Books

2022 Year in Books

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This year, according to insights on my Kindle app, I read 27 books, compared to 29 in 2021 and just 13 in 2020. This includes purchased books and digital loans from the Dallas Public Library, and doesn’t include physical books or the small selection loaned to me for review through NetGalley. I mostly read library books because well, I love to read but my budget and bookshelves can only accommodate so many physical books.

There are a few weeks left in 2022, and quite a bit of downtime for me as business slows and I don’t travel for Christmas. So, I expect to add one or two more titles.

I gravitated heavily toward nonfiction this year. It was a very busy year, so I would have thought the opposite to be true — that I would want to escape into fiction. But my favorites mostly were in the true crime and history genre.

Something new that I have done for years, but only now started tracking, is recommending titles to my 88 year old Grandfather in East Texas. He reads anything and everything, regardless of genre, politics or author. He really likes books that give new insight to history and current events. I send him books to entertain him and try to keep him inside and out of trouble. But like me, he is a quick reader, so there is usually time between book deliveries for him to get into his garden to lift heavy things or mow with one of his ancient, pieced together “Frankentractors” or give unsolicited advice to construction crews across the street, much to the consternation of his grown children and other grandchildren. I have indicated the books I’ve sent to him and when applicable, his unfiltered feedback. (Well, slightly filtered — he shares his reads of the day with my mom at dinner, and she passes it on to me. But she includes strong opinions, cuss words and his…colorful turns of phrase.) If you, too have an elderly person to calm and entertain, maybe these recommendations will help.

These are just a few memorable books from 2022 out of many that I read, and in no particular order. I didn’t review as I went along, and won’t overburden the list with reviews here, just some hot takes. I’m becoming more active on Goodreads if you’d like to follow me there.

The 2022 Notable Book List:

Notes on an Execution, Danya Kukafka (Bookshop.org)
Zabar’s: A Family Story, with Recipes, Lori Zabar (Bookshop.org)
Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, Ada Calhoun (Bookshop.org)
Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, Kathleen Hale
(Bookshop.org)
*Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier, Susan Jonusas (Bookshop.org)
I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home, Jami Attenberg (Bookshop.org)
*Big, Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas, Stephen Harrigan (Bookshop.org)
*Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder (Bookshop.org)
*The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City, Jim Schutze (Bookshop.org)
*Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family, Jess Walter (Bookshop.org)
A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews (Bookshop.org)
A Woman’s Story, Annie Ernaux translated by Tanya Leslie (Bookshop.org)
Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong, Linda LeGarde Grover (Bookshop.org)
Anna: The Biography, Amy Odell (Bookshop.org)
I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy, Erin Carlson (Bookshop.org)
*The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, Studs Terkel (Bookshop.org)

*An asterisk marks the books that I had sent to my grandfather.

The Hot Takes:

Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, Kathleen Hale
This is an intimate look at mental illness in youth, online culture, the ferociousness of young girls and the worst case scenario when the worst of those elements combine. Throw in a detailed look at the juvenile incarceration system and barriers to appropriate mental health care access for incarcerated youth, and you’ll look at “weird kids” with more compassion.

*Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier, Susan Jonusas
I really liked this one, and my grandfather loved it. He read it slowly so that the experience would last through the last hot weeks of summer. It had all the elements he liked, true crime, history and mystery partially set in Texas.

*Big, Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas, Stephen Harrigan
I borrowed this one from the library and sent my grandfather a hard copy. If I wasn’t so sure I’d inherit it back in the next, oh, 50 years or so (if not longer, we can hope), I’d buy my own copy. He especially liked the archival photographs that went with the major points of the book.

*Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder
This was a grim read, but a good one. I’d think “uh-oh” when coming to an especially graphic bit, because I knew what my parents’ dinner table conversation would be once my grandfather got there himself. “I can’t believe people would do that,” he would say, before going into detail on just what they did and the results of their actions. But even grim stories are important and my grandfather agrees.

*Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family, Jess Walter
I really liked this one, an unvarnished account of failures on the part of the government and the fringe beliefs and eccentricities of the Weaver family. “Damn crazy bunch, but the FBI was wrong to do what they did,” my grandfather said. (I’d like to note here that his favorite grandchild —not me!— is, in fact an FBI agent, but he calls things as he sees them.)

A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews
This is set in a Mennonite community, but I found so much familiarity with my (secular) home community. I appreciated that Toews made the characters so multi-faceted. It is more common and I suppose, easier to write these insular communities as oppressed, simple or folksy but that does a great disservice to the very real lives they contain.

A Woman’s Story, Annie Ernaux translated by Tanya Leslie
French writer Annie Ernaux and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature was not a writer I was familiar with until her win was announced. While I regret that I have only just now begun to read her work, I’m also grateful that by now there is a lot of that work to read! Her stories are short and concise, and her literary voice is evocative and inspires emotion without being overly emotional. I have many more of her books on my library loan list, and can’t wait to read them.

Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong, Linda LeGarde Grover
I read this and then interviewed Dr. Grover for the New Books Network, my last interview before our neighborhood went haywire with spur of the moment yard work noises and podcasting became impossible. This was a great book that incorporated Dr. Grover’s own story with her family history and folklore, and I am so glad I got to speak with her to learn more. (You can listen to the podcast here. I hope to podcast more in 2023, but that depends on the leaf blower brigade which is sadly, not up to me.)

*The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, Studs Terkel
I love everything that Studs Terkel has ever produced, and this is no exception. Like my grandfather with his history books, I am pacing myself because sadly, there are no more Studs Terkel books forthcoming and I have read almost all of them. I purchased this for my grandfather’s Christmas present. He had a beloved uncle who died in WWII during Operation Husky, in Italy. In my family research I always look for new details to fill in the part of his story that happened so far away from home. This book does a great job of filling in color and the impact on individual lives from a variety of people who lived and served during the war.

Onward to 2023!

Year in Reading 2019

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I read a lot, sometimes a book a week if I have the time and energy. Here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order:

Catch and Kill. Ronan Farrow. Fast-paced and deep look into investigations of the #MeToo movement and its impact on the author.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. Jia Tolentino. These essays analyze modern and internet culture and how it has changed society, how we find and define our place in it, and how we view ourselves in these new and changing contexts.

Lot: Stories. Bryan Washington. I really loved these interconnected vignettes that formed a narrative around the life of a Houston boy and his family as he grew to adulthood and the neighborhood evolved around him.

American Predator. Maureen Callahan. This book was really scary. I read a lot of true crime, and this one was the first in a long time that truly unsettled me.

Working. Robert Caro. I’m late to Robert Caro, but after reading this I immediately reserved two of his other books through my library system. His writes clearly, but beautifully and humanizes his subjects without pulling punches.

Henri Nouwen. Discernment. I NEEDED to read this book when I read it. Truly life-changing for me. I downloaded some of his other books, and they were good, but I truly found this one at the right time. (Or perhaps it found me, if you are into that sort of thing.)

Calypso. David Sedaris. The best of the best at his best. Sedaris takes universal challenges (aging ourselves, caring for aging parents) and makes them both poignant and hilarious.

Heart of the Sea : The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. Nathaniel Philbrick. I read this as I was missing and reminiscing on The Terror: Season One, and had already read the book on which that show had been based. I was looking for a true seafaring adventure and this did not disappoint. It was heartbreaking at times, and the descriptions of historic Nantucket as a place bound so tightly to the whaling industry were interesting as well.

Wave. Sonali Deraniyagala. Heartbreaking and beautifully written, this first-person account of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lank is told by a woman who lost her husband, two children and parents to the wave. It is a short book, spare in language but not without depth, emotion and even beauty.

Book of Night Women. Marlon James. This author has had a few big publications since this book was published in 2010, but this one is no less strong than his more recent works. It tells the story of a gifted young woman in Jamaica coming of age at the time of a slave revolt on the sugar plantation where she lives. It is hard to read in some parts, but also hard to look away from because the story is so compelling, and James’s gifted prose gives each scene the importance and gravity it rightfully deserves.