The Last Word On Nothing

Say what you will about 2022, but for me, it’s been a great year of reading. By that I mean, I’ve read a lot of really good books. 

I keep my yearly book list only for myself, and I try not to get competitive about racking up numbers. The reading itself is the point. That said, I do have a few little rules about my list: I only count books that I read for pleasure (not work), and they don’t count unless I give them an attentive read cover to cover. 

As I write this on December 18, I have read 49 books and am halfway through number 50. Most of these have been fiction. I’ve also read three books of poetry, five memoirs, two works of narrative non-fiction and a couple of thought-provoking, but hard to classify books (The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, and When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut.) 

Looking over my list, some favorites rise to the top.

Favorite book of the year: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This novel is an insightful exploration of a friendship between two creatives, and it’s one of the best stories I’ve ever read about friendship and creative process. The story is deeply layered and resonant.

Close second: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. At 626 pages, it was the longest book I read this year, but I didn’t want it to end. It’s a captivating story about the power of narratives, told over a timescale that spans centuries. Doerr does an incredible job of threading disparate stories into a unified narrative.

I read two other long epics that were among my favorites of the year: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead and The Overstory by Richard Powers. 

Two novels about scientists were also some of the most memorable. Euphoria by Lily King is loosely based on the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead and does a nice job of capturing the joys and challenges of a field scientist’s work. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, tells the story of a neuroscientist grappling with mental illness in her family and the tension between her Ghanaian mother’s religion and her own beliefs.  

This year, I fell in love with Ruth Ozeki. I read two of her novels: first The Book of Form and Emptiness, followed by one of her earlier novels, A Tale For the Time Being. I loved how Form and Emptiness explored mental illness in a humane and non-stigmatizing way. Also, I’m a sucker for any novel that references Jorge Luis Borges. The characters in For the Time Being — a Japanese teenager and her Buddhist nun grandmother and a middle-aged American novelist who learns about them from a diary washed ashore— captured my imagination. 

Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man, about a white man who wakes up one day to find that his skin has turned dark (a kind of metamorphosis that is simultaneously occurring throughout his town) was a slender book that crept up on me. It’s a story I found myself thinking about again and again after I’d finished. It evoked José Saramago’s novel, Blindness, and of course Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. 

This year I went on an Emily St. John Mandel kick. First, Station Eleven, then Sea of Tranquility and The Glass Hotel. I can’t believe that I wanted to read two pandemic novels (Station and Tranquility) in the latter stages of a real-life pandemic, but I think there’s something alluring about the idea of leaving our current reality behind and starting over. I recently watched the HBO series based on Station Eleven, and found it as captivating at the book, even though the storyline was significantly different.

I read A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles on my dad’s recommendation and I found the tale of an aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol surprisingly amusing and delightful.  

I devoured Miriam Toews’s book, Women Talking when it came out in 2018, and I loved it so much (eagerly waiting the film!) that I pre-ordered Fight Night. Less somber than Women Talking, the new novel is a multi-generational story of three women, narrated by a nine-year-old girl — a great read.  

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir was a fun page-turner. It’s a story about first contact, and I loved the protagonist’s changing perspective as the book progresses. Looking forward to the movie that is sure to come.

I’ll end with two more best-of selections:

Funniest, most pleasurable read of 2022: How to Fail Epically in Hollywood by Holiday Mathis. I may be biased (Holiday is a friend I got to know as the result of a LWON post), but this novel about an aspiring musician trying to make it in L.A. is both hilarious and heart-felt. The storyline involves sleazy Hollywood types, iconic rock stars and a stolen guitar. Along the way, readers are treated to some pleasing and earnest advice about navigating the sharky world of show business. I listened to the audio version, read by Holiday herself, and she really makes the story come alive.

Favorite non-fiction book of 2022: Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny. This book recounts the expedition that botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter took in 1938 to map and catalog the flora of the Grand Canyon. Along the way, they become the first women to successfully run the length of the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon, as they make their important contributions to botany. The narrative follows their adventure, but it also touches on the natural and cultural history of the Grand Canyon. Sevigny makes Clover and Jotter come alive and will make plant lovers out of any reader. (Note: The book does not come out until May 2023. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy.)