2022: A Year of Reading
I read some really great books last year and so of course I'm going to tell you all about them.
Issue #36, Sunday 1 January 2023
My 2022 Reading
I read a total of 85 books during 2022, beating my goal of 80 books set on the Goodreads website. I also read some very long books: 19 of the books I read were 500 pages or longer.
It’s very hard to be accurate about how many pages I read, because many of the books I read were in ebook format. But I estimated those by using the page count of typical print editions on the Goodreads site. On that basis, I calculate that I read the equivalent of roughly 30,000 pages. Which works out to an average of about 84 pages a day, which seems a lot but must be right.
The Best Books I Read in 2022
2022 was a terrific year for my reading. I read some really excellent books, and when it came to trying to identify the “best book I read this year” I simply couldn’t do it. In the end, I found myself unable to distinguish between the top six books on my ranked list. I’ve already reviewed them in Through the Biblioscope, so what follows are just going to be summaries.
In no particular order, really, though maybe very slight preference order:
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
This is a beautifully-written and moving novel. Robbie Arnott is an Australian author, but more than that, he is a very distinctively Tasmanian author. Arnott’s deep love of Tasmania, its history, its landscape, its wildlife and vegetation, its mountains, forests and rivers have never been so obvious as in Limberlost.
It’s a coming-of-age story which lasts a lifetime. It’s about how deeply-felt experiences, both positive and negative, can resonate through someone’s entire life and shape every moment.
All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton
A really engaging main character, a gripping story, and wonderful descriptions of the beauties of the lush tropical north around Darwin.
Set in Darwin, beginning in 1936, it follows the fortunes of young Molly Hook, a “little gravedigger girl” who works for her father and uncle in the cemetery they own. Most of the book relates Molly’s long journey through the extraordinary and beautiful landscape of North Australia, in search of the man she believes cursed her grandfather and his family decades before.
It’s a celebration of nature, and the perseverance and bravery of an extraordinary character.
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
This novel intertwines a number of different story-lines and characters: Konstance, locked alone inside a vault on an interstellar spaceship; Anna, a young seamstress in Constantinople in the 1450s, and Omeir, a boy born with a hare-lip who is recruited by the Turks about to invade the city; Seymour, a disturbed teenager in Ohio who is contemplating an act of violence; and Zeno Ninnis, a gay man unable to express his love for another man. All of these very disparate stories and people are linked together by a comical, fantastic narrative written more than 2,000 years ago. Seems bizarre, but the author pulls it off brilliantly.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Astonishingly good for a first novel. It’s not an easy book to describe. One way might be to say that it’s a highly literate crime novel, but there’s no mystery involved in the central murder: we know right from the prologue Who Dunn It. It’s really all about what led up to the murder, the relationships between the people involved, and then the consequences of the murder. More than anything, it’s about young people trying to make sense of themselves and the world. And the quality of the prose is outstanding. It’s just remarkably good all round.
The High House by Jessie Greengrass
This is a very sad, elegaic novel about the forthcoming climate disaster we are slipping into. And that sad, seemingly inevitable slipping is part of the whole point of this book. A slow-motion catastrophe is happening before our eyes because most of us humans can’t quite imagine our comfortable lives really being under threat. The book could be categorised simply as post-apocalyptic fiction, but unlike many such books, the apocalypse here is not a sudden, dramatic one, just a slow, steady decline into catastrophe, an all-too-likely scenario. It’s about change and how we struggle to deal with it, change both slow and rapid, all too often very slow at first and then very rapid.
A very impressive and moving book, beautifully written, sounding a grim warning, which doesn’t give any easy answers.
The City & The City by China Miéville
This is certainly the best fusion of the crime and science fiction genres that I've ever read. It opens as though it were a simple procedural crime novel, set in a city called Besźel. But we’re slowly introduced to the fact that there’s something very strange about the city. In fact, there are two cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, strangely intersecting or intermingling with each other at many points. These are in fact, the capitals of two independent countries, speaking different languages, and having different cultures and cusines. Yet they are not merely next to each other, but intertwined. The balancing of this strange, science-fictional idea with the solid working out of the central crime, is beautifully done.
Runners-Up
Only a hairsbreadth separates the above from the books which follow them on my ranked list. So I should award honourable mentions to at least these books:
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
Flames by Robbie Arnott
Babel, or The Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang
The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente
I’ve only just finished reading Babel, and I’m not sure that, after further reflection, it might not be placed even higher on my list. I thought it was very good. I’ll be reviewing it in the next issue of Through the Biblioscope.
Currently Reading
Her by Garry Disher
Joan by Katherine J. Chen
That’s all for this issue. I wish all my readers a successful and happy New Year.