Top 10 Books of 2022
“Today, you’ve decided to be a good person.”
We may no longer be in the most wonderful time of the year, but there are some fun consolation prizes in January. Why? It’s time to begin the Best of 2022 series, of course! I love doing Year in Review lists, but sometimes I feel like they get a bit messy or redundant. With that in mind, I’m instituting a new policy that I will strive to maintain every year. I usually come to a decision on how to do my Best of the Year lists each year with the idea that it’ll be conducted that way from then on. I genuinely feel that this year’s decision will stick for good. I’m doing the Top 10 of everything. Top ten movies, top ten television shows, top ten albums, top ten podcasts, top ten books. (Tweets have come to an end, sadly.) Having a top ten is clear and it forces me to be particular, instead of expanding to thirty for some and fifteen for others or seven or whatever. Honorable mention sections will still exist, but they will not receive the blurbs the actual list does. That’s the way going forward! I think it’s good to be discerning!
And, of course, this literature list is the one that is not ranked (it’s strictly alphabetical by title) because it’s never sat right with me to rank books. But I will just clarify that Pachinko is one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life. It still gives me goosebumps to think about it now — and I haven’t even written its blurb yet!
It’s hard to pull some sort of observation or pattern out of the books I read in 2022. Science books, children’s Holocaust literature, mysteries, comedy memoirs, philosophical texts, true crime novels, historical fiction, poetry collections, oral histories, Reese Witherspoon’s approval system. The only thing they have in common is the same thing all artwork and stories have in common: some aspect of what it means to be a human in the world. Whether we’re staring up at the cosmos or falling in love with a role model or refusing to grow up, they’re all some method of categorizing our humanity. Art always is, even if it seems cynical to say. I promise it’s not. I can only promise that everything I read this year, even if I didn’t like a book, taught me something about being alive. That’s why we continuously return to poetry and prose. It’s why we revisit beloved favorites and forge into the derring-do of a written frontier. Literature will always have that power and it’s just as important that we continue to empower it as best we can.
Honorable Mentions: Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The One by John Marrs, Richard III by William Shakespeare, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Also, Honeyblood by Nicole Mello is recommended if you like erotic horror with sprawling characters, but I was advised by the author to not read that one.
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
I’ve long enjoyed the depiction of Cosmos on screen from both Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson and the original text has been in my “to read” list for a while. I’m glad I was finally able to get to it this year. Cosmos is a scientific book that strives to help those who are fascinated by astronomy understand something that’s usually reserved for university textbooks. It fits right in with Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time in the echelon of scientific books that strive to make the incomprehensible tangible. While those two aimed for humor and knowledge, respectively, though, I felt that Cosmos aimed for wonder and awe. And when you look to the cosmos, I think that comes to heart first.
How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur
Bit of a humble-brag here, but I had early access to How to Be Perfect this year. Not because I texted Mike Schur, but rather because it happened to be on the shelf of my local bookstore a week before its official release. That was fun! As was the entirety of this book, the first full-length entry into Schur’s bibliography. The book poses a series of ethical and moral questions and then navigates them with humor and dumbed-down Aristotle. Schur is basically Sagan here, except he makes philosophy palatable, as opposed to astronomy. (I wish I had both in my gen-eds, which I wasn’t smart enough for, but was still curious about.) He’s always been one of my favorite writers, thinkers, and orators, so I was going to buy this book as early as possible anyway. It did not disappoint! Patented Schur humor mixed with genuine treatises on modern ethics and the ever-present concept of “what we owe to each other.” I became a better human being while I was reading it, just as I did watching his show, The Good Place.
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
If you want a true crime story that’s told in a way that’s far from trashy, I highly recommend Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s a true crime story that treats the material the way it should be treated: respectful, resigned, and wrenching. The story is a heartbreaking and tragic one, but it’s told with dignity as well as intrigue; it’s more than a pumped-out nonfiction tale. Detailing the murders of the Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma (along with the concurrent rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation), David Grann unearths a piece of American history that could’ve been steadily more forgotten if not for the local orators who kept the story alive and Grann’s own journalistic work — not to mention a forthcoming Martin Scorsese picture. Killers of the Flower Moon’s closest comp might be Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, but the implications of the former are far-reaching and holistically tragic.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
As I said, Pachinko is one of the best books I’ve read in my life and is probably in my top ten of all-time. Min Jin Lee’s 2017 historical epic is gorgeously specific in its characterization and fragile family tree, but sweeping in its larger themes of displacement, immigration, and imperialism. One page could be emotionally devastating and the next could boast a profound moment of enthrallment and human connection. It needed one to have the other. Pachinko contained all the pain of an ancestor and all the promise of a descendant, operating as resonant for many even while it narrows its focus on one of millions. It’s renowned for a reason and I was completely enamored by Pachinko while I read it this year. An undeniable achievement by Lee.
Peter Pan and Wendy by J.M. Barrie
There’s a reason why the more apt title of J.M. Barrie’s classic tale of the boy from Neverland who never wanted to grow up and only wanted to play hero with the Lost Boys, Tiger Lily, Captain Hook, and the Darling children is Peter Pan and Wendy, rather than simply Peter Pan. It’s because there’s a lurking tragedy, a skulking heart on pause throughout the novelistic version of the famed stage play. The Disney adaptation belies it and the book does, too, until it doesn’t. It took me far too long to read this totemic staple of children’s literature, but I’m glad I picked it up from The Strand this past spring. I was deeply moved by it and also put off by the racism, which is inexcusable.
The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger
I’d been looking forward to reading Bob Iger’s reflections on his time as the CEO of Disney for a couple years now, but I did expect not to learn anything too juicy, as there hadn’t really been any headlines in the trades from Ride of a Lifetime takeaways. Ultimately, the book is nearly as sanitized as the title is, but there are some revealing tidbits and occasional moments of earnest authenticity. It lands as more of a business sagacity read than a behind-the-scenes in Hollywood one, but with the recent Bob Chapek ousting and Iger reinstatement, maybe there’s more between the lines than I initially thought. Maybe he’ll even manage to pen a sequel. What could the title of that be? “The Ride of Immortality”? “The Second Ride of a Lifetime”? “The Ides of Chapek”?
Sister Mother Husband Dog by Delia Ephron
Even beyond rom-com staples like When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, Nora Ephron has always been one of my favorite writers. Her books (primarily I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing) helped shape much about me and I’ll always cherish her contributions to the written word. Likewise, her sister’s, Delia Ephron’s, thirteenth book, Sister Mother Husband Dog, has been in my to-read list for nearly a decade and a new library finally provided access to it. It’s a collection of essays in the same vein that her sister used to write before her sad passing in 2012. Even though a few of the essays are about Nora, Delia swiftly slips from her sister’s shadow and carves out an authorial identity all her own. The insight we have into her own life, her own humor, her own moments of intrigue. It’s all distinctly valuable and I feel very fortunate that the Ephron voice is strong throughout the family of writerly women.
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
My girlfriend and I did a book swap together where she read my favorite book (Little Women) and I read hers (The Song of Achilles). You probably don’t need me to describe The Song of Achilles, considering it’s been on the shelves of Target and Walmart (this is a big deal in the literary world; it means it’s transcended) for years. In case Madeline Miller’s breakthrough hit is unfamiliar to you, though, it’s a story that takes an alternative perspective of the Trojan War (as depicted by Homer’s Iliad) by way of Patroclus. It zooms in on a character for lensing we don’t receive otherwise in the original heroic epic. But in Achilles, heroism takes a back seat to romance, specifically between Patroclus and the titular, tendon-titled Achilles. It’s a riveting one to unfold, even if you thought you understood every nuance of the Trojan War already.
Tinderbox by James Andrew Miller
James Andrew Miller has written nonfiction/oral histories about the United States Senate, ESPN, Saturday Night Live, the Creative Artists Agency, and now, HBO. The interviews and access Miller procures are always riveting to me and, as such, I devoured this thousand page tome about the history of Home Box Office in — roughly — a week’s time. I mean, what’s better than a solid oral history, right? Here, he covers HBO’s early days as a pay-per-view, small-scale stop for boxing and naked adults to its more recent times navigating streaming, Succession, Euphoria, and George R. R. Martin’s IP universe in equal measure. Plenty of surprising nuggets of knowledge behind some of the best television created exist here, in addition to reverence for those who made it that way. Unfortunately, we don’t have too much insight into everything David Zaslav has been doing, but that might be for the best because I actually am very sick of reading his name. Despite that, the HBO oral history does get pretty close to the present; it discusses Mike White and The White Lotus!
Whispering Heart by Atziry Lucero
Upstart indie poet Atziry Lucero describes her 2020 debut collection of poetry as something that “takes you into the deepest thoughts of my mind and the most vulnerable pieces in my heart.” Well, to be fair, that’s only a descriptor for the first section of the book, but it’s hard not to see how it applies to the entire anthology. Whispering Heart is brimming with moving, aching poetry that will tear down your senses and build them back up before it even occurs to you to reach out to the people you care about in life. Few moments of lyricism have ever touched me as deeply as specific turns in Lucero’s book do. I recommend this to all people who crave the innermost thoughts of someone with plenty in their heart to share with us all. We’re lucky for it.
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