The Best Books of 2022
My top 10 favorite books of the year!
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment you have all been waiting for… my favorite books of 2022! When I introduced my list last year, I announced that I read 110 books, which was more reading than ever before. Well, somehow, 2022 was an even more productive year than 2021. Thanks to the introduction of regular audiobook listening, this year I read a personal-best of 166 books. Were all of these books great? No. Should I stop finishing books that I’m not enjoying? Maybe. But beyond the duds, I read some truly exceptional books this year. I was blown away by the writing that I encountered and continue to think about the stories months after finishing.
Once again, I’ve ranked the list for dramatic flair, but the distinction between 10 and 1 is so slight to be almost non-existent. While I don’t think that every book you should read needs to be a 10/10, you do need to read all of these books.
Thank you to everyone who continues to read this newsletter every month. You have no idea how much I value writing about what I love and sharing it with all of you. I can’t wait to see what 2023 has in store.
As a reminder, all of the books written about below are available on my Best of 2022 Bookshop Page, or you can click on the title of the book itself to be routed to the shop. All of the books I’ve ever recommended, sorted by post, are also available on the general shop page.
Looking for a last-minute gift? Don’t know what kind of books the person will like? Bookshop.org allows you to buy gift cards for the readers in your life. If you buy through this link, I receive a small affiliate commission.
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10. NSFW - Isabel Kaplan
The unnamed protagonist of NSFW appears to have the world ahead of her. She’s a recent Harvard grad and has moved back home to LA to search for jobs in the entertainment industry. Through a contact of her mother’s, a prominent feminist attorney known for her advocacy on behalf of rape victims, she lands a low-paying job as an intern at a TV network. Determined to succeed, she works hard to rise up in the ranks, going along to get along, despite rumors of sexual impropriety and a cover-up amongst the higher-ups. When scandal rocks the network, the protagonist is shocked to discover that her mother has been called in to defend the accused and all of the assumptions that constructed her reality begin to crumble.
One of the main reasons why I loved this book was the protagonist. She is witty and funny, anxious but often self-assured, and driven to succeed at her job as a type of personal challenge. This is a character-focused book, and although the plot is interesting and develops to a climatic breaking point, it is the characters that give it its life. I laughed at some points and held my breath at others. I didn’t want to put the book down not because I wanted to get to the end, but because I wanted to stay immersed in this world for as long as possible.
9. The Rabbit Hutch - Tess Gunty
The Rabbit Hutch is a run-down apartment complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana that houses a diverse cast of residents. At the start of the book, each chapter serves as an introduction to one tenant or another, catching them while they are in the midst of their daily lives. While the characters might initially appear separate, as the story progresses Gunty expertly layers their lives on top of one another like the placement of the apartment units. Just as the cast of residents is drawn from The Rabbit Hutch, the story is also limited in its temporal scope, taking place over the course of one week in the summer, culminating in the stabbing of the story’s main protagonist, eighteen-years-old Blandine. Vacca Vale - a declining midwestern town once known as the epicenter of the region’s automobile manufacturing industry but now known for its environmental and opioid problems - serves almost as a supporting character to the story, adding just the right amount of ennui and credibility to its inhabitants, including Blandine, who, as the book begins, lays on the floor of her apartment and “exits her body.”
The Rabbit Hutch is a book I knew I was going to give a 10/10 about halfway through, when I stopped reading to think about just how good the writing in the story was. The structure is creative, the characters fully formed, and the sections distinct. I love a novel that is able to piece together the lives of people who are facially unconnected in creative and unexpected ways, turning the story into a type of puzzle for the reader to solve. It is hard to believe that this is Gunty’s debut. She has surely made a mark for herself with this book - including her National Book Award prize - and I will read anything that she writes in the future.
8. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
Sadie meets Sam in the mid-1980s when they are both twelve-years-old. Sadie’s sister is in the hospital receiving treatment for leukemia and while she waits, a nurse invites her to pass her time in the hospital game room where she meets Sam Mauser, who has been in and out of the hospital following a devastating car crash. Sam is withdrawn and depressed, but playing with Sadie day after day draws him out of his shell, and the two develop a friendship based on their love of video games as well as their creativity. Six years later, they both move to Cambridge, Massachusetts for college - Sadie to MIT and Sam to Harvard. A chance encounter at the train station draws them back together, and Sam, noticing Sadie’s own depression, invites her to make a video game with him and his roommate Marx during the summer between their junior and senior years. The game they create becomes an overnight success, launching the three of them onto an illustrious path of creative partnership. However, their decades long success does not come without its challenges. While the gaming world allows for one to create whatever world they want and reboot it at will, Sadie and Sam must grapple with the unfairness and hardships associated with reality.
I was skeptical when I picked up this book because not only do I not play video games, I also know nothing about them. And while this is absolutely a book about video games and the artistic process behind them, the video games are just the backdrop for a much larger story about friendship, growing up, reinvention, and grief. It takes an author with incredible skill to be able to craft such a sweeping yet intimate story with beautifully complicated characters. This is one of those rare novels that transports you someplace new while also connecting you with a universal story.
7. The Netanyahus - Joshua Cohen
Set in upstate New York in the late 1950s, The Netanyahus follows Ruben Blum, a taxation historian at the fictional Corbin College, as he shepherds Benzion Netanyahu through the search and interview process for an academic position at the institution. Blum has been selected for this role not because he holds any overlapping academic expertise with Netanyahu, but because he is also Jewish, and in the late 1950s, as the only Jewish professor on the campus, he is deemed the most-qualified person to connect with and assess Netanyahu.
Ruben Blum and his family members are exceptionally dynamic characters who humorously tackle big questions of anti-Semitism, Jewish-American identity, and academia writ-large, and I believe the story would have been interesting even without the addition of the Netanyahus. What makes the story exceptional, however, is the introduction of Benzion Netanyahu, father of future Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and the rest of the family who arrive unexpectedly in tow with Benzion and make themselves (too) comfortable in the Blum's home. The three boys are raucous, the mother is vocally discontent with the conditions of their current life, and Benzion is insulted by his reception at Corbin College. The situation is certainly fictionalized, but also has roots in a real encounter that the author, Joshua Cohen, came across and brought to life stupendously. I’d like to brag for a second that I read and loved this book before it won the Pulitzer Prize in May and at a time when it felt like this book was going to fly completely under the radar. This book deserves to be read (and is particularly good on audio), as it is one of the most interesting and entertaining books that I have read in a long time.
6. The Boys - Katie Hafner
Ethan is a man with quirks. His lonely childhood carried forward into adulthood and as a result, he is not one to take risks. Extremely smart and musically gifted, Ethan would be content to stay in his lane - working and going home to a life comfortable for him. His wife Barb is the antidote to his personality, pushing him to travel on a Backroads style bike trip (providing very funny scenes) for their anniversary, to adopt a cat, and to consider having children. Fertility issues lead them to consider adoption, and one day Barb comes home with two Russian children to foster. Worried about his ability to keep children alive, Ethan becomes obsessed with the twins, crafting their lives within an immaculate bubble. When the pandemic hits (yes, this is in part a pandemic novel), Ethan’s behavior towards the boys veers towards compulsive, driving Barb out of his life. As the world returns to a closer approximation of normal, Ethan, newly single, decides to take the boys on the same biking trip that he and Barb enjoyed a few years earlier. Hilarity and one of the weirdest and most enjoyable plot twists that I have read in recent years ensues.
This book is so creative. It is very rare that I am utterly surprised by a twist in a book’s plot and, if I am, that I am also delighted by it. I guarantee you that you will not see the twist coming - it comes from so far out of left field and is completely bizarre - but somehow Hafner makes it work perfectly. I am in awe of her ability to dupe the reader the way she does and would frankly consider re-reading the book to see if I should have been able to see the surprise coming.
5. Games and Rituals - Katherine Heiny
I’m a goal-oriented person, which means that even when I’m enjoying a book I’m always looking forward to the next one. I rarely find myself approaching the end of a book and wishing that it would keep going. Katherine Heiny’s latest wonderful collection of short stories, Games and Rituals, made me do just that. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that Katherine Heiny is one of my absolute favorite authors (and now she knows it too, because she read my review of this book!). Early Morning Riser, released last year, was my favorite book of 2021 and probably the book I recommend most often to other people.
When I saw that her next publication would be a collection of short stories I was simultaneously excited and nervous - what if the brevity of a story meant that I wouldn’t have time to fall in love with her characters? I shouldn’t have been worried. Games and Rituals is a remarkable collection where every one of the eleven stories is as captivating and enjoyable as the next. While they are not necessarily connected, each story contains themes of love, friendship, the follies of youth, and reflection on past choices. In one story, a mother considers her behavior in her adolescence while simultaneously trying to figure out if her sweet seventeen-year-old son is doing drugs after work. In another, a woman reflects on her complicated relationship with her father while she cares for him after he mistook his hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In one of my favorites, a woman’s life unravels over the course of an evening after she discovers a series of clues about her actor husband’s suspicious behavior. I was sad as I came to the close of the book, because I knew that soon there would be no more of Heiny’s complex and fulsome protagonists to discover.
Games and Rituals is out on April 18, 2023. You can pre-order this lovely book here.
4. Seeking Fortune Elsewhere - Sindya Bhanoo
Often in short story collections, one story stands out as my clear favorite. On the flip side, I can usually easily tell which story or two I enjoyed less than the others. It is rare that each story grabs me in the same way, but, like Games and Rituals, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere has achieved this with dazzling effect. In this collection, Sindya Bhanhoo tells the story of South Indian immigrants and their families, stretching across Pittsburgh, California, Georgia, and India. At its core, each story is about finding personal meaning, self, and power amidst shifting cultures and societal expectations. In one story, "A Life in America," a professor who opens his home to homesick Indian graduate students is later accused of exploiting them. In "Malliga Homes," a grandmother placed in a retirement home waits for her family to visit. In "Nature Exchange," a mother mourning the loss of her child continues going to a local nature center to try to win him a prize he had long sought. Each story is written with a strong and purposeful voice, full of fully developed and complicated characters, and that ends at the exact right moment before moving on to the next. Read this collection. You will not be disappointed.
3. The Candy House - Jennifer Egan
The Candy House, is an inventive, miraculous piece of writing and impossible to fully capture in one review. The story begins with Bix Bouton (who readers might recognize from A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan's 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning novel), a tech demi-god reminiscent of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg. Bouton has developed a new technology, Own Your Unconscious, that allows users to upload and preserve their memory into "cubes" that can be shared with the "collective," a type of digital space where people around the world can access peoples' experiences. Each chapter is a window into a different character's life, incorporating some element of Own Your Unconscious into the plot. However, this technology is not the driver of the story. Instead, Own Your Unconscious sits quietly in the background as a type of quasi-setting - a reminder of the themes of memory and authenticity in a world that mirrors ours.
Although I have read books before where each chapter follows a different character but are all somehow linked together, Egan's structural foundation is wholly unique. Egan does not center the narratives around one time, place, event, or voice (indeed, one chapter is written entirely as an instruction manual in the second person in the mid-2030s, while another is a series of email exchanges between different characters). Instead, as mentioned in the New York Times review, the structure has the feel of a social network, where people across time and space are connected in unexpected, wonderful, and often inconsequential ways. The Candy House blew me away. You do not need to have read A Visit from the Good Squad in order to read this book, but if you have not already you certainly will want to after reading The Candy House.
2. Mouth To Mouth - Antoine Wilson
While waiting for a connecting flight to Berlin, the unnamed narrator of Mouth to Mouth notices an old classmate of his from UCLA, Jeff, waiting for the same flight. As they wait out their flight's delay in the first-class lounge at JFK, Jeff regales him with the defining story of his life. Twenty years ago, a few years after they graduated from college, Jeff was running on the beach early in the morning when he noticed an unresponsive man floating in the ocean. Realizing there was no one else around, Jeff made the decision to run into the water, pull the man out, and perform life-saving CPR. After the man is whisked off to the ambulance, Jeff becomes obsessed with figuring out the identity of the swimmer as a way to understand the consequences of saving a life. He discovers that the swimmer was Francis Arsenault, a successful and excessively rich Los Angeles art dealer, and is hired as a receptionist at his art gallery. Although Francis and Jeff grow closer, Francis never acknowledges the day on the beach and Jeff is left wondering whether or not the lack of recognition is intentional, which paves the way for the novel's dramatic conclusion.
Readers are exposed to the entirety of Jeff's story as he becomes intoxicated and, as a result, the entire time I was left wondering what was true and what was false. While the narrator never challenges the events of the story he does become increasingly uneasy as the story progresses, especially after he discovers that he is the first person that Jeff has ever shared this story with. The combination of Wilson's unreliable narrator and the slow escalation of tension made for an exceptional novel, one that I read compulsively as I tried to figure out how it would end.
1. The Colony - Audrey Magee
The Colony is set off the coast of Ireland in the summer of 1979, on a small island known to be one of the last surviving places where Gaelic is the primary language of the inhabitants. The island is poor and relies on fishing to survive, which has become increasingly difficult as more and more people leave for America or Dublin. Enter Mr. Lloyd, a middle-aged mediocre English painter who decides that he will spend his summer on the island and paint the cliffs in an attempt to gain notoriety. He is under explicit orders not to paint the island residents, but Lloyd is not one who heeds instructions well. A few days after Lloyd steps off his currach, a French linguist in the final year of his dissertation on the Irish language, Jean-Pierre Masson, arrives on the island. Masson is furious that they have allowed Lloyd to stay and is fearful that the presence of the English language, made worse by the fact that it is spoken from the mouth of an Englishman, will disturb his research and the preservation of Irish culture and language. The island’s inhabitants, including the family that rents cottages to the men, feel relatively indifferent to the power struggle between these two outsiders. They are merely trying to get by, including fifteen-year-old James, who has a talent for painting and is desperate to leave and start a better life.
Inserted between the scenes on the island are vignettes describing the violence taking place across the water on the Irish mainland. At first it is unclear how much of the news filters back to the remote outpost, but as the book goes on readers become aware that these vignettes are actually radio announcements listened to by the women of the village who are growing increasingly concerned about their futures and options for survival.
There are so many interesting themes explored and contrasted throughout this book including colonialism, cultural purity, and the tensions of preservation. The contrast between this sleepy, isolated town with the violence raging so close by underpins the struggle between the two outsiders: the Englishman is interested in promoting himself at the expense of others and the Frenchman wants desperately to preserve an unadulterated version of a culture that the Irish recognize as obsolete.
Read this book, don’t listen to it. The structure is too interesting to do otherwise and I assume that listening to a narrator would void the book of the nuance provided by the way the words are physically laid out on the page according to the respective narrator. This is a fabulous book and a fascinating way to discuss political issues that remain a present concern.
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