Ten Favourite Books from 2022

Coming up with a “Top Ten” or “Top Anything” list of favourite books from the past year is a little project I’ve been doing since, oh … 2006? Some years it’s easy, and other years it’s frickin’ difficult, mostly because I’ve read so many good books in a given year that I can’t narrow it down.

This was one of those years. I could probably generate a Top 25 (or so!) list, but narrowing it down any further than that simply becomes arbitrary. For this year-end favourites list, I picked 8 novels and two non-fiction audiobooks that I really enjoyed, ones where something about the story or the experience of reading (or listening to) it lingered with me long after I’d finished the book. But it was a fairly arbitrary choice and for every book on here, there are at least two more that I really enjoyed that I left off the list. It’s been a good reading year, folks, and these are good problems to have.

If you want to read my reviews of the books above, they are (in no particular order, because if picking a “Top Ten” was pretty arbitrary, ranking them would be even more arbitrary!):

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
Devil House, by John Darnielle
Dark Tides (and also Dawnlands, next in the series), by Philippa Gregory
The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich
All the Seas of the World, by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Wolf Den, (and its sequel, The House With the Golden Door), by Elodie Harper
Small Game, by Blair Braverman
The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell
Unmask Alice, by Rick Emerson
Where the Light Fell, by Philip Yancey

I always like to track — more for my own interest than anyone else’s — a few stats about the kinds of books and kinds of writers I have read during the year. Sometimes these are more estimates than hard numbers, since I don’t always have full information about who a writer is and where they come from, but I like the big-picture element of tracking some of my own reading trends over time. So, in that spirit, a few 2022 stats:

Total books read: 125Fiction vs non-fiction: 107/18New books vs re-reads: 112/13Women writers vs men: 100/24 (one book had multiple authors. Didn’t read any writers that were, to my knowledge, non-binary this year).Newfoundland writers: 11 (from here originally, or primarily based here)Writers from the rest of Canada: 20Writers from the UK: 44Writers from the US: 42Unknown or from other countries: 8Writers who are BIPOC or otherwise would identify as racialized or “not white”: 16

That last stat is really interesting to me because a few years ago I started making a concerted effort to read more book by Black, Asian, Indigenous and Latine authors, and in the year that I started consciously trying to do that, my stats were about 70% primarily white-identifying authors, to about 30% other writers. What I’m learning is that if I don’t make a concerted effort to diversify my reading, it’s very easy to default to reading mostly white authors (and thus missing a lot of great books along the way!)

So that’s my reading “journey,” if you want to call it that, for 2022! Onwards!