Posted on by Jordan

Year in Review 2022: Books

Best Books I Read in 2022

  • The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 ed. John Joseph Adams & Veronica Roth (2021)
    Synopsis: Stories about murderous kings, murderous robots, and murderous giant crawfish.

    As with any “Best” collection, there are a couple selections in here that seem grossly undeserving of the title. But there are still plenty of good stories, and for the most part those that don’t necessarily reach their full potential are at least interesting and/or amusing. Even the absolute worst story that I cannot believe got published even once let alone twice—seriously, you bring that story to any college fiction workshop it would come out 1000 times better, how the hell did multiple professional writers/editors not clock just basic, amateur bad writing—still poses an intriguing question that I haven’t seen explored much elsewhere.

  • I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (1950) [Also read in 2016]
    Synopsis: A brief history of robots.

    One thing I noticed on my most recent reread is that, while the quality of Asimov’s prose is not exactly consistent, his peaks are at least as high as his valleys are low. Take, for instance, this great bit of characterization from “Runaround”:

    “Powell reached for the ‘Handbook of Robotics’ that weighed down one side of his desk to near-founder and opened it reverently. He had once jumped out of the window of a burning house dressed only in shorts and the ‘Handbook.’ In a pinch, he would have skipped the shorts.”

    Or the evocative ways in which he describes Peter Bogert’ and Susan Calvin’s feelings about each other in “Little Lost Robot”:

    “[Bogert] saw no reason to change his perennial opinion of her as a sour and fidgety frustration.
    Susan Calvin’s train of thought did not include Bogert in the least. She had dismissed him years ago as a smooth and pretentious sleekness.”

    I mean, come on, “a sour and fidgety frustration?” So good.

    I also had a strange experience soon after I finished, when I was experimenting with the new ChatGPT model from OpenAI. After some initial difficulty getting it to respond how I wanted, I found myself talking to it in much the same way as the roboticists in I, Robot coax their own robots into responding as desired, anticipating and attempting to circumvent its predilections and limitations. I didn’t even realize the similarities until after, and it was honestly a little spooky.

    In general, I think the recent crop of “AI” chatbots and other systems are getting noticeably closer to the type of highly specialized robot assistants we see in the earlier stories. No progress on the whole Three Laws thing though.

    Finally, I just want to note that it is incomprehensible to me that I, Robot hasn’t been made into a limited-run streaming series with each episode corresponding to a chapter in the book. It’s structurally perfect for that kind of adaptation (especially with the flexibility of streaming episode length), it’s timely (with some minor modernization), and it’s entertaining. I’d sure watch it.

  • Anxious People by Frederik Backman (2019)
    Synopsis: A bank heist gone wrong leads to an awkward apartment showing where a group of strangers get to know each other, and themselves.

    Most of my favorite heartwarming stories are also a little heartbreaking, and Anxious People certainly fits the bill. It’s a story about finding human connection when you need it most, but one that’s haunted by a man for whom that connection came too late. The key to this novel, and what, along with its inherent darkness, keeps it from being saccharine or schmaltzy, is that Backman recognizes that empathy and hope are hard-won and valuable, not just things you can get from a Hallmark card. It’s enough to cut through even my cynicism and nihilism (at least temporarily).

  • Grievers by adrienne maree brown (2021)
    Synopsis: A young woman tries to get by in a dying city.

    A surprisingly contemplative post-apocalyptic novel about the nature of grief, trauma, and survival. Takes a unique approach by not trying to solve or explain the affliction at the center of the story, instead just exploring what it would be like to live within that world. Some people might find the relative lack of plot frustrating, but I think it works. Any criticisms I have are mostly for the prose, which isn’t bad but I think could have done with some more focused editing, as there a number of easily fixable typos, redundancies, and awkward structural issues that an editor should have caught.

  • Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History by Stephen Chrisomalis (2020)
    Synopsis: A deep dive into how we’ve used and developed numerals throughout human history, with a focus on interdisciplinary research.

    A fascinating look at the history of numerals, or really, the history of the history of numerals, as Chrisomalis argues against some of the received wisdom regarding how and why different numeral systems are developed and are (or aren’t) adopted. As a complete novice I found it largely accessible and packed with interesting ideas and new ways of looking at things I’d never really thought that much about, from the different types of numeral systems to how different forms of numeral representation serve different purposes.

    Chrisomalis’s analysis of the decline and fall of Roman numerals, while providing lots of interesting historical insight into that specific phenomenon, is also a great reminder to always question how your own biases might be affecting your view of times and cultures different from your own, to the point that you may not even be seeing what’s right in front of you. For example, a common explanation of the transition away from Roman numerals is that the new numerals were simply better for doing math. Chrisomalis points out that the Roman numerals didn’t need to be good for doing math because people generally weren’t doing math on paper, they were using specialized tools such as abaci or counting boards. The actual reason for the Roman numeral system’s obsolescence, then, is likely more complicated.

    The final chapter begins by positing some plausible alternatives to the dominant Western numerals* (one of which actually made me angry until I finally got it and now I kind of want to use it all the time) before taking a somewhat surprising pivot towards manifesto territory, which I appreciated even though I suspect I was not the target audience.

    *He addresses this in the book, but basically he argues that referring to them as Arabic numerals is erasing both the history of how those numerals were developed and the specifically Arabic numerals that are currently in use; thus “Western numerals” is arguably more relevant and accurate. I’m no expert and I expect there are dissenting opinions, but I find his argument convincing. At the very least it seems to come from the right place.

  • Coward by Tim Clare (2022)
    Synopsis: Author and podcaster Tim Clare interviews experts and reading studies from a variety of scientific fields, all of which are attempting to find the causes and most effective treatments for anxiety. Along the way he also describes his own experience with anxiety and his attempts to apply his newfound knowledge in his own life.

    Clare doesn’t offer easy answers but instead presents science’s current best understanding of anxiety from every possible angle, elucidated and illustrated with his own experiences along the way. It’s a great antidote to the kinds of self-help grifts and credulous, scientifically illiterate reporting that are so prevalent on this topic. Whether you yourself struggle with anxiety or you know someone who does, this book will give you valuable insight and, hopefully, encouragement.

    (Also I technically finished Coward on January 4th, 2023, but I read like 90% of it in 2022 so I’m counting it.)

  • Dream of the Trenches by Kate Colby (2019) [Also read in 2019]
    Synopsis: Colby attempts to use language to climb out of the hole language threw her in.

    I wasn’t going to bring my book to jury duty because I figured I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything. At the last minute I decided to instead bring a book I’d already read and could easily fall in and out of, and grabbed Dream of the Trenches pretty much at random. “Fall in and out of” certainly feels apt, not so much like love as like the little divots in the tumble dryer that my neighbors are always leaving their socks in.

    (Obviously there is a contradiction between having certain criteria for my selection and “grabbed pretty much at random.” I guess “pretty much” is doing the heavy lifting to resolve that contradiction, I couldn’t think of a less awkward way of defining that grey area between chance and choice.)

    On my first re-read (which really was just the 2nd half of my first read) I wrote various marginalia defining key words that Colby uses throughout the book. On this re-re-read I noticed that some of the definitions I so helpfully provide are written next to the second or third appearance of the word in the text. Colby herself does this, defining words well after she’s already used them without explanation, though I don’t think I was intentionally trying to copy her. I just didn’t know which words were worth defining (though the obvious answer was all of them), so I waited until I was sure. Maybe that’s why she did it, too.

    Jury duty ended up getting out early both days, and for the next week or so I gave preference to the book I had thought I’d be too anxious to read (Tim Clare’s Coward, which might be ironic but I think is just incredibly on the nose [as in his book as related to my own situation, not his choice of title as relates to the subject of his book, which is perfectly appropriate]), but picked up Dream of the Trenches again on Christmas thinking I might as well get it in under the wire.

    Despite being a frequent re-reader who almost never remembers to use a bookmark, it was only now, as I was flipping through to find where I’d left off, that it struck me that my brain was having to distinguish between my memory of reading these pages a week and a half ago and my memory of reading them (and then immediately re-reading them) 3 years ago. At first it did a pretty good job, but with each section I had to re-re-re-read more of it before I realized I’d already re-re-read it, the new reading experience bringing all the previous ones into line like an eclipse.

    Of course, I’m worried that all of this comes off as affect, but it really is just that reading Dream of the Trenches always rewires my brain, and it’s impossible not to write after it afterwards.

  • Time and Materials by Robert Hass (2007)
    Synopsis: Poems about time and, to a similar extent, materials.

    Hass has a way of writing in the moment that I really appreciate, both in how he captures thoughts, sensations, and events as they’re happening, and in how he allows the process of writing to be part of the writing, in a way that isn’t cleverly meta but just self-conscious in the most literal sense, aware that a poem is being written and that the act of writing itself may be relevant. Combined with his exquisite turns of phrase and sense of the line and the stanza, it makes for a truly pleasurable reading experience.

  • A Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy (2014)
    Synopsis: A young reporter gets sent to the front to cover what’s supposed to be a routine invasion, but gets swept up in a fight for independence from the Empire he was supposed to be serving.

    A Country of Ghosts is a didactic yet engaging and human portrayal of alternative forms of society. Killjoy very intentionally sets the story in a secondary world that’s roughly technologically equivalent to the 1800s in our history, not, I think, because she feels an anarchist society is impossible in our world and time, but because the point of the book is not to be prescriptive or predictive, is not to say, “Here are exact concrete steps to take to transform our exact world into this exact world” (I say I think but she basically says as much in the Afterword, so there’s no need to take my word for it). The point is to explicate an anarchist philosophy in a context where it’s not weighed down by the preconceptions and biases that would be intrinsic to such a discussion in our world, and I think in that sense the book makes its arguments cogently and convincingly.

    However, as with the first book in the Black Dawn series, adrienne maree brown’s Grievers, A Country of Ghosts suffers from a noticeable lack of editing. This can be seen in awkward phrases that could have easily been rewritten, redundant paragraphs that restate the same idea, one passage where a character is just flatout referred to by the wrong name, and the persistent use of the adverb “awhile” when it should be the noun “a while”, as it’s being used in the adverbial phrase “for a while.” None of these flaws ruin the novel, but they’re all easily noticeable and easily fixable, and should have been caught by an editor.

    I also just didn’t like the narrator that much, but I suspect that’s more a matter of personal preference than a failing in the writing.

    Overall, A Country of Ghosts is an action-packed page-turner that also serves as a great introduction to anarchist philosophy in a practical, believable context, and is only slightly hindered by a lack of polish.

  • 100 Years of The Best American Short Fiction ed. Heidi Pitler & Lorrie Moore (2015)
    Synopsis: Short stories from the last 100 years of this one anthology series.

    As with any story anthology, there are some great stories, some terrible stories, and most somewhere in between. (And then there’s Ernest Hemingway writing in dialect which I refused to subject myself to.)

    I think Barthelme’s “The School” is the only one I’d read before, which was surprising.

    This was also my first time reading several big names in the literary canon:

    I didn’t really like Fitzgerald, but his use of real-time dialogue (by which I mean there’s a line of dialogue, then some narration, then the dialogue picks up discontinuously as if it was still happening in the background while the narration was happening) is interesting, surprisingly cinematic for the time.

    I wasn’t really feeling Baldwin until the end of the story, which contains probably the best depiction of musical performance I’ve ever read.

    I really liked Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews,” both for the absurdity of its climactic scene and because I can relate to the story’s protagonist. And also because, for all that he is ultimately impatient and even cruel to Ozzie, Rabbi Binder does encourage and attempt to answer his questions, which feels true.

    O’Connor’s story was pretty bleak even for my tastes, just two unbearably unpleasant characters who, I suppose, get their comeuppance in the end, but it sure doesn’t feel good.

    I’ve been referencing Updike’s first rule of reviewing for years, but this was my first time actually reading his work, and I don’t really know what to do with it. I think it’s supposed to be funny, in which case it’s alright if a little tedious. If it’s not supposed to be funny then it is funny, just for different reasons.

    Oates’s story wasn’t bad, though I had a hard time buying into how vapid her protagonist is, but that’s probably just me.

    Saunders is the closest any of these stories got to genre fiction, and it only took almost 100 years.

    That was one of the interesting things about reading those interludes between decades, the editors keep talking about how fiction’s getting stale and they want more experimentation and innovation, but no mention is made of genre fiction whatsoever. Compare an anthology like this to one like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and it’s clear where all the experimentation and innovation was happening. “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester (published in 1954) is one of my favorite stories of all time, at least as good as “Sonny’s Blues” and “The Conversion of the Jews” (and, I think, better than “I Stand Here Ironing”), and certainly more experimental, and it’s a shame that Martha Foley (or, indeed, any of the series’ editors) would never deign to peruse The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

    Still, though, while this collection can feel a bit stuffy at times, that’s not to say it’s not worthwhile. But the copy on the back claims that, “[t]aken together, the stories tell the history of American short fiction,” and that’s just not true.

  • Crush by Richard Siken (2005)
    Synopsis: Poems about insecurity, love, and Jeff.

    Siken is very good and I very much don’t get a lot of his work. I first read this collection in college and re-reading it now I thought maybe less of it would go over my head but that wasn’t really the case. Siken’s metaphors are working at a level so far removed from what he’s actually talking about that it can make it hard to see down to the reality at the center, and the fact that the lines are just so damn good on their own almost makes them that much more opaque. Probably it will take at least a 3rd (and more focused) reading for me to start to get anything out of this, but I think it’s worth it.

    I do get the variably-justified lines a little better now, insofar as I can see how it just kind of *feels* right and it does seem like the poems that do it wouldn’t work without it. Definitely something I want to play with more in my own writing now that I have a better sense of what it’s doing.

    Also, “You Are Jeff” is great, I’d completely forgotten about that poem and it’s definitely my favorite of the collection.

  • Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (1993) [Also read in 2016, 2018]
    Synopsis: Love, math, and poetry at an English estate.

    I don’t have more to say about this other than I’ve read it five times now and the final scene never fails to give me chills. Such a beautiful work of art.

    (I did actually have more to say but it felt like it might be a longer essay so I didn’t. Then I got distracted by other projects and never wrote that essay. Still might at some point though.)

  • Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace (1988)
    Synopsis: Stories about game shows, talk shows, and McDonalds.

    I don’t feel like I have a thesis or anything here, so I’m just going to go through story by story.

    “Little Expressionless Animals” is probably my favorite story in the book, the way it balances the tension throughout is just so well done.

    I like how “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR” plays with the dichotomy of rooting its characters’ identities solely in their jobs but building up to this moment where they are reduced to their raw humanity, and the juxtaposition of the self-consciously detached narration with that poetic last paragraph.

    The title story honestly I could mostly take or leave, but I appreciate the dig at William F. Buckley. And I hadn’t heard of Norman Brown but he sounds interesting, I might end up reading one of his books.

    I’ve previously stated my fascination/discomfort with Wallace’s ability to empathize with politically distasteful figures, and “Lyndon” fits pretty neatly into that category, with the added complication of seeing him through the eyes of a fictional (I think?) gay staffer, which feels slightly iffy.

    “John Billy” is weird, but enjoyably so.

    I just couldn’t get into “Here and There,” it’s like a “Brief Interview” but in the style of “The Depressed Person.”

    “My Appearance” didn’t grab me at first, but eventually I got into it. It feels a little off though, like the structure of the story is implying that something’s going to go horribly wrong and then it doesn’t and then the twist is that this is actually about her marriage falling apart, but that’s not much of a twist because her husband was a dick the whole time, so it just feels like a non-story, or like “Late Show” fanfiction almost.

    “Say Never” is another story that seems to prefigure “Brief Interviews.” The choice of perspectives feels a little arbitrary and/or sexist, like why do we get the brother’s POV but not the wife’s or the mistress’s, I’m not saying get rid of the brother or even Labov, just seems like the women involved (other than Mrs. Tagus) would’ve added something.

    “Everything is Green” is more of a sketch than a story, but it’s fine.

    “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” is probably the most Wallacian story (or rather, novella) in the book insofar as it’s self-aware but aware of its self-awareness in a way that’s trying to make it clear that it’s not being merely clever but rather trying to break past the facade of its own cleverness to get to something sincere underneath—reminds me of “Octet,” though obviously sticks more to something recognizable as a story. I honestly don’t think I got most of it and I don’t know if even liked a lot of it, but it was interesting and of all the stories has probably stuck with me the most.

    There were a couple great character moments, e.g. the revelation that / description of the scene where Mark shot his prize arrow into the ocean, discovered that it floated, and then waited for it to come back. It’s this melancholy moment (capped off by “It makes Nechtr feel special, true. But from special it’s not very far to Alone.”), made all the more so by how it sort of bubbles up from the narrative unexpectedly and then there’s a perfectly-timed section break so we just kind of sit with it for a second in the white space of the page. Similarly, when we learn about D.L.’s dad, that same quality of the story’s just kind of chugging along and then suddenly we’re at this really intimate insight into a character who up til now has been largely an absurd, unsympathetic figure, and then we hit that section break (this time two section breaks setting off her dad’s note) and it’s like we’re suspended in midair for a second, and then we land and start chugging along again.

    And of course (back to how this is such a Wallacian story) there’s a story within the story, and it’s about someone faced with an ethical or moral quandary and ends ambiguously. And the story is about commercialism and pop-culture in that way that haunts all of Wallace’s writing (when it’s not just explicitly the subject).

  • Oblivion: Stories by David Foster Wallace (2004)
    Synopsis: Stories about market research, making the guy in the window seat listen to your weird story for the whole flight, and poop sculptures.

    Probably the least enjoyable of Wallace’s books I’ve read so far. That’s not to say it’s bad, but by and large these stories lack the sense of play or the intimate vulnerability that characterize his earlier work. Wallace feels more like a detached observer here than usual, which leads to a kind of dry, almost obsessively detailed prose that can be difficult to get through.

    There are some exceptions: “Incarnations of Burned Children” is almost unbearably visceral, and “The Suffering Channel” manages to be fun—well, and then there’s the ending of “Good Old Neon” which would be heart-wrenching under any circumstance but is doubly so given the context in which this book necessarily exists and made all the more powerful by this being the one moment in which Wallace abandons his detachment and even becomes explicitely part of the story.

    There’s also a theme of narrators emphasising certain ‘words,’ most notably in “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” and “Oblivion”, though there’s a similar element in “Another Pioneer,” and the use of technical Jargon in “Mr. Squishy” could arguably be placed alongside these as well, though that’s more of a consistent theme in all of Wallace’s work. It’s hard to say why, but for some reason I found the use of emphasis in “Philosophy” and “Oblivion” particularly…distressing? Discomfiting? The emphasis in “Philosophy” has a certain sinister quality that I don’t think is unintentional, given the story, a kind of sneering specificity, like the narrator is quoting someone disdainfully. And then in “Oblivion” it starts out as the narrator doing the whole pretentious “I’m going to say the technical definition of the thing and then put the colloquial name in quotes” thing that is a relatively common trope, but then by the end it feels like he’s just putting everything in quotes for no particular reason, like he’s so paranoid about using inaccurate language that he’s come to doubt the accuracy of all language and now he just lives in a world of approximations. If it’s intentional, as I think it is (especially given Wallace’s love of Wittgenstein and indeed Wittgenstein’s Mistress), it’s masterfully done and adds a subtle layer of unease to the story that helps cut through what, on the surface, is just an incredibly boring and easily resolvable petty squabble between husband and wife (literally they could have just bought a tape recorder my god).

    So, like I said, definitely a well-written collection. Just not one I’m going to be coming back to very often.

    p.s. So, in “Mr. Squishy”, are we meant to conclude that the dude just poisoned all of those focus group participants? Did I read that right? Also, if I remember correctly, there’s one moment where the narration, that has up to this point seemed to be in the 3rd person omniscient, is revealed to in fact be in 1st person, and I have no idea what to do with that. I think that happened in another story I read recently—it might have even been one of Wallace’s now that I think about it. Urgh, this is gonna bug me but there’s no way I’m going to be able to find it. (EDIT: it’s possible I was thinking of The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay, which IIRC similarly reveals a first-person narrator late in the game, though in that case it serves an identifiable purpose. But I read Mirror Thief over a year ago so it hardly seems like it would’ve been top of mind. Ah well, I guess we’ll never know.) Anyway, weird device, kind of want to use it if I ever write a really long story in 3rd person, just to mess with people because I don’t see what the point is otherwise.

    p.p.s. I was trying to decide if I wanted to do a bit where I read every DFW book except Infinite Jest, but my friend said I should read that before I read Pale King so I’m probably going to (NB: I’m currently reading it and it is very good). And this way I don’t have to read Everything and More which is apparently not mathematically sound, or his senior thesis which I probably would not understand at all.

  • Rusty Brown by Chris Ware (2019)
    Synopsis: People live their lives, more or less.

    I’ve never read anything like Rusty Brown. Which admittedly isn’t saying much given my relative inexperience with the genre, but still. A weird, intricately crafted (from the writing to the illustration to the composition of the page), emotionally devastating, brilliant work of art. A showcase not just for what graphic novels/comics are capable of but for what they excel at.

    (Look, I’ll be honest here, I started reading Rusty Brown in like 2020, I think? It was slow going; I had to stop reading it during my lunch breaks after I realized there were, quite literally, NSFW pages, and I’m not always consistent with my at-home reading. At some point I set the book aside for an extended period of time. Like…a year? I thought it was because I’d just read “The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars” and needed to take a break to try and piece myself back together, but when I finally picked it up again just a couple weeks before the end of 2022 I discovered that I’d stopped like 10 pages before the end of the book. So, oops.

    Anyway, all of which is to say while I technically finished this book last month [at time of writing], I haven’t read most of it since probably a year or more ago. So my ability to write any kind of substantive review is pretty limited, But I swear, it’s really a brilliant book. And “The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars” will filet your soul and eat it for dinner.)

Honorable Mentions

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