My 2022 reading wrap-up
The books I've read & loved over the past 12 months
For the past weeks, I’ve been tapping open my Twitter app and email inbox anticipating whose end-of-year reading wrap-ups have been published that day. I adore The Millions’ “A Year in Reading” features, publications’ staff favorites (The Paris Review, Lit Hub, Necessary Fiction), and deep dives by favorite authors (A. Natasha Joukovsky’s “All the books I read this year” was the final straw it took for me to put together my own list).
I’ve read more books this year than I ever have before, and I feel like I’ve enjoyed them more, too—a byproduct of graduating undergrad and feeling freer and more relaxed with my time, perhaps, or getting better at choosing books I’d enjoy. I’m planning to touch mostly on favorites and stand-outs of the year, but for a fuller picture of all I’ve read, feel free to friend me on goodreads. :)
I began 2022 on an incredible note with Jung Yun’s O Beautiful, after its stunning hardcover caught my eye. Engaging, complex, about the Midwest, journalism, and bigotry at the site of the oil boom. I read it in snowy Minnesota on my final winter break of college, along with a Didion essay collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and A. Natasha Joukovsky’s debut novel, The Portrait of a Mirror, both of which I admired, the latter of which became an unexpected new favorite (and also compelled me to keep a running vocab list in my notes app: ophidian, concomitant, simulacra, aposiopesis, tenebrific…). My third Lily King title, and her bildungsroman debut from 1999, The Pleasing Hour, became my favorite of her works I’ve read so far. I reread The Fault in Our Stars nine years later in my childhood bedroom (which sparked a summertime reread of Divergent and led me also to pick up the new-ish Hunger Games prequel, which my younger brother Anson read and recommended).
Back in New York, I was stuck in my apartment with Covid and found company in Jacqueline Woodson’s intimate Another Brooklyn, Denis Johnson’s American epic in miniature, Train Dreams, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (finally!—although I didn’t find myself pulled in quite so much as The Remains of the Day or Klara and the Sun). My final semester began, and Joss Lake’s Exercises in Style syllabus included The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (my introduction to Dorothy, a publishing project), Anne Garreta’s Sphinx, Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live the Post Horn!, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower among others. In Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s literary translation workshop, poetry collections Outgoing Vessel by Ursula Andkjaer Olsen, tr. Jensen, Transfer Fat by Aase Berg, tr. Johannes Göransson, and Mouth Eats Color by Sagawa Chika and Sawako Nakayasu.
I reviewed Katja Oskamp’s Marzahn, mon amour, translated from the German by Jo Heinrich, for Necessary Fiction and became hooked on Peirene Press’ lovely novellas in translation. I’d go on to read and review Bosnian writer Senka Marić’s Body Kintsugi, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, at year’s end.
Over spring break: Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys made me cry, as did Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. I was knocked out by Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams and enjoyed Penelope Fitzgerald’s short, sweet, and strange The Beginning of Spring, though not as much as I fell for The Bookshop or Onshore. I listened to the audiobooks of Didion’s Blue Nights and Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone while traveling—both beautifully moving.
I finished the semester as I finished Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which I’d read in German part by part, week by week throughout the spring for a senior seminar.
During the transition from spring into summer, I reviewed a bizarre and wonderful short story collection, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. In Minnesota for a lazy couple of weeks before a busy few months, I adored Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, my former professor Margo Jefferson’s hybrid memoir Constructing a Nervous System, and Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, translated by Margaret Mitsutani.
My favorites of the summer! Duras’ The Lover. Tim O’Brien’s spine-tingling In the Lake of the Woods, which I’d wanted to read since The Things They Carried in Ms. Fitch’s tenth-grade American Lit. Kristjana Gunnars’ sensory, cinematic, autofictive collection of five novellas set across Iceland, Canada, and Germany, titled The Scent of Light deserves all the attention in the world and has become a life-long favorite—you can read a review I wrote here. Truman Capote’s haunting A Tree of Night and Other Stories, of which I found a dusty old English-language copy at a church book sale in the Netherlands. The NYRB’s The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick: like both gossiping with and learning from a favorite professor. Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais began a shared appreciation of (obsession with?) Fitzcarraldo Editions between my brother Alton and me. Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament was brain-altering, and I can’t wait to read the newly translated Is Mother Dead as soon as possible. While studying in Kiel for a month, I discovered two new favorite German classics: Heinrich Böll’s And Never Said a Word and Anna Segher’s Transit.
At the end of August, I moved into a new apartment and started a new job, accompanied along the way by the author-narrated audiobook of David Sedaris’ Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002. Over the course of one of those long and hot NYC end-of-summer weekends, I finally picked up and flew through Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
After Annie Ernaux won the Nobel, I read my way through—from favorite to least favorite, though I enjoyed each—A Girl’s Story and Happening, A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, and Simple Passion—in just a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to picking up The Years before long.
Inspired by watching the New York Marathon, I listened to the audiobook of Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall and relistened to Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running while jogging up and down the Hudson. I brought Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first installment of My Struggle along on my commute and began looking forward to early mornings on the subway. Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai, over Thanksgiving, and Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac’s Mona were more memorable novellas in translation to cap off my year so far.
And now, I’m halfway through Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and wondering how it’s taken me so long to pick up a copy. Looking forward to another year of reading ahead. I always love to hear recommendations if you have any!
All the best & happy holidays,
Regan