Best of 2022: Books
One of my favorite best-of lists to compile each year is the one for books. That’s usually because I’ve read around 20 books and have lots of great titles to share. However, this year was different. I had to scrounge together this list of ten books — one of which isn’t even a book. See, what happened was this: Earlier in the year I renewed my subscription to Harper’s Magazine. That took away time I’d normally spend reading books. All of which is to say: For a list that I normally spend a lot of time whittling down to 10, this time I had to pad out. But don’t get me wrong — the top five books on this list are all great and well worth your time. So let’s get started with…
10. 20th Century Boys (Perfect Editions, Volumes 1-4) by Urasawa Naoki
Eight years ago I read my first long-form graphic novel: Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series. It consistently makes it onto the Best Comics of All Time lists, and for good reason. Over the span of its 75 issues, Gaiman takes Morpheus (the lord of dreams) on all sorts of adventures. The worlds are constantly changing with each serialized story. Plots move forward nicely before wrapping up to start a new chapter.
Earlier this year I decided I should try my hand at a long-form manga. Urasawa Naoki’s 20th Century Boys showed up on a lot of the Best Manga of All Time lists, so I figured I’d start there. It has a pretty great hook: On the eve of the new millennium, a masked cult leader calling himself The Friend wreaks death and destruction around the world. The thing is, each of The Friend’s acts of terrorism are from The Book of Prophecy — a just-for-fun book that a group of young boys drew when they were playing together in the late ‘60s. We follow one of those young boys, Kenji, who in 1999 is a 30-something guy aimlessly going through life. He’s determined to unmask The Friend and bring The Book of Prophecy to an end.
Pretty great premise, right? The thing is, the story drags on for way too long. I finished four out of the twelve manga volumes (each volume is about 350 pages) and I still have no idea who The Friend is! There were times when Kenji or one of his allies would get tantalizingly close to unmasking The Friend, only for something to happen to prevent us from seeing who they are. Eventually I do want to go back and continue the story, but it felt like Urasawa was purposefully being coy. What I appreciated about Gaiman’s run with The Sandman was how many stories he told — there weren’t many moments of filler for the sake of padding out a story. But here, it seemed like Urasawa was trying to buy himself time by adding more and more complications and not resolving much. A good read if you have the stamina for it, but I found it exhausting and frustrating.
9. Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri
Tokyo Ueno Station reminds me a little of Juan Rulfo’s short novel Pedro Páramo. Both books have first-person narrators who may or may not be ghosts, and both books are full of disembodied voices. I enjoyed the episodic nature of Yu’s novel, and it builds in an intriguing, layered manner. I also really liked the powerful simplicity of some of Yu’s lines. (Morgan Giles does a very good job translating.)
But there were a couple things that constantly took me out of the reading experience. This is a deeply, deeply Japanese novel, and as an American who hasn't yet had the chance to visit Tokyo, I found myself wishing there were a map of some kind so I could reference all of the places, monuments, and locations that Yu references. Here's an example of what I mean: “I walked down the slope by Hanazono Inari Shrine and stood at the foot of Tenryū Bridge by Shinobazu Pond.” I already have a foggy, generic shrine in my mind because I don't know what Hanazono Inari Shrine looks like (or where it is), and now I have a generic bridge in my mind and I’m trying to figure out how all of these pieces fit together by the pond. Now, ultimately it doesn't really matter what my mind is picturing, but it takes me out of the moment each and every time.
If names/places/monuments like these only showed up once every 20-30 pages, then no big deal. But they show up very often, to the point that I just kind of gave up trying to picture anything. Combine that with the disembodied voices, and this was a very hard novel for me to visualize.
8. The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic edited by The New York Times Magazine
This book, which was published in late 2020, is a fascinating time capsule of the early days of the pandemic. It’s essentially an expanded version of an issue of The New York Times Magazine where the editors asked writers from around the world to contribute stories about this unprecedented new time. Most of the stories deal with the pandemic directly, although a few treat it more peripherally. And as with any collection of short stories, your mileage may vary. Of the 29 stories, I liked 19 of them, found seven of them to be so-so, and only really disliked three.
It was a very strange experience to read this book all throughout 2021 and into 2022. I finished it in late February of this year, at a time when we were hopeful that we were maybe possibly approaching an end. Turns out the end still hasn’t arrived and likely won’t ever come, no matter how badly people want the pandemic to be over. Still, it was interesting how dated many of these stories felt even after only a year or two.
7. The Reason I Jump by Higashida Naoki
I was very late to the party here. The Reason I Jump originally came out in 2007. Higashida Naoki, then a 13-year-old boy, wrote this short book structured as a series of questions and answers. Higashida wanted to articulate what it was like to be a nonverbal person on the spectrum. The English translation of The Reason I Jump came out in 2013, and it was done by novelist David Mitchell and his wife, both of whom are parents to a son with autism.
I read The Reason I Jump immediately after Tokyo Ueno Station. Maybe it’s because Yu is an adult and neurotypical, but none of the reviews for her book questioned whether she wrote it or how much of a hand the translator had in the finished product. That’s why I was sad to see so many one-star reviews for The Reason I Jump from people who simply cannot fathom that a 13-year-old boy on the spectrum could write this book. I mean, sure, Mitchell and his wife clearly interpreted the text through their eyes, but that’s true of any work of translation, not just this one. So unless there’s more concrete proof that this book was somehow fabricated (which I think would have surfaced by now), can we just give Higashida the credit he deserves for writing this book?
The saddest part about The Reason I Jump was how many of the answers to these questions include some variant of “please don’t give up on us.” Heartbreaking.
6. Harper’s Magazine
Harper’s has long been my favorite magazine. It’s the Gen Ed of periodicals — you never really know what you’re going to get in any given issue, although many articles focus on literature and politics. Each of the longer articles are sandwiched between the Readings section up front, which is around 10-15 pages of excerpts from books, speeches, interviews, poems, or other topical sources, and the story and reviews at the end of the issue. (The monthly Harper’s List is a real highlight, as is the last page of each issue, Findings.) Although the structure and layout of the magazine stays the same, each issue feels very different based on its content.
It was great getting back into Harper’s this year, even if it cut into a lot of my time to read books. Some of my favorite articles were Suzannah Showler’s “In the Land of Living Skies” (about her journey to reacquaint herself with darkness and the night), Hannah Zeavin’s “The Victim Cloud” (about gullibility in the era of scams), Tess McNulty’s “Both Sides Now” (a #MeToo memoir about McNulty’s time on the high school debate circuit), and a portfolio of photos called “Almost Home” by Tema Stauffer with text by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Long live print journalism!
5. Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me by John Weir
Full disclosure: John Weir was one of my MFA professors at Queens College. His third book and first collection of short stories, Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me is a series of linked autobiographical stories that focus primarily on the AIDS epidemic and how, as a gay man, he survived when so many of his friends did not. Many of the stories are about death, dying, losing, longing, and not having. That makes it sound like Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me is a dense, depressing tome when in fact it’s anything but. Weir covers some heavy topics, sure, but he sprinkles humor and crackling dialogue throughout. It’s a great trick, because that makes those more serious moments have all the more impact when they arrive — often completely out of the blue.
If nothing else, pick this up for the first story, “Neorealism at the Infiniplex.” It’s a perfect example of how Weir combines comedy and tragedy, life and loss, what things actually feel like versus what they should feel like. It's one of my all-time favorite short stories.
4. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
In poetry there’s something called an ars poetica: a poem about poetry. Scott McCloud’s 1993 graphic nonfiction work Understanding Comics is something of an ars comica — a comic about comics. Each chapter focuses on a part of the history or techniques surrounding comics, with an illustrated McCloud acting as teacher and tour guide. McCloud’s thesis is that comics are a valid and perfectly respectable artform just like any other — an argument that was probably more radical in the early 1990s but nowadays is a given. Even still, I really enjoyed how McCloud presented the material in a direct and digestible manner. His drawings do an excellent job of illustrating his points, and the book as a whole is really more about the creative process, regardless of medium. If you’re someone who hasn’t read a graphic novel before and are interested in dabbling in that world, Understanding Comics is a great place to start.
3. At Home by Bill Bryson
This book will always have a special place in my heart. I found it at a used bookstore shortly before we moved into our house — our first house, one that we bought all on our own. And although I wanted At Home to be the first book I read in our house, that didn’t end up being the case. See, one day, when I was about 100 pages in, I read an excerpt out loud to Kaitlin while she was playing with the cats. She was hooked, and we suddenly had a new tradition: me reading At Home out loud while she played with the cats before their dinner. It took us many months to finish this long 500-something page book, but it was such a fun and enjoyable journey.
The book’s conceit is that Bryson goes through his house room by room to provide a history of the objects found within that room. This makes for a really fascinating read, particularly if you enjoy trivia. There’s a lot of fun etymology in addition to some pretty wild tangents. I can’t help but feel that if At Home came out sometime in the past couple years instead of back in 2010 that it would be a podcast rather than a book. Although Bryson’s focus shifts around (and some chapters, like the one on the attic, seem to have very little connection with the room itself), there’s no question that this was a very fun and special book. The day we finished reading At Home we had our next book lined up: Bill Bryson’s The Body.
2. The Cruelty Is the Point by Adam Serwer
Here’s how good The Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer’s book on the Trump era is: I haven’t finished it yet but I’m confident placing it at the number two spot. To be fair, I’m almost done — there are only a couple essays left. But holy shit, The Cruelty Is the Point is great. Serwer does an amazing job linking current trends in MAGA/Trumpworld to their historical antecedents. Each chapter focuses on a different cruelty, with some of my favorite essays so far being about nationalism, the Supreme Court, and The Lost Cause.
Serwer is biracial, and I love all of the dualities he sprinkles throughout the book. I’ve been gathering together a list of dualities I can use as metaphors in my own book, and Serwer has many that I’m sure I’ll reference in the future. A really solid collection of writing on the tumultuous Trump era, and one with lots of great insight. Be sure to pick up the paperback edition for some new content not included in the hardback!
1. The 1619 Project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones
It’s no coincidence that both The Cruelty Is the Point and The 1619 Project were published by One World, an imprint of Random House. Both books do an amazing job of linking the past to the present. In The 1619 Project, the focus of each essay is to draw a line from slavery to our modern day policies, institutions, beliefs, or infrastructure. As short intermissions between these essays are poems and flash fiction by a staggeringly talented group of writers, including Claudia Rankine, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Kiese Laymon, and Clint Smith. But the real meat of The 1619 Project is the essays. Hannah-Jones contributes three essays, two at the start and then the closing essay. Each one of them is great, especially her first two which really set the tone for the rest of the book.
Here’s something I didn’t know as a kid: History isn’t set in stone — it isn’t just dates and names and places. History is an active process, not a passive one, and it requires historians to interpret the information we have to create a narrative about the past. The thing is, the anti-CRT crowd doesn’t realize that the white-washed history we all grew up with is itself a single interpretation of a narrow set of facts. What The 1619 Project does so brilliantly is expand upon that interpretation to include the contributions of Black folks past and present. The 1619 Project is a reminder that those people were always a part of history, regardless of whether the old textbooks and stories acknowledged them or not.
This is the best history book I’ve ever read, and one of the best books I’ve ever read — period. Yes, it is long and yes, it is heavy, but it is also beautiful and inspiring and will make you see how the past continues to affect the present. I hope everyone reads this book.
