Honourable Mentions

Mary Shelley — Frankenstein

Read this for a History course. I didn’t really care for it too much the first time I read it (last year) but found it really interesting this time around.

Very dark, very gothic, and very Romantic. A classic horror tale.

Yukio Mishima — The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

This is my favourite book. Nothing much more I will say about it here. It’s short, the story carries you along nicely, and it has a disturbing ending.

Bret Easton Ellis — Less Than Zero

A non-re-read, I just couldn’t bare to not mention this book. It is horrible and brutal and fast-paced. I really like the writing style and the theme. It feels somewhat relevant to myself, and it really pushed the boundaries of what I thought could be written about. Overall it is the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read.

Let’s move to the top 10.

The Top 10

10. Don DeLillo — Underworld

This book gets points for nostalgia. It traveled with me on several long trips over the summer, and so, although I forget most of nuances of the book, it holds a special place in my heart for that specific reason.

The book has very clean and maximalist prose. I like the style that DeLillo uses at times: a scrambled ‘coming-at-you’-like style. The actual story was sometimes hard to follow. Each part jumps to a different century or year, and there are some minor ambiguities that go to make the story more interesting once you figure them out. You get to see the main character Nick, and then slowly, whatever you thought you may have known about him, changes and alters as we go through his past as well as others’ past.

Overall this was a very interesting book, and I think it took me the longest to read out of any book this year (a month and a half).

9. Alexandre Dumas — The Count of Monte Cristo

The first book that I finished this year (I believe) and one of the best. Yes, the book is overly long, I will admit that, but I found that that added to the last 200 or so pages. You get a feel of the time the Count had passed to get to the pivotal moments in the story through the time you spend reading the long parts. A mini-simulation of sorts. I’m not sure if that was intentional, or if Dumas stretching it out for money was the sole reason, but it worked nevertheless.

The book follows Edmund Dantes through both France and Italy. I really liked that part of the book — almost like Frankenstein in a way — with how there are multiple settings. I also really enjoyed the French and Italian opera houses, which are featured a number of times. Very reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera, or more like the other way around. Overall, my favourite part of this book was its atmosphere, which sucks you into the book.

8. Karl Ove Knausgaard — A Death in the Family (My Struggle #1)

I won’t say much about it here as I have a review out for it here.

Overall I really liked this book. It is essentially an autobiography (though I imagine some of the parts are romanticized). Knausgaard is a very clean writer, and the translation captures this almost perfectly.

7. Robert Walser — Berlin Stories

This was a book that I blew through in a few days. It is a very short collection of what are called ‘microscripts’ that he wrote over his lifetime. There is no story to any of them. They are simple observations of the city, of what’s happening, what people are doing, and thoughts and ideas I imagine he had while experiencing these things. They are not traditional short stories, in fact I don’t think they can be labelled as stories at all. They are reflections and scenes, and they capture an atmosphere very well.

My favourite in this collection is titled ‘Friedrichstrasse’.

6. Jorge Luis Borges — Labyrinths

This collection gives you a little of everything: a taste of Borges’s masterful short stories, and a look into his non-fiction. I would say I equally enjoyed my favourite short story as I did my favourite non-fiction essay-type thing. I won’t talk too much about it here as I have a separate review for it out here.

To summarize, I really liked this book, and although it was difficult, was well worth the trouble it may have caused.

5. Haruki Murakami — Norwegian Wood

This was a book that I bought out of the blue. I’ve read and thoroughly enjoyed Murakami before (After Dark and 1Q84) and decided one day at the bookstore that I would start reading Norwegian Wood. I read it in less than a week, which is quite uncanny for me, especially considering the way I’d been reading this year. All the Beatles references and songs allow you to immerse with the book more — try listening to them when they are mentioned in the book.

4. Shakespeare — Sonnets

I don’t have too much to say about this collection of sonnets at the moment. I just finished reading it and am going through lots of my favourites again. I think I like Shakespeare’s poetry better than the poet who I will talk about later, but Shakespeare’s poetry is just pure genius. That is the only way I can describe it.

I came in with decently high hopes, which were easily fulfilled, but I had a lot of trouble reading the first few poems and understanding them even the tiniest bit. I held a tiny bit of prejudice coming into Shakespeare too, as I’ve tried reading his plays quite a few times and have had trouble understanding anything of what he’s saying, and so have given up quickly (with the exception of Romeo and Juliet because I’d watched the movie). This, however, was different, and a I thoroughly enjoyed a long number of the poems, my favourites being 19 and 30.

3. Karl Ove Knausgaard — A Man In Love (My Struggle #2)

The highest rated novel on my list, and the only author with two books on the list. Knausgaard’s second instalment of the My Struggle series felt more relatable to me than his first. Although there were parts that, when reflecting in the moment, seemed like boring parts of a person’s life that I don’t even know, the writing style makes it interesting, somehow.

There should be a review out for this one sometime soon.

2. Robert Frost — Poetry Collection

This is the Everyman’s Pocket Poet edition of Robert Frost’s poetry. This was essentially my gateway into enjoying poetry. I’m still very picky about what I read, for many poets don’t seem to do it for me at the moment. I tried reading Neruda before this, as well as random poems by other poets, and I didn’t really get it. But, reading Frost, I felt like I finally got poetry somewhat. His writing style is simple, to me. He speaks about things that feel rural. Reading his poetry is very calming. It’s not up in your face and difficult to read (which I also enjoy a lot, but it’s nice to have an antithesis).

His style reminds me very much of Hemingway, and I find his work almost revolutionary (even though he doesn’t seem to have done anything revolutionary) given that he was writing in a period alongside writers such as Joyce and Faulkner. And to think that he died just before the post-modern explosion and meganovels, such as works by Pynchon, and then later, works by Wallace, Mitchell, and DeLillo.

I love straight-to-the-point, minimalistic writers like Frost, Hemingway, and Walser, as well as long, sprawling, almost overwhelming writers like Borges, Dumas, and DeLillo. The two extremes.

This collection is something that I kept reading and re-reading well after I’d first finished it. It’s also something I always try to bring with me on plane trips, for I find it comforting.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Choosing a number one was hard, especially with all the great books I had read this year. But I decided to choose a book that I’d kept re-reading and bringing with me even after I had finished it. I probably underlined, circled, and scribbled throughout this book more than any other book, and it has the added bonus of having come with me on one of my trips this summer.

This book gave me a better mindset moving forward. Nietzsche has a very lecture-like tone. He really speaks to you — the reader — through his commanding sentences. This tone is what first drew me to the book. And although there were rough spots throughout. Of the Tarantulas is one of my favourite pieces of writing ever, and he really capture the state our society is at the moment. I imagine he was just looking at the state of the people he lived with in the late 19th century, but, as time repeats itself, we find ourselves seeing the same things again, and so Nietzsche is reborn.

Conclusion

2022 was definitely my most successful year for reading. To think that Less Than Zero was an honourable mention, and that books that I loved (such as Anna Karenina, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and The Old Man and the Sea) + many others, weren’t on the list.

I feel like the books I chose this year were safer picks: books that I knew I would like. I don’t know how much I challenged myself this year, which is something I want to change next year. I say this, and yet, looking back on the books I’ve read this year (and the ones I will mention) I see that I really have diversified what I’ve read. I have kind of pigeonholed myself into a certain type of literature, and didn’t read any fantasy and only a little science fiction, but overall I would say I expanded my scope on the writing world.

What books would you recommend me to read? And what were some of the best books you read this year? Let me know by leaving a comment.

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Top 10 Books I Read This Year

For the Year 2022