2022 Books
| Title | Author | Date Finished | Rating | Publisher | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Over Sea, Under Stone (The Dark is Rising, #1) | Susan Cooper | 2022/12/20 | 4 | Aladdin Paperbacks, 2004 | “A really fun, rollicking children’s adventure that I read with my 9 year old. Some of the language is a bit dated–at the beginning, the children play a game where they’re exploring a ““jungle”” filled with stereotypically wild Natives–but the story is really engaging and the characters and fun and lived in. " |
| Browse: Love Letters to Bookshops Around the World | Henry Hitchings | 2022/12/17 | 4 | Pushkin Press, 2018 | A fun, eclectic set of essays and memories that captures the feeling of possibility and mystery that draws people like me to bookshops. |
| Space Opera (Space Opera, #1) | Catherynne M. Valente | 2022/12/14 | 4 | Corsair, 2018 | A fun, beautifully written love letter to popular music, and especially the campy world of the Eurovision song contests. The writing was funny and rich, and reminded me of Douglas Adams at his most lush and acerbic. I listened to this on audiobook, and it was wonderfully, entertainingly read by Heath Miller, who did a fantastic job bringing life and exuberance to the words. |
| Future Home of the Living God | Louise Erdrich | 2022/12/06 | 5 | Harper, 2017 | Read My Notes |
| A Walk Through Hell, Volume 1 | Garth Ennis, Goran Sudžuka, Mike Marts | 2022/12/03 | 4 | Aftershock Comics, 2018 | Genuinely unnerving supernatural detective story. Yikes! |
| All About Love: New Visions | bell hooks | 2022/11/27 | 5 | William Morrow, 1999 | Love is a practice, something you do, to cultivate spiritual wisdom in yourself and others. Love is a method of building and being in community, and radical in its potential for emancipation. |
| Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (Claire DeWitt Mysteries, #2) | Sara Gran | 2022/11/18 | 5 | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013 | “I think I actually like this one better than ““City of the Dead”” and that’s saying something. Tense, strange, emotionally rich, and genuinely mysterious (for a mystery). Amazing stuff. " |
| Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training | Mark Rippetoe, Lon Kilgore | 2022/11/14 | 4 | The Aasgaard Company, 2007 | “An exhaustive guide to strength training that genuinely taught me some things and helped me improve my lifting and exercise regimen. The tone is a bit snarky and ““bro-heavy”” at times but if you can get past that, it’s a really useful guide for people looking to lift weights to improve strength and physical fitness. " |
| Hyenas | Michael Sellars | 2022/11/10 | 4 | 2015 | A fast-paced and entertaining zombie survival story that doesn’t wear out its welcome. Also has a suggestive and clever zombie-origin story but one that is neither overbearing nor a black-box. |
| Voyage of the Dogs | Greg Van Eekhout | 2022/10/31 | 4 | HarperCollins, 2018 | A sweet and exciting book about the brilliance and bravery of dogs. I read it with my n 9 yo and though he definitely found parts of it exciting, none of it was too scary or intense for him. |
| Stonefish | Scott R. Jones | 2022/10/21 | 4 | Word Horde, 2020 | Read my notes |
| Infidel | Pornsak Pichetshote, Tananarive Due (Introduction), Jeff Lemire (Afterword), Aaron Campbell, José Villarrubia, Jeff Powell (Letterer) | 2022/10/11 | 4 | Image Comics, 2018 | |
| Cog | Greg Van Eekhout, Beatrice Blue | 2022/10/11 | 4 | HarperCollins, 2019 | A funny and heartfelt book about humanity, difference, and freedom. My 9yo and I both loved it, especially the main character’s halting and funny manner of speaking. |
| Red Light Properties: Previously-Haunted Real Estate | Dan Goldman | 2022/10/03 | 3 | Monkeybrain, 2012 | |
| The Course of the Heart | M. John Harrison | 2022/09/29 | 4 | Night Shade, 2006 | A gorgeously written, strange and magical novel about memory, age, history and the way that friendship and relationships transform, warp, and decay over decades. |
| The Twisted Ones | T. Kingfisher | 2022/09/29 | 3 | Gallery / Saga Press, 2019 | “A creepy monster-in-the-woods story that draws on the ambiguous mythology of Arthur Machen’s ““The White People”” The story is written in an epistolary, conversational style that sometimes worked for me and sometimes didn’t. The characters are rich, with an everyday quality that works against the standard depictions of rural people in North Carolina. Bongo the Dog is a wonderful treat for anyone who lives with or loves dogs. And the ““effigies”” that plague the narrator are genuinely creepy, just as the mythology they represent is strange and cosmic in its implications. " |
| Knight’s Castle (Tales of Magic, #2) | Edward Eager, N.M. Bodecker | 2022/09/19 | 3 | Odyssey Classics, 1999 | “A fun sequel to ““Half Magic”” that continues to be about the problems and perils of navigating the complicated world of adults, but just not quite as rich and fun as the first one. " |
| Homuncula | John Henri Nolette | 2022/09/19 | 3 | Black Powder Press, 2016 | “A sprawling genre study that links up Lovecraftian ““I am the real monster!""-type horror with anarchist history and philosophy. I didn’t love this. It felt far too long for what it was trying to do. I found the engagement between Lovecraftian horror and its conservative fear of outsiders (and non-white people) with the emancipatory history of anarchism to be a clever pairing, but it felt really unevenly delivered to me. Ultimately, the anarchist and labor struggles of the early 20th century just become a kind of set-piece for the rather slow unveiling of cosmic horror. It’s also written in a very plodding style that I found really hard to slog through. " |
| Half Magic (Tales of Magic, #1) | Edward Eager, N.M. Bodecker | 2022/09/01 | 4 | Harcourt Odyssey, 1999 | A funny and clever book about magic, the complexities of wishes and desires, and how ultimately love and family make us who we are and structure what we want. I read this with my 9 year old, and he loved it. It’s written in a very acerbic, clever style that is fun to read out loud, and the kids are all distinct and likeable characters. There are some dated and stereotypical depictions of women, as well as of men from the Middle East. There was nothing that I found to be particularly inappropriate, prejudiced or racist, but it was definitely striking to me. |
| The Runaway Restaurant | Tessa Yang | 2022/08/23 | 5 | 7.13 Books, 2022 | Read My Notes |
| Autonomous | Annalee Newitz | 2022/08/21 | 4 | Tor Books, 2017 | Read My Notes |
| Wonder and Glory Forever: Awe-Inspiring Lovecraftian Fiction | Nick Mamatas, H.P. Lovecraft, Nadia Bulkin, Laird Barron, Erica L. Satifka, Masahiko Inoue, Michael Cisco, Fred Chappell, Livia Llewellyn, Victor LaValle, Molly Tanzer, Clark Ashton Smith | 2022/08/09 | 4 | Dover Publications, 2020 | Read My Notes |
| We Do This ‘til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice | Mariame Kaba, Naomi Murakawa | 2022/08/09 | 5 | Haymarket Books, 2021 | |
| The Phantom Tollbooth | Norton Juster, Jules Feiffer | 2022/08/09 | 4 | Random House Bullseye Books, 1996 | |
| Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms | John Hodgman | 2022/07/25 | 5 | Viking, 2019 | Read My Notes |
| Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (Essential Mike Davis) | Mike Davis | 2022/07/18 | 4 | Verso Books, 2000 | |
| Beezus and Ramona (Ramona, #1) | Beverly Cleary | 2022/07/18 | 5 | Oxford University Press, 2000 | Still as funny and insightful and sweet when I read it with my 9 year old boy as when I read it, as a nine year old boy. |
| The Asylum of Dr. Caligari | James K. Morrow | 2022/07/11 | 3 | Tachyon Publications, 2017 | A fun and interesting book that riffs on various art movements of the 20th century, including film, modernism, cubist and expressionist art. In 1914 a young art student of middling skill takes a job working at an asylum in Germany, run by the eponymous Dr. Caligari, using art as therapy. What unfolds is that Dr. Caligari is using his own art to further WWI and line his own pockets, and it is up to the artist, working with some of the inmates, to stop him. Entertaining and clever. |
| The Postmortal | Drew Magary | 2022/07/11 | 4 | Penguin Group USA, 2011 | Read My Notes |
| Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (Claire DeWitt Mysteries, #1) | Sara Gran | 2022/06/27 | 5 | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011 | Read my notes |
| Tropic of Kansas | Christopher Brown | 2022/06/17 | 4 | Harper Voyager, 2017 | Read My Notes |
| We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement | Ryan Grim | 2022/06/06 | 3 | Strong Arm Press, 2019 | Read my notes |
| Mycroft Holmes (Mycroft Holmes and Sherlock, #1) | Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Anna Waterhouse | 2022/05/25 | 3 | Titan Books, 2015 | Not the most richly written book, but the idea of grafting the Sherlock Holmes stories onto the broader history of British Colonialism, slavery, and conquest is genuinely novel and smart, and makes for an entertaining and engaging read. |
| The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy | Stephanie Kelton | 2022/05/18 | 3 | PublicAffairs, 2020 | Read my notes |
| The Wild Road (The Wild Road, #1) | Gabriel King | 2022/05/16 | 4 | Del Rey Books, 1999 | A really delightful cat fantasy, written by someone who clearly understands the weirdness, silliness and drama of cats. There’s also references to alchemy, mysticism, and a delightful counter-history of the world where cats have always been in charge (or maybe that’s just how it is!) |
| Apocalypse Nyx (Bel Dame Apocrypha #1.5, 1.7) | Kameron Hurley | 2022/04/22 | 3 | Tachyon Publications, 2018 | A gritty collection of novellas about a bounty hunter and her crew, trying to make a life in a world of violence. |
| Irredeemable Omnibus | Mark Waid, Peter Krause, Diego Barreto, Paul Azaceta, Emma Ríos, Howard Chaykin, Marcio Takara, Damian Couceiro, Andrew Dalhouse, Nolan Woodard, Zac Atkinson, Archie Van Buren, Ed Dukeshire | 2022/04/21 | 4 | BOOM! Studios, 2020 | A power deconstruction of superhero mythology that manages to find a new dark path so-far untrod–in essence, what if Superman had a psychological breakdown and began destroying the world? I read the whole 900 page thing in basically one sitting. It was emotionally rich, exciting storytelling full of morally complicated, messy and deeply human characters, set across the entire cosmos and throughout the history of the universe. Really engaging and definitely recommended to anyone who who loves comics, their culture and their complexity. |
| Tomorrow’s Cthulhu | Scott Gable, C. Dombrowski | 2022/04/18 | 3 | Broken Eye Books, 2016 | Read My Notes |
| Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People | John Hartigan Jr. | 2022/04/10 | 4 | Duke University Press Books, 2005 | |
| Once & Future, Vol. 2: Old English | Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain, Ed Dukeshire | 2022/04/07 | 4 | BOOM! Studios, 2020 | |
| Station Eleven | Emily St. John Mandel | 2022/03/27 | 5 | Knopf, 2014 | A sweet and thoughtful look at how human being work to make a new world in the ruins of an old one. This book is really a delight to read, hopeful and empathetic, even as it describes in great brutality, how a global plague destroys most of humanity. It sets itself apart from most apocalypse literature with its focus on how people make things together, be they art or houses or families or museums, and how this shared creation sets a horizon in the future rather than wallowing in the past. |
| The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism | Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski | 2022/03/20 | 5 | Verso, 2019 | Read My Notes |
| Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2) | Tamsyn Muir | 2022/03/13 | 3 | Tor.com, 2020 | Read My Notes |
| Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1) | Tamsyn Muir | 2022/02/24 | 5 | Tor, 2019 | Read My Notes |
| Story First: The Writer As Insider | Kit Reed | 2022/02/14 | 4 | Prentice Hall, 1982 | “A useful writing manual that focuses on getting prospective writers to work from character (““inside”") outwards towards plot, structure, language, etc… It also encourages writers to draw from their own experiences for such characterizations, another ““inside”” out approach. Concludes with some writing exercises typical for such books, as well as a lengthy but useful guide to running a writer’s workshop.” |
| Fledgling | Octavia E. Butler | 2022/01/26 | 4 | Grand Central Publishing, 2007 | Read My Notes |
| We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy | Kliph Nesteroff | 2022/01/17 | 5 | Simon & Schuster, 2021 | Read My Notes |
| Southern Cross, Vol. 1 | Becky Cloonan, Andy Belanger, Lee Loughridge, Serge LaPointe | 2022/01/10 | 3 | Image Comics, 2016 | |
| Writing the Other | Cynthia Ward, Nisi Shawl | 2022/01/07 | 4 | Aqueduct Press, 2007 | A short and thoughtful guide to writing social diversity in speculative fiction, written by two masters of the genre, and featuring a number of useful and practical writing exercises to aid the goal. |
| Throne of the Crescent Moon (The Crescent Moon Kingdoms, #1) | Saladin Ahmed | 2022/01/07 | 3 | DAW, 2012 | “A fun and exciting inversion of the standard ““medieval Europe”"-rooted high fantasy, with a dark and rich mythology that draws on Islamic themes, as well as Persian and Egyptian history. The writing was a little over-expository at times, but that’s par for the course with most high fantasy. The characters are fun and lively, and the city of Dhamsawaat is a character all its own, a rich and complex and exciting place where Ahmed gets a chance to express his love for urbanism and social diversity. ” |
| The Peripheral | William Gibson | 2022/01/03 | 4 | Berkley, 2015 | Strange and bewildering time travel murder mystery, that sits somewhere between the power of meaningful choice and inevitable futility. Also paints a moderately hopeful (or at least livable) vision of an apocalyptic future. |
| The Darkest Hour (Warriors, #6) | Erin Hunter | 2022/01/01 | 3 | Avon Books | A fitting and exciting end that brings the arc to a good conclusion. I wish there had been more with brightheart, though…. |
| Bear | Ben Queen, Joe Todd-Stanton | 2022/08/21 | 5 | Archaia, 2020 | A beautiful story about ability and friendship. I read it a bunch of times and loved every read. |
Previous years’ lists:
currently reading, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017], 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2000s, 1990s
