My favourite reads of 2022
Was I distracted? For some reason I read a lot less than usual this year, and didn’t finish many things that I started. I blame myself. I think I’ve played a lot more games, board and video, and had a resurgence of watching older horror films that I hadn’t seen in years. Hammer and Universal monsters were great company, along with the works of John Carpenter and Roger Corman. I even treated myself to The Masque of the Red Death on blu-ray for Christmas, and it might make for perfect New Year’s Eve fare, along with a glass of good red wine and some choice nibbles. Anyway. Reading often got relegated to the last thing I did at night, a half-hour spent with whatever awaited me on the TBR shelf.
But there were nights when I started something, read an opening paragraph that hit me unexpectedly, and everything else got put on hold for that story. There’s nothing else like a good book. No intermediary, no other vision, no camera cutting away or swelling soundtrack. Nobody else in your imagination with you. Where does the author go? Are they beside you, as you walk through the created landscape? I’m not sure whether we are in their world, or the author enters ours. Some place between the two, maybe.
I felt that strongly when, early on in 2022, I read Martin Machines’ Gathering Evidence. I became so involved in that novel that I felt as if I was dreaming it. It’s a wonderful balance of realities and strangeness, and things that can’t quite be put into words by one voice alone. The author brings so much, the reader brings their own thoughts and feelings, and the result is spectacular.
Things that can’t be seen and must be imagined dominated Francesco Dmitri’s Never the Wind. That book had pages that seduced me and pages that terrified me. It’s very beautifully written, letting us breathe into the gaps between childhood and adulthood, sight and blindness, reality and fantasy.
A novel that seemed to be much more straightforward at first glance was Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, but there is just so much to unpack there that I could read it many times over and still feel no closer to nailing down that story about an artist who takes up an invitation to stay with an older woman. Few fictional relationships feel as dense and demanding and prone to sudden shifts in meaning as this one.
If Cusk’s book dealt in the power of the moment we live in, Shola von Reinhold’s Lote was sharply, magically funny about the past and how we translate that into inspiration and motivation, artistic or otherwise. And Iain Reid’s Foe also made me laugh out loud, detailing a journey that needs to be undertaken for reasons that become more and more sinister. I love that space in which a reader is both entertained and highly wary, like a practical joke that might, in a heartbeat, go so very wrong.
That’s the past and present represented on the page, but what about the future? EJ Swift’s The Coral Bones has such an expansive, wise, warm vision of what awaits us from near to far times, and it does that incredibly difficult thing of weaving together different perspectives without making any of them feel forced in order to contrive meaning. And while the last thing I wanted to read was a book about a virus, I ended up getting hooked by Phase Six by Jim Shepard, which fixed a serious and determined gaze upon possibilities, small and large, within the interconnected world we inhabit.
What else from writers that I don’t yet know well? Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, and The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara all gripped me, one after the other, in the autumn. I want to read more by all three voices.
Other voices were much more familiar to me. The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch, and William Golding’s Darkness Visible, for instance – great books that I hadn’t got around to reading before by some of my very favourite authors. And only this month I finally got around to Cinema Purgatorio by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, bringing me back to my love of that brightly lit screen, and all the ways that cinema can hold us captive. It’s a wonderful read, and mentioning it here also gives me a chance to say how much I will miss Kevin O’Neill’s marvellous gift. Nemesis the Warlock in particular was one of my early favourites from my 2000AD-shaped childhood.
And something I discovered this year that brought back the joy of mad genre inventiveness was Chew, by John Layman and Rob Guillory. I absolutely love the idea behind this – a detective that gets psychic impressions from things that he eats. This means he has to eat some fairly unsavoury stuff to track down criminals, and there’s a lot of nasty stuff, brilliantly drawn. I had a blast, and I think Roger Corman would have made a wonderful film out of it. But, in the absence of that, I’ll slink into the new year with The Masque of the Red Death for company, and with a TBR shelf waiting for me. Here’s to a wonderful start to 2023 for you, and to finding great new worlds to walk through, alone and with others.
