Favorite books of 2022 Archives

The Arsonists’ City

by Hala Alyan

File this one under "What Should I Read Next made me do it." When I recommended Alyan's debut to an upcoming WSIRN guest, I was reminded that she had a new book out, published in March. This new novel is significantly longer than Salt Houses, clocking in at nearly 500 pages and 20 hours of listening time, but I'm so glad I downloaded the audiobook anyway. I was quickly swept up in the story of the complicated Nasr family, with its Syrian mother, Lebanese father, and three adult children flung across the globe. If you enjoyed Marjan Kamali's The Stationery Shop, I urge you to consider The Arsonists' City for your TBR. Alyan's story, while a bit edgier (I'm thinking specifically of drug use), has a similar feel. Leila Buck's narration was outstanding.

Lucy by the Sea

by Elizabeth Strout

I sat down with this book on a Saturday and read the entire thing because I didn't want to put it down. It is a pandemic story, following Lucy as she escapes with her companion from New York City to the coast of Maine. The conversations in this book are about the pandemic, but also about the fragility of life and what it means to be in relationship with others, and I found it touching, sad, but ultimately life-affirming.

The Swimmers

by Julie Otsuka

This 2022 release made me an instant Julie Otsuka fan: I laughed, I cried, I dove into her backlist. This slim story begins with the collective narrative of the devoted regular swimmers at a community pool. But one day a crack appears in the bottom of the pool and it's soon closed to the swimmers. No longer able to gather for their laps, the swimmers are forced to individually deal with the grave disruption to their routine, and no one is affected more than elderly Alice, whose story takes over the narrative. The surprising pivot from snappy social commentary to a devastating portrait of encroaching dementia is effective and moving. Otsuka is a master of the tiny details throughout, be they witty or heartbreaking.

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution

by R. F Kuang

When MMD Book Club hosted Peng Shepherd in August to discuss The Cartographers, Peng raved about this new fantasy release from the author of The Poppy War trilogy. It's a cool 545 pages in hardcover, and WOW does she put every one to good use. The publisher calls it “a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”—if that sounds a little cerebral for you, don’t worry, it’s easy to get swept up in the story. I've found myself talking about it ALL THE TIME to all sorts of readers. Kuang's historical fantasy takes place primarily in 1830s Oxford, where the workers at the translation institute Babel literally fuel the British Empire by combining their language skills with precious silver bars. While I loved the academic setting and band of four fast friends, her engagement with the complexities of race, power, and privilege are what really ground the novel. There's also a lot of philosophizing about the art of translation and discussion of what the practice actually involves, which I found insightful and fascinating.

Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation

by Erika Krouse

An arresting blend of memoir and true crime about a landmark sexual assault case. “I became a private investigator because of my face,” Krouse writes. No matter where she goes or who she meets, perfect strangers tell her things they’ve never told anyone else. To her great surprise, this inconvenience turns into a job offer when a local attorney hires her as a PI to investigate cases for his firm. When the attorney takes on a new client who was sexually assaulted by college football recruits, he sets an audacious goal: he wants to prove the school was not only aware of but complicit in the program’s culture of violence. The prospect of securing justice and making the perpetrators pay compels Krouse to take the case, despite her own history of sexual abuse. As the lawsuit—and the story—move forward, her past trauma and its present repercussions nestle up alongside the investigation in the narrative, to great effect, and build to a stirring, stunning, and gently hopeful ending. A painful yet purposeful book, beautifully executed, utterly unputdownable. For fans of Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, with interesting parallels to Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand.

Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver is back with a retelling of David Copperfield; no familiarity with the original required but if you have read it, you’ll appreciate her updates. Damon Fields, known as Demon Copperhead for his red hair, grows up impoverished in the southern Appalachian mountains in Virginia. We first meet him at age 11 and then follow along as his mother becomes addicted to opioids, he goes through the foster care system, and later wrestles with substance abuse himself. Just as David Copperfield was an impassioned work of social activism, this examines the ravages in southwestern Virginia and how the people Demon loves and identifies with are oppressed by those who have power. It’s a big book and it’s worth every page. 560 pages.

French Braid

by Anne Tyler

In her 24th novel, Anne Tyler offers a funny and wise meditation on the enduring imprint of one’s family of origin. This multigenerational story portrays life with the Garrett family of Baltimore over a sixty-year span, beginning with a rare vacation in 1959 and ending in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In vignettes set every ten years or so, the common thread is the little kindnesses and cruelties that characterize the family, along with their constitutional inability to share their true thoughts and emotions with each other. In the final pages, one character compares the indelible imprint of his family to his daughter’s French braid: “That’s how families work,” he says. “You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.” The family may be exasperating, but the book is anything but. I loved this. For fans of Tyler’s Redhead by the Side of the Road and Elizabeth Strout’s Oh, William!

Foster

by Claire Keegan

This tender story is at once heartbreaking and life-affirming, and though it's a short story, it's lush, full, and packed with life. It begins on a hot summer day in rural Ireland, when an anxious child is taken by her father to live with a distant relative for a time, in order to ease the burden on her mother as she prepares to deliver another child. The story is just under a hundred pages but Keegan takes you on quite the journey: I read this with my heart in my throat, and found it to be a true testament to what a gifted writer can do in a small space.

Memphis

by Tara M. Stringfellow

Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and former attorney Stringfellow draws on her own family’s rich history to pen a stunning debut. Stringfellow’s grandfather was a World War II veteran who served as the first Black homicide detective in Memphis—before being lynched by his own all-white police squad. Her grandmother was among the first Black nurses in Memphis. This dual legacy of excellence and injustice permeates the novel as it traces a legacy of violence and matriarchal strength through three generations of Black women living in this historic city from 1937 to 2003. It unflinchingly portrays both its strong communities and grim history of racism and violence, illuminating the secrets each generation kept and the traumas they endured. Readers should know this novel depicts horrifying events (content warnings apply), yet it also lovingly and fiercely conveys the resilience, grit, love, and even joy of these women and their community. This is a stunner. For fans of Brit Bennett’s The Mothers and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand.

Take My Hand

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

A timely and gripping work of historical fiction loosely inspired by the real-life groundbreaking court case of Relf v Weinberger. In 2016 Memphis, distinguished Black doctor Civil Townsend prepares to retire. First she must journey to her hometown of Montgomery to make peace with the past and tell the truth of it to her own daughter. In alternating timelines, Civil reveals all that unfolded in 1973, when she was a young and idealistic nurse, stepping into her first job at a reproductive clinic serving Black women in her community. She cared deeply for the girls under her care, but grew alarmed at what she was called upon to do: administer experimental and perhaps unnecessary treatments to young patients without their understanding or consent. When the unthinkable happens to one patient and she is sterilized without consent, Civil becomes involved in a landmark lawsuit. A moving story and a testament to fiction’s power to influence hearts and impact lives. For fans of Kaia Alderson’s Sisters in Arms and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

An intoxicating and wholly unexpected epic of love, art, belonging, betrayal, and … video games. This is the story of Sam and Sadie, two childhood friends who meet in a hospital game room in 1986. They come from completely different worlds, but bond immediately over video games. Eight years later, as students at separate Boston colleges, the pair reunite and bootstrap a Tempest-inspired video game that becomes an unexpected blockbuster, cementing their future as game designers but bringing upheaval into their personal lives. I don’t have much interest in video games but I adored this book, which is ultimately about creativity and ambition, astonishing success and what comes after, and the inevitable hurts and disappointments of a life-defining friendship. It’s a stirring meditation on the intrinsic hopefulness of games, and what they might mean for us all. Content warnings apply. For fans of Free Guy, Grace Li’s Portrait of a Thief, and Alice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point.

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me

by Ada Calhoun

Regular readers know I adore sagas of complicated families. This new nonfiction work from Why We Can't Sleep author Ada Calhoun delivers all that and more. Thanks to the book's pre-release publicity, I discovered Calhoun is the daughter of art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who I've been quoting for YEARS (especially in MMD Book Club) about his approach to works that aren't "immediately hospitable." Calhoun's new genre-bending book is a memoir-ish look at their complex relationship—and also a profile-of-sorts about poet Frank O'Hara. I couldn't resist, devoured it in 36 hours, and put it straight on my Best of the Year list. By the time I closed the last page I'd googled a hundred things about NYC history and requested ten books from my local library. Fascinating, devastating, vexing, illuminating. Heads up for a handful of content warnings that aren't obvious from the publisher's description or reviews.

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give

by Ada Calhoun

I blew through this essay collection on marriage, relationships, infidelity, divorce, and personal growth that came into being because of her viral Modern Love column, and made a hundred highlights along the way. This book would have horrified me when I was younger, but Will and I celebrated our 22nd anniversary this year: we're hardly newlyweds. To give you a taste: "'The first twenty years [of marriage] are the hardest,' an older woman once told me. At the time I thought she was joking. She was not." Or this: "Even good marriages sometimes involve flinging a remote control at the wall." I loved it.

Funny You Should Ask

by Elissa Sussman

I flew through this: strong writing, interesting format, great narrative drive, tons of fun. The story unfolds in two timelines: back then, Chani Horowitz wanted to be a serious writer but she's stuck writing puff pieces for popular outlets, something her more literary colleagues (and novelist boyfriend) sneer at. But then, she lands a gig interviewing A-list movie star Gabe Parker, her biggest celebrity crush and the next James Bond. Fast forward ten years: The Profile (as it came to be known) launches her career, but Chani still feels conflicted about it, wondering if she would even have a career without Gabe. So when his publicist asks her to revisit Gabe for a second interview, she wants to say no ... but she's also desperate for him to answer the questions that still linger for her ten years later, the ones she never wrote about or disclosed to anyone.

Diary of a Void

by Emi Yagi

The premise of this Japanese debut (translated by David Boyd and Lucy North) hooked me immediately: when 34-year-old Ms. Shibata begins working at the cardboard tube manufacturer, she initially finds it a welcome change from her old job, where sexual harassment was a constant threat. But she quickly realizes her new position has problems of its own: as the only woman in her department, her colleagues expect her to serve the tea, do the dishes, and sundry other menial tasks unrelated to her actual work. Then one day, fed up with waiting on the men, she impulsively tells them she can't clear the tea: she's pregnant and the smell makes her nauseous. The thing is, she's <em>not</em> pregnant—but because her work life instantly gets a whole lot better, she determines to find a way to keep the ruse going for the whole nine months. A satisfying blend of clever, playful, and subversive.

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