Top 5 Reads of 2022
My favorite five reads of the year ... so far
How is it already July? And more importantly, how are we already halfway through 2022? The following list includes books that I read in the first half of the year that I rated a perfect 10/10. Considering that my average rating this years has been an 8/10, I think the books on this list are all phenomenal. I couldn’t rank them from worst to best, so they are ordered alphabetically by the author’s last name.
I’d love to hear about your favorite reads of the year. Feel free to let me know by commenting below or sending me an email!
Top 5 (10/10)
Seeking Fortune Elsewhere - Sindya Bhanoo
Fiction/Short Stories, 225 pages
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 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 itself. 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 by having them do work around his house. In "Malliga Homes," a grandmother placed in a retirement home in India by her daughter in Georgia 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 sought before being killed in a school shooting. In good short story collections I sometimes wish that the stories were expanded further because just when I get attached to a character or a plot point the story ends. Now, I know what an excellent collection looks like. One in which 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 book. You will not be disappointed.
The Netanyahus - Joshua Cohen
Fiction, 237 pages
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. I am so glad that it won because this book deserves to be read, as it is one of the most interesting and entertaining books that I have read in a long time.
The Candy House - Jennifer Egan
Fiction, 350 pages
Jennifer Egan's latest work, 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 or 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 is discussed 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, not least because of Egan's brilliance. 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.
These Precious Days - Ann Patchett
Non-Fiction/Essays, 320 Pages
These Precious Days is Patchett's most recent non-fiction essay collection, with stories all centered around different elements of her life. In my opinion, Patchett is at her best in her non-fiction essays, including in her previous books This is the Story of a Happy Marriage and Truth and Beauty. In These Precious Days, Patchett looks at her life with new wisdom, writing essays full of heart and humor on topics ranging from her three fathers to her husband's love of flying to her induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The title essay, "These Precious Days" and its epilogue about Ann's friendship with Tom Hanks' former assistant, her battle with cancer, and her accidental living arrangement with the Patchetts during COVID moved me to tears. If that is not a sign of powerful writing, I do not know what is.
Mouth To Mouth - Antoine Wilson
Fiction, 192 pages
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 prior, 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 ran into the water, pulled the man out, and performed 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 through Jeff as he becomes intoxicated and 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 and continue to think about now.
Honorable Mentions (9.5/10)
I’ve read 22 books this year that I rated a 9/10, and all were phenomenal. Two books separated themselves from the pack and came so very close to the perfect 10/10 rating, so I had to include them here.
Agatha of Little Neon - Claire Luchette
Fiction, 288 pages
Agatha and her three sisters have spent the last 9 years running a parish daycare in Buffalo. In their spare time they assist with mass, run bible study sessions, and do good deeds around the community. When word comes, however, that the Buffalo diocese is bankrupt, Agatha and her fellow sisters are forced to relocate to Woonsocket, a small Rhode Island town, to run a halfway house called Little Neon, named after the color of the cheap paint on the exterior. Upon arrival, Agatha, deemed the smartest of the four, is asked to teach sophomore geometry at the local all-girls school. For nine years, Agatha has done everything with her sisters and has reveled in the anonymity provided by the church. The opportunity to become a teacher slowly expands her world, shining light on subtle problems that were always present but that she chose to ignore. These issues include the identical form letter sent by the pope to each of the sisters after they wrote individual and personal welcomes, the constant desire to pray for one of Agatha's students who she discovers kissing another girl, the halfway house inhabitants' deep struggles that are not healed by simple prayer, and the constant murmuring about an issue of sexual abuse and the large monetary payoffs doled out by the Church.
I thought this book was fantastically written, full of observations that are as quiet as they are powerful. I appreciated that Agatha's reckoning with the Catholic Church and her role as a sister was not instigated by one calamitous event nor were her complaints forceful and immediately clear. Rather, it was the accumulation of a decade of subtle slights that precipitated a slow awakening for Agatha to her surroundings. This is a beautiful book on faith and religion written with detailed precision.
Search - Michelle Huneven
Fiction, 390 pages
Search, a novel written in the form of a memoir, is the story of one California Universalist-Unitarian church's search for their next head minister. Writing the memoir is Dana, a former seminary student turned LA Times food critic and best-selling memoirist, who decides to apply for and join the search committee both as a way to reconnect with her church as well as gain fodder for a new memoir. In addition to Dana, the search committee is composed of seven other people who act as a representative sample of the congregation, from the 85-year-old former church secretary to the young mother in her twenties with strong opinions about how the church should look in the future. The book follows the committee and their organized deliberations over the course of the nine month process to find the next minister, giving insight into a highly choreographed and highly contentious search. This is a book that contrasts fully-formed, entertaining characters who fill fascinating scenes of tension-filled deliberation with quiet moments of pensive reflection on the roles of community, spirituality, and leadership in a highly progressive enclave. This book is not action-packed but it is not devoid of movement either. I was drawn to Huneven's prose from the very first page and loved its unique structure and unconventional subject matter that made it difficult for me to put down.
Spoiler!
I just finished reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and absolutely loved it, giving it a 10/10 rating. The review will be in my July Reading Round-Up, but if you want a sneak preview you can see my thoughts here.