During the calendar year of 2021, aided by lockdowns and quarantines, I managed to read 39 books. I haven't read so extensively in many years--since I was in graduate school. Let me introduce the one fiction and one non-fiction book I am choosing as my Books of the Year. These are the works I would recommend, if you only had the time and energy to read two books in 2022.
My first selection is for non-fiction and it is the book that I believe is so essential that every citizen on the planet should read it. Lie Machines, by Philip N. Howard, discusses (quoting the book cover) "How to save democracy from troll armies, deceitful robots, junk news operations, and political operatives." Howard is a political communications researcher from Oxford University who has spent the past several years gathering research on how troll armies work and how they undermine legitimate democracies. It's an incredibly well-researched book that presents a shocking picture of how democracy is in terrible danger. Best of all, Howard provides all of us with specific actions we can take to resist this evil and to fight back. Urgent reading for anyone who cares about preserving what's left of the civic good.
My Fiction Book of the Year is Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. It chronicles the life of a PhD candidate in neurosciences at Stanford University who is studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural pathways of addiction and depression. Doesn't sound all that exciting, right? Actually, it's a poignant story of a young African-American woman's efforts to figure out why her brother couldn't beat his addiction to heroin and her struggle to reconcile her career in science and her extremely religious upbringing. All of this while trying to overcome poverty, living in an America that isn't kind, to put it mildly, to people of color. The narrative voice is compelling and the story is also a thought-provoking meditation on racism, addiction, religion, the dreams of immigrants, and the inner tensions one struggles with when stuck between two cultures (in this case Ghana and the U.S.). I love this book and hope you have the chance to discover it as well.
No matter what you do, even if you never pick up these two books, please spend 2022 in the loving embrace of a good book, at least once or twice during the year. It could help transform your mind and enrich your life.
(Honorable mention for outstanding non-fiction book: How to be a Stoic, by Massimo Pigliucci. Honorable mention for outstanding fiction book: The Girl who Saved the King of Sweden, by Jonas Jonasson. It's not a great novel in the classic sense, but it is SO MUCH FUN.)
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