2022 Year in Reading

Thea Anderson

In the week between Christmas and the New Year, I asked my twelve-year-old whether she considered herself to be a fast reader. We were each reading silently on the couch, a scratchy throw blanket draped between us. She shook her head. “I’m definitely the slowest reader in my class,” she answered. “Methodical?” I offered. No, she emphasized. Slow.

This year, I’ve also been slowing things down. Especially when I got covid in October and began If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. I resisted the urge to read it quickly even when I wanted the characters to survive already. To make it already. I ended the year with Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens which I legitimately did not want to end. 

While I usually try to steer clear of titles with the word witch – they tend to be anything but – my nonfiction pick is Caliban and The Witch by Silvia Federici. It’s about the subjugation of women throughout European history and capitalism.

I wish I had read a complete book of poetry so here’s to that as a goal in 2023. Behold the photo of my book tower which is modest because it’s an altar to slow reading and library cards. 

Alex Tanner

Rachel Aviv's Strangers to Ourselves and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona were big standouts for me this year; two great books about suffering, injustice, the decay of the self. My partner Sasha’s novel, Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World, came out back in February, and that was a singularly cool experience to have as a reader; I’ve been reading it, in some form, for five years or more, but it was really emotional to encounter the object-form of this story that’s been a big part of our lives—to hold it and sit with it and be its audience. I’m in the middle of a few great books right now, rotating through them in a way that feels chaotic but pleasant: The Fight for Turtle Island, Libra, and The Dawn of Everything. My attention span feels like it’s worse than ever; I think I needed to let my reading life sputter a little bit the last several months so that I could come into December feeling tender and wistful about how much I miss it. It’s my sincere goal next year to stop it with my phone so much already, in a focused and intentional way, and to read some big challenging novels: Stalingrad and Life and Fate are the ones I want to start with. 

Beccah Shuh

Another year, another sixty-odd books, another book person slogging through a personal literary flop era. I’m sure many of you can relate. (Except for the freaks who read over a hundred books – I see you, I don’t understand you, I frankly don’t even know if I believe you.) 

I’ve been feeling quite stagnant, in both reading and life, for about three years. I can’t imagine why! I find myself reading to kill time more than I used to, breezing through domestic and spy thrillers. Perhaps I am indeed injuring eternity, but it’s tough to muster care for that when the world continues to be in shambles. 

I regret to inform that once again I did not read a single book of poetry this year, and this time I’m not even going to promise to be different next year. (Unless someone wants to personally gift me a book of poetry, in which case, yes I promise I will read it.) 

My favorite work of fiction this year was Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso, although since it came out in February that feels like about five long years ago rather than ten (still long) months. To me, it lived up to the high expectations of a Manguso turn to fiction. 

And for the haters out there — my favorite nonfiction book was My Body by Emily Ratajkowski. I thought that the book got a lot of undeserved criticism — the reviews all seemed to ask, “How can she bring up her awareness of these societal problems and her own participation without offering solutions?” This struck me as a silly argument to make about a book of personal essays — EmRata is not a sociologist or a thought leader, nor does she claim to be. I amused myself by thinking about people reading any of the books of personal essays by young-ish women over the past several years and asking them to reconcile Bernie Sanders’ place in socialism within their pages. Anyway, I thought it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking book of essays by a woman from a unique vantage point in modern life. 

Renée Jarvis

Coffee Will Make You Black by April Sinclair

I nipped this one from my mother’s library, and it’s a throwback from 1994. Her copy of the book has probably seen me as a baby! I read this book so quickly and walked away satisfied. It’s funny, familiar, and nostalgic. I love reading older books, the writing styles we mostly engage with today differ from those of 30 years ago, so it's always refreshing to peek into the capsule of a good oldie.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo by Zora Neale Hurston

It took me all of 2022 to read this book because I’d get angry each time I opened it. I have had my copy since 2018, and avoided reading because I knew it would surely stir my emotions. In powering through, I was able to access this needed record of history. It was a tough, but incredibly valuable read, and what I've learned will stay with me for a long time.

The Somnambulist by Lara Mimosa Montes

I had already read this back in 2016 and picked it up again sometime in June. This book is a reminder of the power in poetry to take dark subject matter and transmute it. Somehow, court document excerpts and scenes of a hard life are made whispy in quality. The writing gives buoyancy to heaviness while remaining potent and true. Re-reading rewarded me with a deeper satisfaction and understanding of these poems.

Monika Woods

I read Solmaz Sharif's Look because I loved Customs. Sharif’s poetry is some of my favorite being written by my generation. She’s so reliably, consistently surprising, which is to me very difficult to do, which is why I value it so highly. I’ll always read her books. She brings me so much unexpectedness, and she writes about systems and experience in such a lived way. 

Either/Or was probably my most ecstatic experience reading a novel in 2022. I love Elif Batuman’s work, and waiting for this book for so long kind of added to my experience of reading it. But I also love reading her work because she is so infinitely more educated than I am, and yet she has similar experiences and emotional shades that I do. So I get to see myself (in a way) from a more academic, theoretical, and analytical perspective. That feels so thrilling to me. (Special mention to The Books of Jacob, which I basically read for the entirety of 2022 and yet still have not finished.)

Reading The Unwomanly Face of War was inherently weighted, and part of a research project I've been working on for several years for something I'm working on. I haven’t read that way before this project, making a long list of books I want to read with the express goal of informing generative work. So it feels like college a bit, and makes me take those books really seriously. Svetlana Alexeivich consistently upends my sense of the world, and The Unwomanly Face of War was no different.