10 Favorite Books of 2022

I like recommending books in the order I read them at the end of the year, even if it’s not a traditional best books of 2022 list. Only one of the books I’m recommending came out in 2022, and I’m going to repeat some of my recommendations from years past, because I reread them this year and they’re still my favorites. Recommendation is a practice I like coming back to because books have a double power. First, books, especially rereading books, is a way for us to see ourselves in new ways. Reading, and giving attention to our reading, lets us see how we respond to characters, stories, emotions, and ideas. Books give us the time and stillness we need to see ourselves. Contrastingly, and sometimes more importantly, books allow us to see another person in another time and place. They reflect characters, stories, emotions, and ideas that aren’t our own and if we give them our attention, we can be moved and shaped by them (or deliberately say no thanks). I also like recommending books because it’s something my wife and I can do together (here’s her list).

When we Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut (2020)

This was a Christmas present I got myself last year at a great bookstore (the Midtown Scholar) in Harrisburg PA. When we Cease to Understand the World starts at full throttle and almost never relents. It’s a book about the entangled relationship between modern science and modern war through the lives of prominent scientists and mathematicians, asking if scientific progress is worth the violence it’s unleashed. The scientists in Labatut’s telling are mystics and visionaries, receiving visions and epiphanies they don’t fully understand but burn like fire in their bones. Like the characters in the book, I’m a scientist and my career has been almost entirely funded by the US Navy. Science, knowledge of the world, violence, and death are still intertwined. I love this book and it asks the same questions about science I was asking when I was considering different professional opportunities at the beginning of the year.  

Liturgy of the Ordinary, Tish Harrison Warren (2016)

I wish I’d written a book like Liturgy of the Ordinary. Tish Harrison Warren reminds us that liturgy is the work of the people, and that work, even something as simple as making the bed, is a sacred act. 

Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren (2021)

In March, both my wife and I lost our maternal grandmothers and their funerals were on the same day across the country from each other. It was a hard time.

Accidentally, we’d booked a look weekend in a small cabin in Keene, NY right after all the funeral travel was over. That time with each other, reading and processing Prayer in the Night together was just what we needed. A book about loss and grief, pain and suffering, Tish Harrison Warren gave us a shared language for us to talk about our losses. And we didn’t know it at the time, but it was also preparing us, as much as anything can prepare you, for losing our first pregnancy three months later. 

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)

I actually reread Gilead twice this year, and wrote about it here. In the past, I always saw John Ames as almost invincibly good, but reading this year I was struck by his weakness, frailty, jealousy, and fear. I hope that’s wisdom.

Hill, Jean Giono (1929)

I picked up Hill because of the publisher. The New York Review of Books (nyrb) likes to publish forgotten gems, so whenever I see their logo on a book’s spine I give the book my attention. I found Hill in Powell’s Books in Portland OR, and it didn’t disappoint. Books from nyrb (including When we Cease to Understand the World) have atmosphere. When you start the book it has a relentless mood which makes each page crackle with intensity even when nothing is really happening. Hill is about a town facing a storm, but much of the book is the stillness. It is a moment of seeming clam, seething with power and destruction. 

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013)

After I read Entangled Life, a wonderfully brilliant book about mushrooms, a couple of years ago I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book about moss, Gathering Moss. Where Gathering Moss really is about moss, Braiding Sweetgrass is only briefly about sweetgrass. It is a book about our relationship to the world and all with whom we share it. Here, there is deep wonder in and reference for existence and suggestions for how to cultivate, or better reclaim, that sense. 

The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu (2008)

The Dark Forest is the second of Cixin Liu’s trilogy of sprawling sci-fi novels. What sets the Dark Forest apart from the Three Body Problem and Death’s End is Luo Ji. Cixin doesn’t seem all that interested in characters which makes Luo Ji stand out as essentially the only character with a personality and arc that doesn’t just serve the time-dilating plot of the series. I definitely don’t agree with Cixin’s view of the world (he seems fairly convinced that humans will always default to self preservation over all else and that authoritarian world governments are the best way to get things done), the Dark Forest is ambitious, spiraling, and unflinching in taking its premise to the end.  

The Land Breakers, John Ehle (1964)

The Land Breakers is another book from nyrb, and I like it for all of the reasons I like Hill. But as well as the atmosphere, the Land Breakers reminds me of where my mom grew up, in of Eastern Kentucky. It’s a novel about life in the hard hills of North Carolina, a land which seeks to drive off every homesteader, but at the same time gets deep into their bones. It is a land that gives nothing willingly, and will never be left willingly. 

The Golden Enclaves, Naomi Novik (2022)

The Golden Enclaves is great. Naomi Novik brilliantly finishes her Scholomance trilogy, deepening the world and characters, while drawing disparate threads into a unified whole. I was so engaged while finishing this book that a stranger in the airport asked me what it was. If I was that into the book, they wanted to read it. The Golden Enclaves is one of the few final books in a trilogy that makes the previous books better, and, unlike most of the books on this list, it’s really fun while also being charming, engrossing, and smart.

Home, Marilynne Robinson (2008)

The first time I read Home it was probably my least favorite of Marilynne Robinson’s books about the town of Gilead. Rereading it this year, Home might be my favorite. It is a master work of misunderstanding. The action of the novel is essentially nonexistent, yet Home carries the tension of weary muscles and broken hearts. Glory, Jack, John, and Robert are all deaf to each other for the ordinary reasons we are deaf to each other: old hurts, fixed beliefs, being unable to imagine the life of someone else, just thinking about ourselves, not wanting to understand, and sometimes not wanting to be understood. And despite all of this, some of the characters are able to see each other, beautiful and strong in their weaknesses, to see each other as God might see us. And Glory comes to model the prayer: Lord make us instruments of your peace… let us not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood, as to understand, to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, pardoning that we are pardoned, and by dying that we are born into eternal life.