2022 Books of the Year

 

Of the 70 books I read in 2022, five deserve special mention as my favorite Books of the Year.  These works remain in my memory even months after I've read them.

FICTION

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

This book is incredibly subtle and really doesn't have a plot.  Instead it is a series of small, seemingly-unrelated vignettes in a women's life all stitched together.  It's a novel that delves deeply into the main character's interior life. By the time the reader arrives at the novel's conclusion, each of these incidents suddenly make sense and we witness the character's transformation and her commitment to take a different path in her life.    

Whereabouts is my favorite book by Lahiri, but I've read two others this past year and can say that she's become one of my most-treasured authors.

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is best known for her novel, The Forty Rules of Love.  Her most-recent novel about the forbidden love shared by a Greek boy and Turkish girl (teenagers), living during the era of civil war in Cyprus, traces their 40-year romance, told through the eyes of a fig tree that serves as narrator.  A fig tree as narrator?  Sounds preposterous, but Shafak makes it all work and, in the process, creates a wonderful mix of reality and fantasy that beautifully examines grief, love, memory, and the senseless cruelty of ethnic conflict. 

NON-FICTION

How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

In 2018, midway through Donald Trump's presidency, two Harvard political scientists, horrified by the erosion they were seeing in American democracy, decided to find out how and why democracies had collapsed during the 20th and 21st Centuries.  They discovered that most democracies that collapsed suffered a gradual and predictable death that had many characteristics in common.  This book examines these characteristics and how Trump and his minions followed the frighteningly predictable path toward exterminating American democracy.

It's a bit of a depressing text because the recommendations the authors made on how to save U.S. democracy when they wrote the book in 2018 still haven't been enacted.  But, we must not turn away from that which seems hopeless, because the world only becomes hopeless when we fail to to stand up and take action.

So, go read this book!  Every American should read How Democracies Die, as should all people who are interested in preserving or creating democracy in their own nations.  Perhaps the most urgent book I've read this past year. 

Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, by Lesley Hazleton

This incredible book is an explanation and defense of agnosticism, the belief that humans can embrace doubt as a religious stance.  Hazleton does an extraordinary job of explaining how being agnostic is actually a very profound spiritual approach to the question of the divine. 

Resa Aslan, who reviewed this book, sums it up better than I can:  "At last, in Agnostic, we have a liberating antidote to the either/or thinking of the atheist-believer debate.  Hazleton makes an impassioned and persuasive case for the insights, and joys, to be gained from a stance of not-knowing."

It's an incredible book that invites one to transcend dogma to fully engage religion and non-belief in an open-minded and intelligent way.

POETRY

Dearly, by Margaret Atwood

I am not really into poetry, but Margaret Atwood's recent collection of poems is phenomenal and might be the most engaging book of poetry I've ever read. The poems are profound and beautiful, yet meaningful and accessible.  If I were to ever teach introductory literature again, this would be the work I would use to introduce poetry to students.  

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These five books might not suit your interests, but embrace a book of your choosing.  You never can tell what you might gain.

And starting at the end of this month, I will be starting a new feature:  Book of the Month.  That way you won't have to endure reviews of all the books I have read, just the one I think might be of widest interest to all.