A Bookish Review of '22
The Best and Worst Reads of the Year
Another year has passed, and it’s time for my fifth annual review of books. Sometimes I wonder if the well of books will ever run dry and if I should go back and reread my favorites, yet every year delights and surprises with books published both recently and decades ago.
I’ve also wondered if reading may ever become less important to me. Between a full-time job, a child, teaching a daily early-morning scripture class, I think I have enough excuses to read less. However, it’s the truest and most consistent habit I have. As Cormac McCarthy so eloquently put it in his new book, The Passenger, “The legacy of the word is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.”
I’ve read over 200 books in the last five years. That amounts to over 18 million words and 66,000 pages. These are rookie numbers for some readers (a girl I went to school with does 100 books a year), but I’m happy with that progress, and to me, it represents the kind of consistency I’m looking for. If I did my math right, reading about 350 words a minute would mean that I have read, on average, about 25 minutes a day, every day. This captures the mindset I have to always be reading something, even if it’s not a lot.
2022 was a stronger year for fiction than non-fiction. I kicked things off in January with a deep dive into the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Cormac McCarthy released two books this autumn, and The Passenger might crack into my top three McCarthy novels after a second read. In any case, it felt so nice to read something new from my favorite author. I also read a few novels of great renown like House of Leaves and The Picture of Dorian Grey, as well as some contemporary classics like Gone Girl and Normal People, neither of which I would normally seek out but was glad to have read.
Regrettably, none of the non-fiction I read this year totally blew me away, or at least I felt that way until the end of November when Willie Morris swooped in with Terrains of the Heart, a book of his essays about the places he calls home including Mississippi, Manhattan, Long Island, and Washington D.C. Willie Morris is a little hard to find in the wild, but a trip to the remarkable Dickson Street Books with my cousin Lauren in Fayetteville, Arkansas produced a copy!
On that note, in addition to Dickson Street books, I feel compelled to call out a few stellar used bookstores I visited for the first time in 2022. Check them out if you’re in the neighborhood.
Commonwealth Books - Boston, MA
Housing Works Bookstore - Manhattan, NY
Normal’s Books and Records - Baltimore, MD
Ranking, Scoring, & One Word Reactions
As always, I give each book a score out of five and arrange them in order starting with the best. This year, I’m adding a one word reaction. In the next section, I’ll give some longer thoughts and quotes.
Fiction
The Complete Poems of Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens - 4.9
Serene
House of Leaves, Mark Z Danielewski - 4.6
Haunted
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh - 4.6
British
From Hell, Alan Moore - 4.6
Devastating
The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy - 4.6
Masterful
Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy - 4.4
Crushing
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams - 4.4
STELLA!
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde - 4.3
Witty
Normal People, Sally Rooney - 4.3
Contemporary
Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech - 4.3
Heartbreaking
Daytripper, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba - 4.3
Vibrant
Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis - 4.2
Lively
Ghostwritten, David Mitchell - 4.2
Twisting
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk - 4.2
Damning
The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles - 4.1
Capturing
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn - 4.1
Queasy
Cousins, Patricia Grace - 4.1
Slow
Lila, Marilynne Robinson - 4.1
Reverent
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon - 4.1
Conspiratorial
The Stranger, Albert Camus - 4.0
Maddening
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan - 4.0
Plain
The Rehearsal, Eleanor Catton - 3.9
Enticing
Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion - 3.7
Disappointing
Non-Fiction
Terrains of the Heart, Willie Morris, 4.7
Homesickness
No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer - 4.5
Inspiring
Vanishing New York, Jeremiah Moss - 4.4
Grumpy
The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens, Paul Mariani - 4.3
Comprehensive
Beautiful Swimmers, William W. Warner - 4.3
Exploratory
The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat - 4.3
Insightful
Wanting, Luke Burgis - 4.2
Mind-altering
Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement, Julian E. Zelizer - 4.2
Exemplorary
Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss - 4.2
Useful
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee - 4.2
Dependable
From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe - 4.1
Confrontational
Status and Culture, W. David Marx - 4.1
Simplifying
Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport - 4.0
Praiseworthy
A Very Punchable Face, Colin Jost - 4.0
Funny
The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman - 3.9
Overbearing
How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy - 3.9
Motivating
The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss - 3.9
Exhaustive
The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt - 3.8
Longwinded
Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Italo Calvino - 3.7
Ambiguous
Out of Office, Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen - 3.6
Unnecessary
The House of the Lord, James E. Talmage - 3.3
Chloroform
Longer Thoughts and Quotes
Fiction
The Complete Poems of Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens - 4.9
Reading Wallace Stevens reminded me of how I felt reading T.S. Eliot for the first time in high school when Prufrock was a revelation and The Wasteland was a cipher. The Collected Works covers 25 years of Wallace’s poetry and seven previously published collections. His first, Harmonium contains some of the best, and while I think the earlier poems are better than the later, there are magical sentences throughout.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.from The Idea of Order at Key West
House of Leaves, Mark Z Danielewski - 4.6
This strange novel is about a fictional academic book about a fictional documentary, and on top of that, there is a fictional journal written about reading the fictional academic work… it’s great. It’s a long book, but not nearly as difficult as advertised. It sucked me in as much as I was hoping.
“I want something else. I'm not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it's drenched in sunlight and it's weightless and I know it's not cheap.”
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh - 4.6
I was introduced to this book in an interview with one of my favorite authors, Donna Tartt. It’s one of the great first-person narrated novels like The Great Gatsby and Tartt’s own The Secret History. The story follows one man’s interaction with the Brideshead family, a once wealthy semi-royal Catholic family who sees its power and relevance decline in post WWI England.
“How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous mood, of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation, Dresden figures of pastoral gaiety! Our wisdom, we prefer to think, is all of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of it, the last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time.”
From Hell, Alan Moore - 4.6
This is the second-best graphic novel I’ve ever read after Watchmen, and it’s no coincidence they’re by the same author, Alan Moore. From Hell is a fictional retelling of the Jack the Ripper murders that highlights a conspiracy theory, namely that Dr. William Gull, a surgeon, was not only the murderer but that his involvement was known to the crown as one of the murders was to cover up some infidelity within the monarchy.
“I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell.”
The Passenger & Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy - 4.6
Like I said, it was great to read McCarthy again. The Passenger combines his newer style—heavy dialogue and almost pulpy plot line (or at least hints of pulp)—with his older style—biblical prose, sublime natural descriptions, and a sense of life-absorbing consequentialism. Stella Maris only contains dialogue, similar to his screenplay The Sunset Limited, and is a perfect companion piece to The Passenger. The books focus on a brother and a sister plagued by grief, regret, and the seeming meaninglessness of life.
“Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.”
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams - 4.4
“Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde - 4.3
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Normal People, Sally Rooney - 4.3
Sally Rooney is so popular with millennials I found myself judging her works without actually reading them. The book was better than expected, and I found myself caring quite a bit about the outcome of the story despite the sometimes unbelievable self loathing both main characters demonstrate.
“If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech - 4.3
“It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something that we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had a first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.”
Daytripper, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba - 4.3
“Only when you accept that one day you'll die can you let go, and make the best out of life. And that's the big secret. That's the miracle.”
Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis - 4.2
“To my mind, this Cretan countryside resembled good prose, carefully ordered, sober, free from superfluous ornament, powerful and restrained. It expressed all that was necessary with the greatest economy. It had no flippancy, nor artifice about it. It said what it had to say with a manly austerity. But between the severe lines one could discern an unexpected sensitiveness and tenderness; in the sheltered hollows the lemon and orange trees perfumed the air, and from the vastness of the sea emanated an inexhaustible poetry. " Crete," I murmured. " Crete..." and my heart beat fast.”
Ghostwritten, David Mitchell - 4.2
“Access to memories does not guarantee access to truth.”
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk - 4.2
“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”
The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles - 4.1
I was fairly annoyed with the ending of this book, should anyone want to discuss.
“He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb. And then this... This! A little boy from Nebraska appears at his doorstep with a gentle demeanor and a fantastical tale. A tale not from a leather-bound tome mind you... But from life itself. How easily we forget-we in the business of storytelling- that life was the point all along.”
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn - 4.1
“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”
Cousins, Patricia Grace - 4.1
I love this city, the hills, the harbour, the wind that blasts through it. I love the life and pulse and activity, and the warm decrepitude… There’s always an edge here that one must walk which is sharp and precarious, requiring vigilance… I have never stopped loving my first home, but even though I missed it I have never been afraid of the city.
Lila, Marilynne Robinson - 4.1
“My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one’s faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same.”
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon - 4.1
Pynchon was one of the last American post-modernists I hadn’t read, and supposedly this book is the most accessible. Like most post-modern books, I found it good, not great, yet both difficult and rewarding. I’ve found myself thinking about different scenes and plot points even months after I finished.
“Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.”
The Stranger, Albert Camus - 4.0
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan - 4.0
This book got so much hype this year, and I can’t quite understand why. There’s nothing wrong with it, though the writing is middling and the story a little heavy on the morality for my taste.
“Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
The Rehearsal, Eleanor Catton - 3.9
“There’s no such thing as innocence any more," the girl said, "there’s only ignorance. You think you are holding on to something pure, but you aren’t. You’re just ignorant. You are handicapped by everything you don’t yet know.”
Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion - 3.7
My first Didion novel. Definitely not as good as her essays.
“I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point.”
Non-Fiction
Terrains of the Heart, Willie Morris, 4.7
I read Morris’s magnum opus North Toward Home two years ago and found this essay collection on equal standing. He’s cemented himself as my favorite non-fiction writer not only for the warmth and inviting way he writers but for his unapologetic nostalgia.
“It seems I am forever traveling out of the South and into the North, the magnetic points on the compass of my existence, and this was now to me, in retrospect, one of the cataclysmic journeys of my life… Ever since my boyhood, driving through the South had never failed to suffuse me with a bittersweet sadness, the sadness of love and belonging, and now something there had ended for me, something irretrievably lost in the land I knew in my heart, some connecting vein with one’s own morality.”
No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer - 4.5
When I read this, Netflix was still invincible, though the latter part of the year has seen them layoff workers, add advertising to the platform, and face mounting competition. The lessons still feel relevant, perhaps with a few more caveats than before.
“When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.”
Vanishing New York, Jeremiah Moss - 4.4
See my June newsletter for a more in-depth review of this book.
“And in every afflicted city, the story is the same: luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture.”
The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens, Paul Mariani - 4.3
I’m forgoing a quote here because this isn’t a quotable book, or at least all the best lines belong to Stevens himself, not his biographer. One reason I appreciate Wallace Stevens is that he was a working man his entire life. Not that I find too much resonance between my talent/aspirations and his, but it’s somehow reassuring and fitting that the greatest modernist American poet worked as an insurance executive.
Beautiful Swimmers, William W. Warner - 4.3
I read this book before we took a vacation to a little sinking crab community on the Chesapeake Bay called Deal Island. I found the trip much more rewarding having learned the history of the place. America has so many micro-cultures, most of them the product of a certain geography. The Chesapeake is a treasure.
It is so known through the length and breadth of its watershed. The Bay. There is no possible confusion with any other body of water, no need for more precise description. It is, after all, the continent’s largest estuary. Its waters are rich, the main supply of oysters, crabs, clams, and other seafoods for much of the Atlantic seaboard. Its shorelines cradled our first settlements. It is the Chesapeake.
The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat - 4.3
This book offered the most convincing conservative critique I’ve read of contemporary America. The second half is much slower than the first and almost ruins the book, however.
“It’s possible that Western society is really leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb.”
Wanting, Luke Burgis - 4.2
See my August newsletter for an in-depth review of the book.
“It’s not enough to know what is good and true. Goodness and truth need to be attractive—in other words, desirable.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement, Julian E. Zelizer - 4.2
“Religion cannot be the same after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Its teachings must be pondered not only in the halls of learning but also in the presence of inmates in extermination camps, and in the sight of the mushroom of a nuclear explosion.”
Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss - 4.2
“Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you.”
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee - 4.2
“Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft.”
From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe - 4.1
“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.”
Status and Culture, W. David Marx - 4.1
All of this leads us to the central paradox of authenticity: we are supposed to listen to the voice in our hearts, to “discover and articulate our own identity” —and yet, only others can judge whether we are authentic. Appraisers compare our taste with our demographic profile, and where there is a suspicious mismatch, they deny us status.
Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport - 4.0
“Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.”
A Very Punchable Face, Colin Jost - 4.0
“Maybe that’s why most people never move off Staten Island—they’re terrified of hitting traffic on the way out.”
The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman - 3.9
I don’t really recommend this book to anyone, at least not in one sitting. Scan the table of contents, pick a topic that interests you, and dive in just deep enough to return for air when things get dense. The “selling-out” essay is one of the best.
“The concept of ‘selling out’—and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything—is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.”
How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy - 3.9
“Maybe it’s a cliché, but you have to focus on verbs over nouns—what you want to do, not what you want to be.”
The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss - 3.9
“A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”
The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt - 3.8
It took way too much will-power to actually finish this book, and for most readers, I’d recommend you watch Haidt’s Ted Talk on the subject instead. The ideas are fascinating but buried amidst too many tangents.
“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”
Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Italo Calvino - 3.7
“One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.”
Out of Office, Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen - 3.6
“We don't work from home because work is what matters most. We work from home to free ourselves to focus on what actually does.”
The House of the Lord, James E. Talmage - 3.3
It feels almost sacrilegious to say this is the worst book I read this year, especially when it’s written by one of Mormonism’s greatest writers, but geez, this was a slog. I honestly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, Mormon or not. I expected great insights about temple worship but instead got a manual of overly detailed descriptions of temple architecture.
Let us be mindful of the fact that whether it be the gift of a man or a nation, the best, if offered willingly and with pure intent, is always excellent in the sight of God, however poor by other comparison that best may be.
4.0 for The Stranger is probably about right. I like Kierkegaard’s existential fiction better! Guilty/Not Guilty and Diary of a Seducer are both superior in their own respects.
Ah, I love a book review post by people whose taste I actually trust.