The Books (& A Little Bit of TV) That Defined My 2022

My best reading year ever was 2017, when I discovered and read the entirety of Robin Hobb's ouevre. Talking ships and people with animal familiars became my reality; my actual life was but a fleeting dream. 

Sadly, no year has come close, but I am always looking for new book universes to live in. Here's where I stayed this year:

Fiction: sassy sleuths, new David Foster Wallace, and, uh, BookTok

The fictional series that came closest to replacing my reality is Veronica Mars. I know. It's not even books. For a couple of months I lived in Neptune, California, watching all 4 seasons and the movie and reading the books (The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line and Mr. Kiss and Tell). When it ended, part of me died.

To dull the pain, I shot The Complete Sherlock Holmes into my veins. Although with only 4 novels and 56 short stories, the canon only gave me a couple of weeks of escape. I actually found Sherlock pretty instructive for figuring out my freelance strategy. He only accepts work he's genuinely interested in. And his pricing strategy... wow. He either charges a bomb or does it pro bono.

Other mystery series I read and loved include Sujata Massey's Perveen Mistry novels, Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes books and TV show, Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels and Deanna Raybourn's Veronica Speedwell series (read most last year, but the 7th book came out in 2022).

I generally have no patience for "serious literature". But this year I made 2 literary discoveries. One was Nora Ephron by way of The Most of Nora Ephron. Erudite and low-brow at the same time: I LOVE HER.

The other is David Foster Wallace's Something to Do With Paying Attention. This is a previously-undiscovered novella that was only published in 2022 (how did I miss this!?).

I blasted through Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, alongside the TV series (Benedict Cumberbatch losing his shit, again). They turned out to be free therapy, helping me re-evaluate my relationship with my parents and move on from entrenched family dynamics.

Finally on the fiction front, I also read a number of BookTok books "for science". I was expecting reams of badly-written porn that I could be a snob about, but it turns out I have basic tastes. 

Like everyone else, I loved Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis (love interest is Adam Driver in Star Wars), Emily Henry's Book Lovers (Adam Driver in Paterson) and Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us (thank god, a love interest that bears no resemblance to Adam Driver).

Non-fiction: death, money, and self-help in unexpected places

I read an embarrassing amount of non-fiction in 2022. I guess it's all part and parcel of trying to discover myself, but it also led to me feeling lousy that my life did not resemble a "life-changing" self-help memoir.

While trying to read the early retirement classics like Early Retirement Extreme and The Simple Path to Wealth, I found myself thinking inexplicably about death. 

Re-reading Walden and Seneca's On the Shortness of Life gave me some insight. 

Thoreau didn't wait around for things to happen: “I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had already got.” 

Seneca, meanwhile, slammed those who wait for retirement age to start living: "Aren't you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and devote to wisdom only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end!"

Along the same lines, I also found Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks and Bill Perkins' Die With Zero important nudges towards facing mortality with pragmatism. 

I blog about The Artist's Way a lot, so of course I have to include it in my List of Life-Changing Books. For those who want to live less corporately and more creatively, I'd like to also recommend JoAnneh Nagler's How to Be An Artist and Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living.

Finally, I found unexpected inspiration in Nigella Lawson's How to Eat. This is not a cookbook. It's a guide to life. “In cooking, as in writing, you must please yourself to please others," wrote Queen Nigella. The fastest way to self-love and living the good life, it turns out, is by putting together a cheeseboard for one.