Transportive Stories: The Books of 2022
You can tell a lot about a timeframe, not to mention a person, by its defining books — by the stages of one’s reading life and the stories we come back to; the authors we gravitate toward; and the themes that resonate, interweaving a year with a narrative pattern we don’t recognize until we’ve closed the book and reflected on its predecessors.
I’m always interested in what people are reading because what interests me varies. It ebbs and flows with the influence of my surroundings. In Italy, for instance, all I read were the Italian greats. But my taste now isn’t what it was. Yes, I’ve gone on literary deep-dives, embracing Faulkner and Milton and Kafka, devouring the kind of literature that counts as literature. Much of it I love. Austen’s line of life sits on my shelf, dog-eared and underlined, annotated and remembered.
But many other books don’t sit right with me. I abhor reading plays for no real reason other than arbitrary dislike. That rules out Shakespeare, Beckett, the aforementioned Milton. My eyes tire over the choppiness of ongoing dialogue, and it’s for that same reason that I’ve never gravitated toward poetry. I’ve also — don’t tell anyone — skipped a lot of the classics; I only read Orwell’s 1984 last year, and have yet to rifle through my beautiful from-Dublin copy of Ulysses; collection of Hemingway novels (though I lent my cousin my un-read The Old Man and the Sea and he’s loving it, so, by extension, I’ve read it); and, most shameful of all as an English major, I don’t know anything about the Brontes.
Some day, I’ll get to some of these stories, though my reading life doesn’t work with curation. There are the stories we find … and then there are the stories that find us, and I’ve given up controlling what I read. My favorite way to pick a book is to go to the library and check out anything that makes me pause for more than a second. Most library visits, I come home with 15 books in 15 genres. Of those, I’ll read maybe half. We place a lot of pressure on finishing what we start, but my bookshelf consists of half-read novels, chapters dog-eared, and short stories highlighted only for their endings to remain my mystery. I’m at peace with the unfinished — and if a story isn’t sticking, I’ve become okay with putting it down and letting it remain an open parenthesis.
Below, however, is a list of everything I’ve finished in 2022, with spurts of Curtis Sittenfeld and Maureen Johnson; an overarching Haruki Murakami fascination; more non-fiction, theology, and short stories than I’ve ever read before; and even a sprinkle of poetry. Each gripped me enough to reach the end by some combination of sentence magic, storyline, character movement, and the right time, place, and mood. Reading is that arbitrary, and that’s what makes it so fun.
Books 2022
The Overstory, Powers
IQ84, Murakami
Beach Read, Henry
One of Us Is Next, McManus
Vanishing Girls, Oliver
Truly Devious, Johnson
We are the Brennans, Lange
World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, Bourdain
Fiona and Jane, Chen Ho
The Vanishing Stair, Johnson
The Hand on the Wall, Johnson
The Box in the Woods, Johnson
The Hunting Party, Foley
Wahala, May
A Carnival of Snackery, Sedaris
Anxious People, Backman
Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Schwab
The Invitation, Foley
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami
Groundskeeping, Cole
Mother Noise, House
Crying in H-Mart, Zauner
You Have a Match, Lord
Three Poems, Sullivan
The Agathas, Glasgow and Lawson
Tweet Cute, Lord
Prep, Sittenfeld
When You Get the Chance, Lord
I Kissed Shara Wheeler, McQuinston
The Hazel Wood, Albert
Anatomy: A Love Story, Schwartz
You Think It, I’ll Say It, Sittenfeld
All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr
Sadie, Summers
A Swim in the Pond and the Rain, Saunders
Dreamland Burning, Latham
Finding God in the Waves, McHargue
The Language of God, Collins
Nothing More to Tell, McManus
Malibu Rising, Jenkins Reid
Daisy Jones and the Six, Jenkins Reid
Rodham, Sittenfeld
Happy Go Lucky, Sedaris
Eligible, Sittenfeld
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Jenkins Reid