What did I read this year?

2022. You do not have to read everything the New York Times tells you to

It’s difficult to keep up with the Gregorian year-end “year in review,” “best [insert media] of [insert year],” “20 [things] you missed this year” lists churned out by the New York Times and New Yorker and New York Magazine and all the rest of the publications that I read through shared links and newsletter digests. I simply do not have the time or interest to read everything someone else tells me is good, and that is fine. Keeping up with the zeitgeist? Boring, exhausting, impossible. Determining my own tastes? Freeing, exciting, ever-evolving.

I have a few rules of thumb that I abide by in reading new books: I rarely purchase a book that I haven’t already read. That’s what libraries are for! And yes, I am currently hold number 533 of 734 for Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, but I do not need to imminently read this book. I am happy to miss out on an elusive satisfactory conversation with the mind hive. I’ll read it when it arrives and if I like it, I might purchase it to read again or share with a friend. In the meantime, there are hundreds of other books to enjoy.

Another rule of thumb is that I don’t place stock in recommendations from random people on the Internet. This sounds benign and obvious and perhaps snooty, but I’ve been bombarded too many times in the BookTok-BookTube-Bookstagram wave pool of opinions on “absolute must-reads” only to find every single recommendation lacking. I’ve found that the most successful recommendations for my reading interests come from authors whose work I already enjoy (again, obvious, but masterful writers tend to like masterful writing) (e.g. Brandon Taylor, Samantha Irby, Ann Friedman, Roxane Gay) and from family and friends who ready widely.

So the following eleven books are books I enjoyed, grouped loosely. To practice what I preach, I also note from where I acquired these books to be conscientious of where they lived before they live with me. I also threw in three essays that made me laugh and think. If you want further half-baked reviews, here’s last year’s list:

Week 44/45: What were your favorite books of 2021?

Best in Show

• The Shipping News (1993) by Annie Proulx. This is not a fast-paced book. The slow chug of a boat on the horizon. About a family, a town, grief, love. Best ending sentence of the year, possibly of any book ever. Do not enter this book expecting Plot and Action. Enter for Time and Place and Character. I read it over the course of six weeks, as summer shifted into a cool autumn, and it enhanced the seasonal pace that washed over me in the text. 

  • I borrowed this, indefinitely, from Eric Sumner’s personal library, on the recommendation of his daughter Beth. 

• In the Dream House (2019) by Carmen Maria Machado. The opposite pace of Proulx’s novel, this memoir was gripping. I inhaled it in a single afternoon. Machado’s writing about domestic abuse and survival was chilling and spellbinding. And, proving that humans can and will write about the same things in a million new ways, this was also about a town, grief, and love, with a sharp twist towards hope and healing.

  • I purchased this at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, the bookshop owned by author Emma Straub.

• White Teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith. A deeply written intergenerational family novel that kept me company on long commutes into New York (meaning, it was a good book to pick up and set down again and again). This year and last, I tended to love novels about families more so than anything else. There are so many story opportunities in a family! White Teeth dealt with time and space deftly, and, for those of you who know Twain, it played with a Punn’head Wilson arc with the twin characters. Wry and wickedly funny. 

  • I purchased this at The Book Corner in Bloomington, Indiana, which indeed sits on the corner of the street across from my old apartment, which made for perilously convenient shopping.

• Great Circle (2021) by Maggie Shipstead. I wrote a whole essay about how much I loved this book. I recently stayed up very late in the evening to purchase a copy of this book annotated by Shipstead in support of the literary magazine Off-Assignment (and in support of my love of this book). I will tell you my thoughts again once I read the annotated version. Every section is meaningful to the novel’s endgame, but there are two particular scenes that conjured the feeling of being spun around in a roaring wave. Reading the last 60 pages, I was overcome with the sensation of careening towards the end of something treacherous. I relished every second. 

  • This book’s magnetic pull drew me directly to it in City Lights, San Francisco, the famous Beats bookstore right next door to Vesuvio, that similarly storied bar. 

• Matrix (2021) by Lauren Groff. I first learned of this book in a job interview, where the person asked “Have you read the book about the 12th century lesbian nuns?” No, but now I must. I needed a few pages to adjust to the cadence of Groff’s prose, which is wildly different from her previous (and similarly excellent) work Fates and Furies. But the arc of the text—which follows the life of Marie, a lesser French noble-turned matrix of a dilapidated Abbey in the muddy backwater of England—proves mystical, speculative, burn-the-house down excellent.

  • My best friends gifted me this book for my birthday! Thank you, friends! I later lent it to at least three of my colleagues because I wouldn’t shut up about it at lunch.

Books Worth a Second Try 

• The Night Watchman (2020) by Louise Erdrich. I wrote this earlier in the year: the first time I picked this up in September 2021, I realized I didn’t have the attention to devote that this book deserved to be understood. Returning to it about nine months later was the right call. 

  • This was also a The Book Corner purchase. My goal when I lived in Indiana was to bring with me only books I had never read so I could better complete my bookshelves with books I’ve actually finished. I keep track of the books I haven’t read in my Bookshelves Inventory. But I ended up purchasing books from this shop all of the time, and I never finished that initial stack. Eso si que es.

• Piranesi (2020) by Susanna Clarke. Clarke is a divisive writer: people either love or hate her first novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. This book is weird. It’s an intensely lyrical narrative of a strange mystery with soft worldbuilding ensconced in hard walls. Catch all that? I read it in one sitting during a layover in the Detroit airport—so, technically, I didn’t have to give it a second try, but I recommend doing so if its formal weirdness turns you off at first. It’s about change.

  • I think this was a The Last Bookstore purchase in Los Angeles. I definitely bought it in California. I have a hard and fast rule that if I enter a bookshop, I must purchase something. Shawn Bythell of Diary of a Bookseller and The Book Shop, Wigtown, Scotland, writes how frustrating it is when a person enters the shop, takes a turn around, exclaims, “Oh I could just spend all day in here,” then promptly leaves, refraining from purchasing any book. I vow never to be that customer. Shop indie!

Biggest Surprise of the Year

• Trust (2022) by Hernan Diaz. Who knew I would so thoroughly enjoy a book about finance.

  • From Roxane Gay’s Book Club Literati subscription, which I am now retiring. See below.

Books from my Book Clubs

• I did not do a good job keeping up with Roxane Gay’s Book Club this year. I love Gay’s monthly conversations with the authors (she is an expert interviewer!), but the book-a-month model doesn’t suit my reading habits. Trust was definitely my favorite book of the bunch, and I never would have read it without receiving it in the mail. Nonetheless, the subscription was not for me—I have 400 books on my to-read list and I squirm at tying my reading to the formal bounds of time.

• I read two books with Bookish Book Club, a book club for books about books, that I loved:

  • Placing Papers (2020) by Amy Hildreth Chen was a thin little slip of literary archives gossip (who sells them? Who buys them?) that illuminates the role of Big Money and Prestige in institutional collections. Purchased from UMass Press.

  • Old Books, Rare Friends (1997) by Leona G. Rostenberg and Madeline B. Stern introduced me to the word fingerspitzengefühl, and that alone made it a keeper, but I loved how Rostenberg and Stern narrated their careers and enduring partnership in the trade. Purchased from Between the Covers Rare Books.

Favorite Essay About A Book

• Whenever I’ve needed a laugh this year, I reread Brandon Taylor’s essay “persuasion (2022) is a hate crime.” Taylor writes literary analysis incisively and with an inviting casualness that makes me laugh out loud. This essay lambasts the 2022 Netflix adaptation of Persuasion by Jane Austen starring Dakota Johnson, a woman who has a “face that knows what a cell phone is” and can therefore never convincingly perform in period pieces. You don’t even have to have read Persuasion to appreciate the essay, though it did prompt a reread for me (recall the Autumn of Austen), which leads to my last book recommendation:

• Persuasion (1818)! It’s very quick by Austen standards—usually around 220 pages long, depending on which edition you choose. Her most melancholy and mature writing, she successfully captures the aching feeling of, “Oh no, have they moved on from me?” and the euphoria of missed connections made whole again.

  

Best Bird Essay of the Year

• A Bird Idiot’s Guide to Winter Birding by Matt Ufford at Defector.

Favorite Interview About Other Creatures

• Sabrina Imbler, who once chatted with me about what writing for a college newspaper entails and likely does not recall that conversation, wrote a memoir! And they gave this joyful, wonderful interview about their process to Nicole Chung in The Atlantic newsletter. I’ve been reading Imbler’s science writing for years (they are responsible for this genius headline and fascinating article from NYT) and I am very excited to read this book. 

Housekeeping and birdseeking

house

• What I read last week: finally finished Look at Me by Jennifer Egan. Also, recently read For Butter or Worse, a romance novel I borrowed from the library on the pun alone, which had a disappointing lack of food eroticism for a book about two foodies falling in love. Tragic.

• For your travel and adventures in the New Gregorian Year: the Book-et List

• Asks are still open! What are your questions about the information world?

bird

• Be careful about gifting foul to friends for the holidays. They might imprint.

• And the Tower of Babel? More like the Tower of Birble. I’ll see myself out.

More later.