30 Best Books I Read in 2022

It's been a poetry year.

I read a bunch in 2022, but not necessarily for work, and therefore not for the most part 2022 releases. So instead I figured I’d go through the old Kindle and/or shelves and list the best things that happened to cross my eyeballs in the calendar year. Some nonfiction, some genre, some lit fic, a good bit of poetry, and who knows which else. Sometimes there are things I reviewed, and for a while I was doing capsule reviews—so one way or another there are links and quotes for a bunch of these. Hope you find something of interest!

30. K.N. Robertson Exposing Lesser Demons: This Is The Second Coming of the Supernatural (2022) Robertson’s self-published urban fantasy reads like magic world cyberpunk body horror. It’s set in an alternate earth/near future where many people—especially queer BIPOC people—have suddenly started manifesting magical talents. Many of these abilities are psychic. So everyone is simultaneously transforming and casting themselves into everyone else’s minds. The narrative is a slippery, fluid, thing, as, identity, bodies, and desires all drift and smoosh together. And then somewhere in there is a pulpy romance plot.

29. G. Elliott Morris Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them (2022) Morris is polling’s anti-Nate Silver; thoughtful, modest, and committed to democracy. This book is an explanation of what polling can’t do (provide certain election predictions) and what it can (help us understand public opinion to better arrive at democratic outcomes.)

28. Wislawa Szymborka Poems New and Collected (1998) I’d never read Szymborka before and had somehow always thought of her as a weighty, difficult Eastern European poet. She’s just the opposite, it turns out; this volume is funny, accessible, and filled with quick wit. She’s great.

27. Adelaide Crapsey Delphi Complete Poems (2019) Crapsey is a semi-forgotten but quite wonderful poet on the cusp between Victorian formalism and the imagists. She wrote a number of cinquains, a kind of blank verse haiku form, which I adore. I put together a whole chapbook of my own which maybe someone will publish someday. In the meantime, here’s one of hers.

Youth
But me
They cannot touch,
Old Age and death…the strange
And ignominious end of old
Dead folk!

26. Imogen Binnie Nevada (2013) (LA Times) “A road-trip novel that refuses to go anywhere, people aren’t locked into linear narratives. Life stories pool in stasis or loop around on themselves. The challenge for Binnie’s characters is to be in the moment, not to reach some foreordained gendered goal.”

25. Rowan Ricardo Phillips Living Weapon (2012) (Patreon) “Phillips’ poems manage to feel clear and lyrical even while meaning leaches out (or maybe skitters away.) Similarly, his work often centers on a lyrical “I” which is almost the poet himself but then tends to turn into a trope and float out of his life towards some obscure and starry distance.”

24. Ling Ma Bliss Montage (2022) (Document Journal) “The mixture of fear and fascination with exiting one’s own life remains Ma’s central obsession.”

23. Grant Morrison Luda (2022) (LA Times) “A sprawling camp postmodern novel in which patriarchy is defined as a kind of magical Oedipal drag. Like Morrison’s work on everything from Batman to the X-Men, except even more so, the book is wildly and sometimes tediously self-indulgent. Also like the comics, it is in parts wildly, and weirdly, brilliant.”

22. Marilyn Chin A Portrait of the Self As Nation (2018) Chin’s a wonderful and versatile writer, combining Chinese, American, and Japanese poetic traditions into a irritated, amused cacophony rather than a melting pot. Her one line (often filthy) haikus, were maybe my favorite part of the book.

The frog jumps into the ancient pond: she says, no, I am not ready

21. Terrance Hayes American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) (Patreon) A collection of sonnets all with the same title. They don’t use regular rhyme schemes or rhythms, though he often includes a sonnet turn, and he manages to capture that blank verse sense of language as supercharged speech. Bits of it sound like if Yeats did spoken word, though lots of other voices wander in and out too. Everyone thinks Hayes is great, and everyone is right.

20. Rita Dove Sonata Mulattica (2009) (Patreon) A collection of poems tracing via imaginative interpolation the sparsely documented life of George Bridgetower, a Black violin prodigy who almost had the famous Kreutzer Sonata named for him before he got into an argument with Beethoven over a woman. The highpoint is a sort of hip hop battle between Bridgetower and Beethoven, but the whole volume is funny and weird and startlingly ruthless. By far the best thing of Dove’s I’ve read.

19. Margaret Drabble Seven Sisters (1992) Margaret Drabble hated post-modernism, supposedly, but then picked it up and ran with it in mid-life with this small novel of mid-life crisis and quiet rebellion. Some reviewers disliked the insignificance, but as I get older and more boring, I really increasingly appreciate boring novels in which nothing happens except for the quietly eviscerating delight of language with nowhere in particular to go.

18. Elizabeth Popp Berman Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality (2022) (Public Notice) Like the title says, Berman explains how progressive’s abandoned sweeping ideas of equality with a focus on smaller bore, supposedly more efficient ideals. Painstakingly detailed, infuriating, and ultimately a hopeful blueprint for the future.

17. Frank O’Hara Lunch Poems (1964) (Patreon) Supposedly these are poems O’Hara wrote on his lunch break in New York, and they have a famously breezy cosmopolitanism, as he incorporates passersby, newspaper headlines, and whatever he happens to be thinking about into an easy stream of consciousness. The volume includes some of his most famous poems (on Billie Holiday’s death and Lana Turner collapsing and how the mothers of America should let their kids go to the movies.) But all of them are filled with an irresistible gossipy good cheer

16. Philip Larkin Collected Poetry(1988) (Substack) As you’d expect of a collected poems, this is for completists; there’s a lot of filler, especially in the early volumes. But it’s interesting to see Larkin work his way into being the crotchety self-indulgent anti-romantic we know and aren’t supposed to love.

15. Joan Wallach Scott On the Judgment of History (2020) (Patreon) Scott argues in this great, short book, that the appeal to a future history which will right wrongs, or at least judge rightly, tends to erase injustice rather than rectifying it, allowing it to proliferate. She points to Nuremberg, which was careful to absolve Western nations of imperialism and racism by judging German crimes barbarous and uncivilized. Or, in other words, the claim that history will judge rightly relies on a narrative of progress which itself needs to be judged wanting.

14. Catherynne Valente Palimpsest (2009) The Palimpsest of the title is a mystical land like Narnia. You don’t get there through a wardrobe, though. The path opens when you have sex with someone else who has been there and bears a map of one of its neighborhoods on their skin. A magical realist bisexual fairytale of stories within stories and grief within loves, the novel like the realm opens for those who dream of trains and bees, bookbinding and locks. It’s not for everyone, but if Palimpsest calls you, you won’t ever want to leave.

13. Langston Hughes The Weary Blues(1958) Hughes makes poetry look so easy; his blues/jazz influenced verses have a spontaneous, joyful lyricism that sounds improvised on the spot. If it was really that effortless, though, everyone would write like this. Which they very much do not.

12. Anne Sexton Transformations (1971) (Patreon) Sexton’s reworked fairy tales are funny and magical and mean, brutal and knowing and innocent, like fairy tales themselves, but transformed.

11. Ron Eduard Hassner Does Torture Work? (2022) Hassner figured the best way to answer the title question was to look at the extensive records of the Spanish Inquisition. What he found was that torture does work—partially, slowly, if you’re willing to be very careful about it and have no deadline and no limit on your resources. Part of the true horror of the Inquisition, he determines, was that it was effective. And also that, in some respects, in comparison to our own chaotic, haphazard torture regimes, its calculated brutality can look almost merciful.

10. Amos Tutuola My Life in the Bush of Ghosts(1954) Nigerian author Tutuola’s novel is sort of a dream, sort of a collection of folk tales and sort of a metaphor in which being enslaved is like entering the land of the dead. A seven-year-old boy is chased by slavers into the bush, where magical ghosts torment him for years and then decades. He changes into a horse and a camel, is bound in spider webs, and eventually learns to be a dead man himself. The tale is written in English in repetitive, almost incantatory prose. It’s like the boy is watching his suffering and redemption through a veil of distance or shadow.

9. Gertrude Stein Tender Buttons (1914) (Patreon) “What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it?” There is not making sense like Tom Raworth and John Ashberry not making sense and even blackbirds not making sense but no sense is no sense like Gertrude Stein not making sense. It’s quite liberating the not making sense; it’s all in her head and she may mean something but there’s no obligation to communicate and so there’s no obligation to be communicated. Just not getting tired of not getting tired of it. Also it’s hard to stop thinking like not thinking with words once you start not thinking with words it’s hard to stop.

8. David Higgins Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt Victimhood (2021) (Patreon) A brilliant study of how fantasies of victimhood and colonization from War of the Worlds to the Matrix have been appropriated by the right for purposes of self-dramatization and radicalization. The reading of Philip K. Dick is especially thoughtful.

7. Maria Ying The Demon of the House of Hua (2022) Maria Ying is a pseudonym for Devi Lacroix and Benjanun Sriduangkaew. This is an interlude/prequel of sorts to their sapphic urban fantasy series. One sorcerer sacrifices her life so a demon will raise her child safely, leaving her lover to mourn. It’s a story about grief and found families which will break your heart and put it back together again.

6. Ann Akhmatova, trans D.M. Thomas Selected Poems (1985) I’d read one of Thomas’ translations of Akhmatova years ago, but this whole collection is really wonderful. This is one of my favorites:

Lying in me, as though it were a white
Stone in the depths of a well, is one
Memory that I cannot, will not, fight:
It is happiness and it is pain.

Anyone looking straight into my eyes
Could not help seeing it, and could not fail
To become thoughtful, more sad and quiet
Than if he were listening to some tragic tale.

I know the gods changed people into things,
Leaving their consciousness alive and free.
To keep alive the wonder of suffering,
You have been metamorphed into me.

5. Faubion Bowers The Classic Tradition of Haiku (1996) A great collection of classic haiku. Here's one by Yamazaki Sokan.

Even at the time
when my father lay dying
I still kept farting

4. Robert Nichols Theft Is Property: Dispossession and Critical Theory (2020) Nichols argues that the colonial act of taking land essentially creates property, and that indigenous identity is a dialectical response to that creation of property and to theft, which are the same act. It’s a great analysis…and I got it for free, which seems apropos.

3.Billie Holiday and William Duffy Lady Sings the Blues (1956) (Patreon) I mostly avoided rereads for this list, but made an exception for this swinging, painful memoir, which is as much about how the carceral state is a racist nightmare as it is about music. One of the greatest artists in the country’s history spent her entire life being tormented by the police. Those are the blues she sings about, and they’re pretty bleak.

2. Rachel Pollack Unquenchable Fire (1992) A future utopia/dystopia in which revolutionaries overthrow science in favor of a complex mythology probably influenced by Pollack’s interest in tarot. Pollack captures dream logic like just about no one else other than Kafka, and there’s rarely been a chosen one quite as desperately bitter about being chosen as the protagonist. I really don’t think I have ever read anything like this book. It should be better known, but I can understand why no one is quite sure what to do with it.

1. The FSG Poetry Anthology (2021) (Patreon) A massive anthology of 75 years of poetry from Farrar Strauss and Giroux’s catalog. Lowell, Bishop, Neruda, Walcott, Mina Loy, Lorca, Gluck, Ashbery, Celan, Rowan Ricardo Phillips...I read it slowly cover to cover over six months or so, and wrote a ton of poems while doing so. It kind of restarted my poetry “career”, so it was about as directly life-changing as a book is likely to be when you’re 50.

This is one of my favorites from the book:

And that’s it for this year! We’ll see if the poetry thing continues into 2023, or if I just burn out on it and slink back to prose…