Some Books of 2022
I wanted to do more monthly writing about books this year. That, unfortunately, did not happen. A lot did happen this year. I moved. I started a PhD program. I read a lot. I (especially in the latter half of the year) wrote a lot. Below you’ll find some of my favorite reads. As always, I love to talk about books, so if you’ve also read any of them, let me know and I’d love to chat.
Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven; The Glass Hotel; Sea of Tranquility
Like a glass of wine you hold while staring over a balcony, this trilogy is haunting, reflective, and invective. Station Eleven tells a harrowing story of a post-pandemic existence. The Glass Hotel covers a capitalistic scheme being unraveled. And Sea of Tranquility connects them all.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
This book was my first time reading Ishiguro. I picked it up because it was one of the top books in science fiction on Goodreads. It tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend, who is taken into the family to be the companion of a sick child. Ishiguro’s book is more meditation on artificial intelligence, life, and relationships than a heavily-plotted book, but in that quiet, I think, the true beauty of Ishiguro’s writing comes through.
Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow
Iron Widow has a lot going for it that I love: giant robots, mystic magic, and spunky rebellion. What I found most interesting about Zhao’s work is its unsubtle takedown of patriarchy; Zhao is not a writer that you have to unpack what she wants to get across. She puts it right into the action of her book. That’s actually what I’m most interested in when it comes to her relationship to Literature—that one doesn’t have to piece a message together, that message is simply given to you. Does that make the book worse or better? Does the rage that is invested into the response to patriarchy get across the anger of a generation or is it too on the nose? I’m still mulling over that—and the ending to the book—while I look forward to the sequel.
Kiersten White, The Guinevere Deception; The Camelot Betrayal; The Excalibur Curse
Look, I am a lover of all things Arthurian, and I’m becoming a lover of all things Kiersten White. For me, the greatest depth of White’s work comes from her engagement with questions of agency and consequence. I noticed it first in And I Darken, and it’s continued through many of her books: how does one have agency in a controlled space—when ones very body confines you to a political or social space? She thought about this in And I Darken, her historical fiction, gender-bent trilogy about Vlad the Impaler (a.k.a. Lada), in which a woman gained fame through conquest. And she thought about it in The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, in which she injects a female friend into the work of Dr. Frankenstein and the book suffers out the consequences of femaleness in the 19th century. For The Guinevere Deception and its sequels, White takes on a different question with agency: bound by propriety, yet knowing nothing about that propriety, a Guinevere who does not know her history marries Arthur and must deal with ruling a kingdom, discovering love and friendship, and wrestling with her self. The struggle for (against?) agency is always a struggle with identity and place, and I think White’s Arthurian trilogy portrays that struggle—and some of its ramifications—really well.
Matt Bell, Appleseed
I took a course this semester on the word “Nature” in the history of American literature and thought. I read Appleseed near the middle of that course, and it affected my thinking about nature vis-a-vis the future in many ways. Nature as a word is contested since the beginning of American literature; the way John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau used it is very different than how we use it today. Nature has been used to subjugate land away from indigenous communities (the founding of the National Parks, for one), invest in a fairytale of certain ways of doing things as they’ve always been (gender, sexuality), and develop approaches to what it means to be human (are humans a part of or apart from nature?). Bell’s work, being science fiction, looks toward the future of nature, in how it can be used for control and domination in the name of salvation and safety. It makes you think about how we use nature and what that means, while also giving a story that whisks us away to a world that I hope will never be.
Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon
I listened to this book during my move from Kansas to Connecticut. I was also watching the AppleTV+ show For All Mankind at the time. The show and the book pair well because I was able to learn more about the history of the moon journeys, while watching an alternative history to those very same journeys. Rocket Men falls into a loose connected trilogy of historical books for me: Hidden Figures and Rise of the Rocket Girls. Taken together, these books presents a really good history of the beginning of the journey to space. In Kurson’s book, I found myself invested in that same national excitement that spacefaring brought in the mid-20th century, and I think that is a true prize of any historical book.
Neal Shusterman, Scythe; Thunderhead; The Toll
What would life be like if there were no death? Shusterman begins with this premise and then builds a strong trilogy that seeks to answer questions of meaning, choice, and duty. I thoroughly enjoyed this trilogy—from its dystopian premise to its musings on power, control, and choice.
Other Books of the Year
The following are other books out of the many I read this year (I’m at 241 for the year at this writing; we’ll see where that ends up now that I’m on break).
Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Ling Ma, Severance
Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers
Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife
John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
Jennette McCurdy, I’m Glad My Mom Died
T. J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door
Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
Pierce Brown, Red Rising; Golden Son; Morning Star; Iron Gold
Erik J. Brown, All That’s Left in the World
And finally, a favorite video.
