All the books I read in 2022, reviewed in 2 sentences or less

My annual book review, on a new platform, and with a promise of more writing for the new year.

At the end of every year, I publish a list of every book I read in the previous 12 months. This is the first time I’m doing it on Substack, because it’s also the launch of my newsletter!

I’m going to be sending out one work of nonfiction per month, on the first Tuesday of the month. I want to talk about the issues that are central in my community: climate change, the crises in our political systems, and their connections to culture. I’m going to try to also talk about the things that make life good too. The first real post comes out on January 3rd.

I named the newsletter Bluebonnets after the beloved state flower of Texas. Bluebonnets are threatened by climate change, and make me think about how the things that unite us can also be the place to begin discussions about what we need to change. They also make me really happy every time I see them (unless they’re blooming in December).

All that is to say: please subscribe, and please enjoy All the Books I Read in 2022, Reviewed in Two Sentences or Less:

The Big Short - Michael Lewis: At the beginning of this year, I wanted to learn more about finance, and how it generates outcomes outside the ledgers and accounts of bankers. This book has earned its notoriety as the right place to go to understand why so many people lost their homes in 2008 and 2009.

Flash Boys - Michael Lewis: A different take on market manipulation, this book provides a very succinct explanation of why it's so easy for the wealthy and well-connected to make money on Wall Street: they know things that you and I don't, and they have faster computers than we could ever have.

Crashed - Adam Tooze: Crashed is a wide-ranging explanation of the aftereffects of the 2008 financial crisis in a global context, pointing out how a catastrophe cooked up by American and European bankers turned into a massive power grab for American financial hegemony. This book felt like it took forever, but explored territory I never considered about the power of finance, and not letting crises go to waste.

Life in the City of Dirty Water - Clayton Thomas-Mueller: Clay's book is an unsparring look at a hard life, well-lived, and his path towards becoming one of the most effective advocates for the planet anywhere.

Ancillary Justice series - Anne Leckie: An elaborate and dark sci-fi epic that is both a grand space opera and a dive into the ethics and nature of AI and consciousness. If you want some sci-fi that is both big and personal, this is a great series to pick up.

Battle Cry of Freedom - James McPhearson: For a while in the spring, I thought I wanted to get into reading more about the US Civil War, so I read the classic primer on the politics and history of the war. What stuck out for me was the partisanship of so many of the political victories that we now see as essential to the refounding of American government after the war: even in the midst of open conflict, Lincoln was constantly navigating party politics, and accomplished a great deal on small margins.

The World Is On Fire But We’re Still Buying Shoes - Alec Leach: Alec's book is the other side of the questions I have about the emotional terrain of climate change: it's about how to develop new emotional and aesthetic tools to manage your impact on the planet, and become happier in a life of owning less.

Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey: I took this book with me into the Grand Canyon, and for all of Abbey's clear love and appreciation for the land, it's also clear that he's a bit of a jerk.

This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: A charming and unexpected delight: a time-traveling epistolatory queer romance, written with pace and verve. I picked it up based on the recommendation of a bookstore in Flagstaff, and have since recommended it to many friends.

Sugar Run - Mesha Maren: A general mess of a novel with little consistency in plot or voice.

Amatka - Karin Tidbeck: This is an uncomfortable blur of dystopian science fiction, where the world is destabilized by words and authoritarian politics. Consider it if you are in the mood for distinctly weird speculative fiction.

Appleseed  - Matt Bell: One part fairy tale, one part speculative fiction, throughout a reflection on ecological collapse, Appleseed has moments of brilliance but doesn't quite hang together as novel.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson: Everyone should read Snow Crash, the actual origin of the term 'metaverse' and one of the most startling visions of near-future America ever set to paper.

Noor - Nnedi Okorafor: I was excited about this book, but I found the characters underwritten and the plot thin. It never drew me in, or left enough to the imagination.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino: I read this while traveling through Venice, because I liked the idea of reading Calvino's surreal and existential Marco Polo while in his surreal home port. I've been intrigued and delighted by this book ever since I first read it 15 years ago, and I keep finding new things to love.

The Medici - Mary Hollingsworth: I picked this up while in Florence because something just felt off about the way city institutions talked about the Medici family. I was right: destroyers of democracy, bigots, and exploiters of all kinds, the veneration of the Medici is almost entirely misleading.

Neapolitan Series - Elena Ferrante: The Neapolitan series remains one of the greatest works of fiction I've ever read, and I was so pleased to have a chance to read them while staying in Naples (and Ischia) for several days. The experience heightened everything - my enjoyment of the book, my enjoyment of the city - and was as close to a perfect reading experience as I can imagine.

The Lying Life of Adults - Elena Ferrante: I picked this up while waiting for the ebook of the Neapolitan series to become available in the library, and it's a lovely, if less profound, demonstration of her strengths as a writer of young women struggling to navigate the history of the trauma that surrounds them.

The Lost Daughter - Elena Ferrante: This book feels like an intensified sample of the Neapolitan novels, from the title downwards. That is a good thing.

World War Z - Max Brooks: Worthwhile escapism made with dark clarity about human nature and bureaucracies.

The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown: Look, I was traveling through Italy and I kept thinking about this book, and so I re-read it. You will never read a novel more written to a screen adaptation than this one.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid: Mohsin Hamid's novels are modern fables of migration, and in my opinion, nearly perfect works of fiction. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about the way that money flattens the world, and the spirit of the people in it, and the lengths that powerful people will take to hold onto their power.

Hunger - Roxane Gay: My most intrusive thought is about body image, and it took me a while to be willing to read Roxane Gay's unbelievably honest book about her feelings about her body, and the path they have led her to through life. I'm glad I did, however.

Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie: I had hoped for a bit more from this novel, but it felt like so much of the plot was written to move its characters around, rather than to let them learn or grow. I feel like it was built to have political suspense at its center, but little happened that wasn't forecasted from the beginning.

The Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa: Few books have made me as physically uncomfortable while reading them as this one did: its description of a very specific kind of authoritarianism that is able to disappear memories and words is so real, and claustrophobic, it's hard not to feel the walls of the room closing in on you. Kafka reborn.

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro: A brutally sad novel about trying to find grace in a specific kind of alternative dystopia that also feels like a damning indictment of our own world. A grey reflection on class, genetics, and how to make life worth living.

Gag Reflex - Ellie Nash: More artistic statement than work of fiction; I don't want to say that teenagers' microblogs are not worthwhile reflections of *something*, I just think that a book written as a collection of them should lead somewhere a bit more clearly.

The Nutmeg's Curse - Amitav Ghosh: I'm very glad I read Amitav Ghosh's examination of Dutch spice colonialism before I traveled to Amsterdam - although, I will say it took a bit of the charm out of the experience. One of the ongoing realizations I've had as I've grown older is how much of history is about theft; Ghosh's book is about the ideas and rationalizations that shape that theft, and the kinds of wealth that it can generate.

The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber and David Wengrow: Despite its flaws, eccentriticies, and length, I think this is the book that most changed my thinking this year; Graeber and Wengrow successfully challenge the core idea of human history as a straight line of progress, rather than an ongoing exploration of values and culture. The history of human experience is wild periods of experimentation and overturnings, which is something we can embrace about our future as well - and reading about it (for so so many pages) helped me carry my worries about what's next more easily.

Cultish - Amanda Montell: Cultish makes valid and interesting points about the echoes of cult behavior in contemporary institutions, but only ever teeters on the edge of making a solid conclusion about what might be taken from those insights.

Gold Fame Citrus - Claire Vaye Watkins: Claire Vaye Watkins is my favorite new author that I've been introduced to in the past few years: her writing is vicious, seductive, and clear. This novel takes you on a jarring ride through apocalyptic California, across a desert and into a cult, and drops you off somewhere that has no kind answers - and I absolutely love it.

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel: An epic on the meaning of power, and a finely drawn character study that shows how trauma weaves its way into politics. One of my favorite works of fiction that I read this year.

Devil House - John Darnielle: While in Amsterdam, I got to see John Darnielle's band The Mountain Goats play in a huge old church, backlit by stained glass, and watch them send a crowd into moments of mass catharsis unlike anything I've ever experienced at a concert before When you can do things like that, it's OK that you sometimes write heavy-handed, very mid novels.