just entirely glossed over in American history classes – and the books in the 20s often cover life that began in the late 1800s, even more forgotten. For another, they are so very focused on the Midwest, often in immigrant communities. Interestingly, these immigrant (Dutch or Scottish or German) are treated as the soul of America. One of Ours covers the life of a young man growing up on a farm, always searching for something to believe in, who finally finds it and the sense of being something bigger than him in the war. It was a very poignant book, and far more affecting in bringing to light the disaffection with the day to day than, say, Catcher in the Rye. I’d say this is a book that should be brought back to our curricula.
Astonishing the Gods, Ben Okri
A young man finds himself stranded on an island with invisible beings, and a series of tests he must pass to find enlightenment, to join them, and to become one of the Invisible Gods himself. I’m not sure I got all of the meanings of this book, as I’ve seen it referred to as a parable that provides insight into our world of inequality and injustice and I did not get that at all. But I did really like reading it and thought the story on its own, while clearly hinting at deeper meaning, was engrossing and stood by itself.
The Factory Witches of Lowell, C. S. Materich
The independent bookstore near me had a Labor Day table. This was on it as a staff pick with the description that just said, “Queer Union Witches.” Obviously, I had to buy it. Primarily for one of my friends, but I did read it first. It’s a short read, with the women of a boarding house deciding that they need to form a union for the sewing factories. They are bound together in their pact by magic that prevents anyone from talking to management or betraying the strike, and form closer relationships in the battle. It was a fun read and obviously touched on a lot of themes I’m interested in. If you also like women’s solidarity and the thought of capitalists getting their comeuppance through immigrant women, it’s probably worth your time as well.
Anthem: A Novel, Noah Hawley
There’s been a definite theme lately that maybe the older generations have done a pretty crap job with running things and maybe teenagers and only people under 25 should be given a chance. I’m not quite ready to give up on my generation yet, and I know quite a few Gen Zers (including the ones I’m raising) and I’m not quite sure about turning over the reins. But I do think they’d do a far better job than the Boomers and older Gen Xers, and there’s plenty in my cohort who don’t actually get global warming and the threat to democracy. Anthem is in this vein, taking place in an America that is about the same time as ours, with a teenager who has fashioned himself as a Messiah, the civil war rhetoric turned up to 11, school shootings radicalizing and militarizing the youth, and an Epstein-like figure able to kidnap and terrorize people at will. It was a pretty horrifying vision, and hard to read at times, but a really good book that made me question if I’m cynical enough.
Silent Winds, Dry Seas, Vinod Busjeet
I don’t really know anything about Mauritius, so I was really glad to read this story of the time when Mauritius was becoming independent. It sounds like a fascinating country, with the native Mauritian/Creole population, British, French, Indians brought as indentured laborers and slaves and their descendents. Busjeet explores all of these populations, never feeling like he is lecturing or explaining for White audiences, but providing little bits of context to help make sense of the country if you are unfamiliar. It follows one particular family, focusing on the son and the way he made his way and saw the politics and battles and rules of caste and society in his family. Perhaps its because of Hurricane Ian striking my own home town last year, but the tale of a hurricane destroying their home and the family having to run across to a neighbor in the winds was particularly affecting. Throughout, though, it was a fantastic book.
The Able McLaughlins, Margaret Wilson
Another Pulitzer winner from the 20s; another slice of life from an immigrant community eking out an existence on the plains and representing the best of America. However, this is completely different from One of Ours. In Wilson’s book, a young man comes back from war wanting nothing more than to make a life with the woman he has fallen for and live in the community he has always been a part of. The main challenge with this one is it makes so little sense if you are not in the time. There is a scandal with a woman raped early in the book and 1) it’s a problem for her that she might be shunned, and 2) the situation is discussed in such a roundabout way it actually took me a while to figure out what was going on. And then the fallout and secrets from it have repercussions that were also so vaguely discussed it was hard to pick up all the subtext. This is one that does not really hold up outside of historical interest.
What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe is hilarious, and xckd is one of the best things on the internet. What If? is one of my favorite books around. What If? 2 is very good still, but I didn’t love it quite as much as I did the first one. Munroe seems to have leaned in to how many absurd and yet entirely sincere questions come from kids, and written this with that in mind. So it’s still a good read even if you’re an adult, but it definitely felt a little younger than the first.
The Unfinished World and Other Stories, Amber Sparks
Helen Oyeyami’s short story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is still one of the most fantastic books I’ve ever read. Just wholly unique and different. The Unfinished World and Other Stories is not exactly like What Is Not Yours…. but it did leave me with the same dreamlike feeling, unsure if the worlds created were a reimagining of my own or something totally different. The stories were immersive and haunting and beautiful, whether about someone building homes for the dead as temples in case they return, or outlining the bizarre items and each of their histories in “Cabinet of Curiosities”. Sparks captures a feeling, and it was a delight to read.
Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution, Mike Duncan
Full disclosure, biographies and memoirs are my least favorite form of book (the latter more than the former.). I just find myself losing interest in the domesticity and the fortieth letter you have to read through. That being said, if anyone deserves a biography, it is certainly Lafayette, someone at the pivotal moment of every point of the American and French revolutions and a fascinating and principled man. And you could hardly ask for a better biographer than Revolutions’ Mike Duncan. The book took me a long time to wade through – I might have had a couple others going at the same time – but it is a very intriguing subject matter.
What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, Adam Becker
Quantum physics is very interesting, and incredibly bizarre. It allows for random chance, or that everything is predetermined, and challenges both a planned universe and free will. It deeply challenges the way we experience and interact with the world. And yet, as Becker shows here, for years and years the thought was that it was only important to solve equations, not figure out what it all means. Becker tries to look at the feuds that exist in quantum physics, and how other meanings were brought forward. But while the science writing was interesting, I’m not sure I really understood all of the different possibilities for quantum physics and what they meant. This is a topic that interests me on a philosophical and scientific level, but this book didn’t clarify the schools of thought for me very well.
Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel
St. John Mandel is an absolutely gorgeous writer, with just beautiful and atmospheric books. This one seems to take place in the same world as The Glass Hotel, but in a far more fantastical vein than any of her others, even Station Eleven, with time travelers, people living on the moon, and a metaplot with a writer who has written a book about a pandemic and is doing talks as a new pandemic is kicking off, and questions about the simulation hypothesis and how to prove it one way or the other. But just as you should read Station Eleven even if you don’t care about post-apocalyptic books, you should Sea of Tranquility even if you don’t care about time travel and the simulation hypothesis. Because St. John Mandel is such a beautiful writer and her books are sublime and more than they appear to be.
The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa
I started a new job, so I started a new book club. This was the first book, three long short-stories, or short novellas (unsure which). It was okay. Others liked the book far more than I did, but I found it disturbing and I was unsure what to make of some it. Some of it is supposed to be disturbing, with a girl in a house where her parents have taken in and raise many orphans acting out her anger and cruelty on younger ones, and another with someone sort of trying to poison her pregnant sister with grapefruit jelly. And the last story with an unreliable narrator and possible murders? Just unsure all around how I felt after reading this.
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
Like Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman is someone I have come to much later in life than I should have but now absolutely adore. It is a rare writer who does such an amazing job with both adult and kids books. The only other I can think of is Roald Dahl, but Gaiman is even better and more prolific. My middle child is very into graphic novels, and plucky heroines, so we got the graphic novel adaptation of this from the library and read it together. Very creepy and intriguing and an excellent read all around.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
This book is part of the reason I read so many fewer books this year than last year. It took a lot to get through. I think I had expected it to be more like The Wealth of Nations in that it would have economics, but be more economic philosophy. But nope, this pretty heavily pulls on lots of economic discussions I did not know and critiques of theories with lots of math. There were some interesting parts I could understand, but this is definitely for economists, not lay people.
The Lesson, Cadwell Turnbull
I expected to like this story of aliens landing over St. Thomas looking for we-don’t-know-what and harsh rules more than I did. I never fully grasped what the lesson was. Like all alien invasion stories, it’s a bit of metaphor for colonization and Europeans but was still a bit fuzzy to me.
Matrix, Lauren Groff
This one I loved. Groff has invented a fascinating character, Marie, who is an illegitimate daughter of William, Duke of Aquitane, and half sister of Eleanor of Aquitane. She is large and uncouth and hails from a line of women crusaders. The book opens with Marie sent away from the court to become prioress of a convent in disrepair, one which as the book proceeds she builds up through her own wisdom and strength, and aided by miraculous visions. It’s a wonderful story exploring women’s power and place in the Church, and written by a skilled author. Loved it, one of the top books I read last year.
Severance, Ling Ma
There’s going to be a lot of pandemic literature, isn’t there? What’s interesting is that now that we’ve lived through one (although admittedly not as devastating as the ones that get written about) we’re also aware of the disorientation and boredom that come along with the pandemic as well. Severance definitely captures that feeling of being unmoored and wondering what even to do we all had in 2020. In this book a fungal infection of uncertain contagion pathways seems to take hold of people and make them zombies acting out habits in the past. The main character is mostly a loner and has no family, and an unfulfilling career that is at the same time her only anchor and sense of identity. The book takes us through memories of her recent life with her Chinese-American family, her search for something more, and the life of survival in These Unprecedented TimesTM.
How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
This was a tough read. Climate change kicks off a new pandemic that is a reverse of the way ours played out. It primarily targets children and, at the beginning, is nearly unfailingly fatal in a painful and drawn-out way. How High takes us through how people and society are dealing with this and search for meaning. There was one fairly key part that just really didn’t land for me, but outside of that it’s a poignant book and beautifully written and hard to read if you spend as much time terrified for what climate change means for your children as I do.
H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald
This book isn’t quite what I expected. I was thinking it would be nature writing, but it is actually Macdonald’s story of falconry and taming a goshawk, a bunch about T. H. White, his life and his book The Goshawk, and reflections from right after losing her father. It was a pretty good series of essays, but just not the nature tale I thought it would be.
We Spread, Iain Reid
Well, talk about an unreliable narrator. An aging artist starts to falter and wakes up one day learning that her and her husband had made arrangements to be taken care of in a retirement home in her later years. A home that seems to be fairly sinister and inescapable, or maybe is only seen that way by a deteriorating older woman. It definitely had a disorienting gothic feel throughout, similar to Plows Over the Bones of the Dead. It left me a bit more unresolved than I’d hoped for, but I suppose that’s rather the point.
I hadn’t reread Brautigan in a while, but I do enjoy going back to it. I love a book with a sense of place, and I love a book with a sense of time. And there is nothing that will make you feel that you are wandering out West as part of the counterculture in the late 60s like reading some Brautigan. This group of two novellas and a bunch of poems is going to take you back in time and on an adventure. And make you get Harry Styles’ “Watermelon Sugar” stuck in your head on a loop.
Flyaway, Kathleen Jennings
The second book choice for my book club, this one is a modern(?) fairy tale in Australia. It is among those stories that have become more common in the last few years that really feel like they’re supposed to be in the 1950s at earliest but then someone has a cell phone and it really throws you off. A girl is in a small town, with an overbearing mother, and a secret of something having happened in the past that leaks out in drips and drabs as you find out more about the town and it’s connection with old stories. Some of which it turns out were made up for this, but felt like they should be legends. We read it with someone who had lived in Australia, and she liked it a lot more than the rest of us and was able to give us context for how it feels compared to other Australian and Aboriginal folk lore. I liked it, I could just tell I wasn’t getting everything I was supposed to.
Thistlefoot, GennaRose Netercott
A brother and sister from a family of puppeteers, who have hardly spoken in years, find out they’ve inherited something from their Russian great-grandmother, and it just so happens to be Baba Yaga’s house. And also an evil spirit that’s tracking the house down. This book felt familiar, but it had some creative twists to it as well that I enjoyed. But, and this isn’t too much of a spoiler, you start to get the feel early on, the house was formed during a pogrom and the spirit is a being that breathes hatred into everyone. Fine, we’ve all read that before. I guess I’m just starting to feel that fairy tales that make a spirit to warp people is a very comforting tale that lets people off the hook, and we need more tales to help us grapple with the ways we corrupt ourselves.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler
Okay. Okay okay okay. I’ve been reading the past Pulitzer Prize winners, mostly starting from the beginning. However, I picked up this winner from 1993 at a used book store and read it out of order. And it is an entire book written from the perspective of Vietnamese immigrants written by an old white guy. Like, he had fought in Vietnam and obviously wants to make people sympathetic and I think he was trying to do something he thought was helpful? I guess? But come. On. There’s even one written by a ‘bar girl’ who falls for an American client that is written entirely broken English and it is soooo cringey just not okay. And this was not only published but won the Pulitzer! In the 90s! Reeling from that. Absolutely reeling.
Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis
Back to the 20s for this Pulitzer. Some classics are timeless, some are not. This one was not. I mean, I guess the striving for meaning is, but the whole way the college and medical system works, and a lot of the plot were not. There’s a young man, Arrowsmith, who wants to be a research scientist and deals with the trials and tribulations of working on public health in rural areas, and eventually ends up at a research institution. There’s a lot more that fills it in, but I didn’t have context for much of it, and honestly I couldn’t tell who were the ‘good guys’ in some of the medical discussions. I’ve read other Sinclair Lewis that still holds up, but this one doesn’t.
The Prisoner, B.A. Paris
Any good suspense novel is going to include some twists that don’t 100% make sense, and require you to just sort of go along with some of it. This book required way too much of it. The overly convoluted plot didn’t make sense (they never do, but this book wasn’t propulsive enough for me to overlook it), the character motivations didn’t make sense, the deus ex machina for our main character didn’t make sense. None of it held together at all. Would not recommend.
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, Matthew Sullivan
A young woman with a tragic past is working at a charming and quirky independent book store that has become her home when one of the regular clients commits suicide. In trying to track down more she uncovers much of her past and hidden family secrets. I’m sure you can fill in some of the beats, but it was a good story nonetheless.
Miracles, C.S. Lewis
I know he’s the hero of the more conservative Christians, but I do like C. S. Lewis and his spiritual writing. I’m not sure he 100% explains miracles in a way that will ring true for everyone, and I dislike the way he dismisses the way other faiths might view them, but I do think he makes a compelling case for why, if you go along with Christianity, you need to go all in.
An Atlas of Extinct Countries, Gideon Defoe
Gideon Defoe is, of course, the author of the fantastic Pirates! series, which I encourage everyone to read. This similarly humorous book is a true catalogue of extinct countries. Some only ever existed in the fevered dreams of the 4th son of a European noble in the time European nobles could pretend anything was their country. Others were pretend countries just to prove a point. And some were real places tragically destroyed by the aforementioned European nobles (with some assist from Americans later on), but the more tragic ones are kept to a minimum. Each country also only has a couple pages so it’s a great book to keep on hand for when you have a few minutes spare time.
And that’s it! All 75 books I read last year. I hope to get this done in a more timely manner in 2024, and do a mid-year review as well – I was starting to forget a lot of these buy the time I got around to it. Happy reading everyone!
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Cavalcade of Whimsy 