The Best Books I Read In 2022
If 2021 was the year I tried to get into ebooks, 20222 was the year that audiobooks became my best friend. Looking at the list of everything I read this year (that I can recall, at least) it is split nearly evenly between print and audio.
As far as I can suss out, I read no ebooks this year. The format just doesn’t work for me — I am too trained to sit like an itchy grasshopper when looking at a screen, lightly and ever-ready to pounce on any notification or ping. Call it Slack brain. It’s no good for reading.
Happily the lack of ebooks didn’t do me any harm, and I managed to avoid some eye strain by shifting a good bit of my reading to the audio format. I want to thank our Peloton screen for breaking. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had so much time to just sit on the stupid bike and listen. Pelotons are good. The classes are fun. But if you just need to get in some cardio time, I cannot recommend audiobooks and pedaling enough. If you are reading something good, it’s not hard to keep yourself spinning an extra 15 minutes so that you can hear the rest of the chapter.
Print books mattered as well. This year I took part in my regular book clubs as possible. My father and I had some wins (Red Mars, a reread for myself) and some losses (Crime and Punishment is miserable). My social book club out here in Providence had some winners (Cerulean Sea, January’s Doors) that helped me expand my horizons a bit.
Mostly, however, the books I read this year were self-indulgent and comfortable. I regret nothing. 2022 was a hard damn year. I took on a new, larger role at work that consumed a huge fraction of my mental and physical energy, not to mention that we started the year going through several rounds of IVF after a long run in infertility-land. (As I write to you, we’re just over the 40 week mark, and counting down until Ada is born. This post is actually a bit early this year and will miss a book or two, but I don’t want to put it off until my free time goes to zero.)
So, favorites. A few:
The Expanse series: If you have seen the show, you have consumed a good portion of a fraction of the story. Now having completed all the books, I am heartbroken that Amazon didn’t pony up the money to finish the story, and by some changes to characters made when it was under different care. But holy heck on a hill was that an adventure. I will share and spoil nothing, but if you are a science-fiction dweeb like myself, get in there.
The Golden Enclaves: Sometimes the hoi polloi get something right, and the mass-market love for the Scholomance series is well-earned. This, the final entry in the series, was a book I counted down to its release. I was just so excited. And it wasn’t what I expected, but something different, surprising, and human. Start at the beginning, and do not stop.
Fevered Star: The sequel to Black Sun and the second entry in the Between Earth and Sky series is something to read. I will never, ever look at crows the same way again. Roanhorse is doing something with fantasy that I find intriguing and fresh in a way that I can’t quite explain, but have spent a good bit of time chewing over after reading her work. A heartfelt recommend.
The Priory of the Orange Tree: Given the some 700-page length of this book it’s a bit hard to condense down to a few words. Let it suffice that I bought it because it was huge and long and therefore interesting, and the book actually lived up to its length. Also, dragons, a question of belonging, and a drunk. Read it under a blanket by a fire with tea nearby so you don’t have to get up and distract yourself.
Looking at my print reading, I did a reasonable job reading from a diverse set of authors. Not great, and not as well as in recent years. My audiobook reading was incredibly White Male. My main reading goal for 2023 is to get my reading diversity back to a point of intellectual health, and to read more poetry, a genre that I neglected this year.
Hugs and love, Alex