2022 in Books

As in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, I logged the books I read. Here's the 2022 list, followed by some brief comments.

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1. A House in the Sky — Amanda Lindhout & Sara Corbett | 1.1
2. Warlight — Michael Ondaatje | 1.2
3. 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing — Gary Provost | 1.7
4. The Plot Against America — Philip Roth | 1.8
5. The Winter of Our Discontent — John Steinbeck | 1.13
6. American By Day — Derek Miller | 1.19
7. Heimatland — I.K.H. Kronprinzessin Mette-Marit & Geir Gulliksen | 1.20
8. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky (Trans. Constance Garnett) | 1.22
9. The Midlife Cyclist — Phil Cavell | 1.24
10. Sing Backwards and Weep — Mark Lanegan | 1.25
11. My World — Peter Sagan | 1.30
12. The Pastor — Hanne Ørstavik (Trans. Martin Aitken) | 1.31
13. The Passenger — Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (Trans. Philip Boehm) | 2.2
14. The Arrest — Jonathan Lethem | 2.4
15. How to Tell a Story — P. Rubie & G. Provost | 2.5
16. Under Color of Law — Aaron Philip Clark | 2.6
17. Parakeet — Marie-Helene Bertino | 2.7
18. Transmission — Hari Kunzru | 2.9
19. The Almost Nearly Perfect People — Michael Booth | 2.18
20. The Art of X-Ray Reading — Roy Peter Clark | 2.21
21. Fever Pitch — Nick Hornby | 2.25
22. A Calling for Charlie Barnes — Joshua Ferris | 2.28
23. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 — Cho Nam-Joo (Trans. Jamie Chang) | 3.7
24. The Write Structure — Joe Bunting | 3.16
25. Age of Empyre — Michael J. Sullivan | 3.17
26. Far From the Light of Heaven — Tade Thompson | 3.19
27. So Wie Du Mich Kennst — Anika Landsteiner | 3.21
28. Forty-one False Starts — Janet Malcolm | 3.27
29. Draft Animals — Phil Gaimon | 3.31
30. Ray — Barry Hannah | 4.2
31. The Last Season — Eric Blehm | 4.12
32. Real Life — Brandon Taylor | 4.21
33. How High We Go in the Dark — Sequoia Nagamatsu | 4.23
34. C — Tom McCarthy | 4.24
35. Sin and Syntax — Constance Hale | 4.29
36. Take Control of Scrivener 3 — Kirk McElhearn | 4.29
37. Spook Country — William Gibson | 5.2
38. Italian Shoes — Henning Mankell | 5.8
39. Something from the Nightside — Simon R. Green | 5.14
40. Offline — Arno Strobel | 5.17
41. The Investigation — Stanislaw Lem | 5.22
42. How to Tell a Story — The Moth (Bowles, M., Burns, C., Hixson, J., Jenness, S. A., & Tellers, K.) | 5.23
43. The Three Body Problem — Cixin Liu | 5.25
44. Zero History — William Gibson | 6.1
45. Black Nerd Problems — William Evans & Omar Holmon | 6.3
46. This is Not Propaganda — Peter Pomerantsev | 6.8
47. The Wanderers — Meg Howrey | 6.12
48. The French Art of Not Giving a Shit — Fabrice Midal (Trans. Ian Monk) | 6.15
49. Tea with the Black Dragon — R.A. MacAvoy | 6.22
50. Untold Night and Day — Bae Suah (Trans. Deborah Smith) | 6.27
51. Pro Cycling on $10 a Day — Phil Gaiman | 7.1
52. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction — Dinty Moore | 7.5
53. Early Riser — Jasper Fforde | 7.6
54. Gated Prey — Lee Goldberg | 7.11
55. The Overstory — Richard Powers | 7.23
56. Chemistry — Weike Wang | 7.24
57. More Better Deals — Joe Lansdale | 7.25
58. Mourning Diary — Roland Barthes (Trans. Richard Howard) | 7.27
59. Lenin auf Schalke — Gregor Sander | 7.31
60. Die Trying — Lee Child | 8.3
61. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days — Rebecca Donner | 8.7
62. How to Write Clearly — Tom Albrighton | 8.9
63. On Animals — Susan Orlean | 8.9
64. The Maidens — Alex Michaelides | 8.13
65. Chinatown Beat — Henry Chang | 8.15
66. The Book of M — Peng Shepherd | 8.21
67. We are the Weather — Jonathan Safran Foer | 8.22
68. Dissolution — C.J. Sansom | 8.28
69. The Order of Time — Carlo Rovelli | 8.29
70. Agent Running in the Field — John Le Carré | 9.3
71. Hummingbird Salamander — Jeff VanderMeer | 9.8
72. Collateral Damage — David Mack | 9.12
73. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs — Beth Ann Fennelly | 9.13
74. How to Read Literature Like a Professor — Thomas Foster | 9.16
75. Sojourn — Amit Chaudhuri | 9.20
76. My Salinger Year — Joanna Rakoff | 9.21
77. Der Tote im Strandkorb — Anna Johannsen | 9.21
78. You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train — Howard Zinn | 9.25
79. Second Place — Rachel Cusk | 10.9
80. Safe Houses — Dan Fesperman | 10.16
81. Save the Cat! Writes a Novel — Jessica Brody | 10.18
82. Movieland — Lee Goldberg | 10.31
83. Companion Piece — Ali Smith | 11.1
84. The Terrible — Yrsa Daley-Ward | 11.12
85. Dark Fire — C.J. Sansom | 11.14
86. Now is Not the Time to Panic — Kevin Wilson | 11.21
87. The Beginning of Spring — Penelope Fitzgerald | 11.21
88. Fearless Mind — Craig Manning | 11.23
89. The Old Woman with the Knife — Gu Byeong-mu (Trans. Chi-Young Kim) | 11.24
90. Freedom Road — William Lashner | 11.27
91. The Cyclocross Bible — Alexander Forrester | 11.28
92. Disappearing Earth — Julia Phillips | 12.5
93. An Impossible Love — Christine Angot (Trans. Armine Kotin Mortimer) | 12.5
94. Long Story Short — Margot Leitman | 12.10
95. Preparing for the Future — Jeremy Eaton | 12.10
96. The Name of the Wind — Patrick Rothfuss | 12.17
97. Land of Big Numbers — Te-Ping Chen | 12.18
98. American War — Omar El Akkad | 12.21
99. Remarkably Bright Creatures — Shelby Van Pelt | 12.23
100. Acts of Desperation — Megan Nolan | 12.25
101. Managing Expectations — Minnie Driver | 12.25
102. Das Mädchen am Strand — Anna Johannsen | 12.26
103. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — John Le Carré | 12.28
104. The Making of Incarnation — Tom McCarthy | 12.29
105. Cleanness — Garth Greenwell | 12.30
106. Rainbows in the Mud — Paul Maunder | 12.31

Once again, I read fewer books this year than last. I started cycling in 2021, and that cut into my reading time. I started racing bikes in 2022, and that cut into my reading time even more. It's a happy trade-off, though.

I wasn't really blown away by anything I read this year. Usually there's at least one book that stays with me in the best way (e.g., Dark Eden, Remainder, M Train, Bluets, Against Art, Sweet Days of Discipline), but this year nothing really followed me past the last page. Second Place was remarkable, and I'll say more below, but it didn't haunt me the way Dark Eden or Remainder did.

So it was an odd year of reading. Lots of good books but nothing really astonishing. I'm not sure why people love The Overstory so much—I did not love it. Hummingbird Salamander started out white hot, then ... was kind of boring? I read books from Ali Smith and Tom McCarthy that were ... not as good as their other books. Sigh. Here are a few books that stood out:

• Second Place — Rachel Cusk
• Second Place was brilliant, and Cusk’s prose is sparkling and insightful. For me, a good novel will have four or five stunning sentences full of wisdom and insight. In the second half of this book I was highlighting such sentences every handful of pages, sometimes page after page. I’m just in awe of her skill with simile and metaphor—Cusk is an amazing prose stylist.
• The Arrest — Jonathan Lethem
• This plot was pretty ingenious, and the themes were thought-provoking.
• Acts of Desperation — Megan Nolan
• A solid contemporary novel, notable (to me) because it was the first #booktok-recommended book that I've read.
• Transmission — Hari Kunzru
• Kunzru is becoming one of my favorite writers. He has a fantastic ability to weave complex narratives that comment on our peculiar times.
• Disappearing Earth — Julia Phillips
• This was thoughtful and well-constructed, and the opening chapter was just heartbreaking and disturbing and so well done.
• Sojourn — Amit Chaudhuri
• My favorite kind of contemporary novel—dreamy, pithy, wise.
• Zero History — William Gibson
• Zero History closes a trilogy in an unexpected way (or, at least, in a way that I didn't expect). This was especially satisfying given that I read (and loved) Pattern Recognition so long ago and saw little connection through book two and most of book three.
• C — Tom McCarthy
• Reading C was kind of like reading China Miéville’s Bas Lag novels—disorienting and strange and mesmerizing, especially as you acclimate to the world. That McCarthy does this in provincial, late Victorian England is credit to his ability to render the strangeness of that world and time. Did I love this as much as Remainder? No. But it was fascinating and weird and compelling.
• But I also finished The Making of Incarnation this year, and it was ... not great. If you've read Moby Dick, then you surely remember those long chapters on the technical details of whaling, crammed full of archaic and odd vocabulary. Incarnation was almost exclusively whaling chapters, if you'll stay with the analogy. I wanted to love it, but it was so difficult to hang in there, page after turgid page. McCarthy is clearly brilliant, but sometimes one can be too clever.
• Managing Expectations — Minnie Driver
• I've got basically no connection to Minnie Driver. She's British, she was in Good Will Hunting, and she has noteworthy hair—beyond that I couldn't tell you much. But I found this book by chance, liked the cover, read a bit, and discovered: Minnie Driver is a very good writer and storyteller. I enjoyed this memoir very much.
• Rainbows in the Mud — Paul Maunder
• This one is admittedly self-indulgent, but this is my list after all. A good friend of mine is a track cyclist in Indianapolis. He once described track cycling as "the niche sport of a niche sport." This is so well-said, and also true of cyclocross. I don't know why, but I thought I might like cyclocross, so I decided to jump in this year, with zero experience or understanding of the sport. Another cycling friend in Lexington said: "why? No one does cyclocross around here. No one cares." But I thought: "why not?" It turns out that I'm well-suited to the demands of cyclocross, and it's got a vibe that I absolutely love.
• Maunder's Rainbows in the Mud is a wonderful ride through the history and culture of this strange niche sport. I'd often read his recap of a given race and then put the book aside to scour YouTube—I almost always found the exact moment he described, and this back-and-forth enlivened my experience of the book and the sport. Given my interests, I was bound to be happy with this one, and it was such a fitting book to close out 2022. But anyone with even a passing interest in cycling as a sport and cultural phenomenon will get a lot out of this book.



My guess is that I'll read fewer books in 2023. I'm ok with that. I'd like to read your 2022 list, if you have one. Find me on Instagram (@bmcnely) or on Strava, and share!