I never know how to start these lists, so allow me to lean fully into the weird—with a brief Q&A conducted by myself, with myself.
Q: Aren’t you sick of year-end lists by this point?
A: Sure—I mean, they’re everywhere and only seem to multiply.
Q: Then why make another one?
A: A New York Times critic (Was it Manohla Dargis? A.O. Scott? I wish I could remember) once wrote that we make lists to stave off death. They don’t literally keep us young or alive, of course, but allow us to mark our time and place in the world. I suppose it seems worthwhile to me to make an accounting, to bear witness, to scrawl I was here across the past year, even if only in a ledger of other people’s art.
Q: Did you only read new books this year? Why no love for the classics?
A: Last year, a well-meaning (I think) person on social media saw my list and implored me to read older books. Trust me, folks, I do: Some of my favorite reads in 2022 were Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Annie Proulx’s Close Range, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and collected works by poets such as Sandburg, O’Hara and Pinsky. But again, this list is meant to drive a stake into current soil, to honor books that are only now moving through the atmosphere and finding their people.
Q: Wasn’t 2021’s year-end book list a three-partner (fiction, nonfiction, poetry)? Why are you changing the format and scope?
A: That was … a lot of work. And frankly, it seems a little self-indulgent/important to assume that readers will go along with me for three lists. I feel bad about not being able to honor as many books, but this seems more manageable, more faithful.
Q: What do you hope readers take from this list?
I hope the authors I name feel honored, feel heard, know their work kept me company and kept me moving in a truly difficult year. And I always envision a reader stumbling upon a once-unknown title here, seeking it on the shelves of their local library or bookstore and seeing themselves in the words.
Q: What do the books on this list have in common?
Beauty. Sentences that pierced the fog within and without me. An ability to conjure love for the people they chronicled and captured in ink (and for the authors especially), then turn that affection back toward the 3-D world.
Q: Isn’t the guy in that picture reading a magazine?
A: Let’s just get to the list.
Here are my 25 favorite books released and read in 2022, listed alphabetically by author’s name:
Claude Atcho, Reading Black Books (religion and culture)
Thick hope is the through line and ever-expanding terminus in Atcho’s beautifully dense debut. Through the novels of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Nella Larsen and more, he examines the layers upon layers of life that make up experience, community, narrative and wisdom, then shows how these layers become cords, tethering us together and to faith.
Read my Fathom Magazine interview with Atcho here.
Megan Mayhew Bergman, How Strange a Season (stories)
Bergman’s stories draw us into the lives of women living along the edges of collapse, personal or global. They wrap at least one fist around their own destiny, showing us something about how to exist in a world on fire (or, at least, one that’s smoldering). These stories raise gooseflesh but also make synapses rattle and hum.
Caylin Capra-Thomas, Iguana Iguana (poetry)
As fully-realized and self-assured as a debut comes, Capra-Thomas offers poems that establish a sense of place, that complicate our sense of such places, that make us laugh two seconds before crying, and trouble the waters within until we actually see ourselves through eyes of mercy.
Read my Columbia Daily Tribune review of Iguana Iguana here.
Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage (interviews)
Creativity, grief, organized (and private) religion and more come into the clearing created by the great Nick Cave and Irish journalist Sean O’Hagan in this extended, engrossing set of interviews. Cave and O’Hagan share a fascinating relationship on the page, the ability to keep the conversation spiraling in multiple directions yet tethered to an intimate core; and readers are all the better for eavesdropping.
Phil Christman, How to Be Normal (essays)
The highest compliments I can pay another writer all belong to Phil Christman. In these essays, when he writes of the familiar (in religion, in marriage, in masculinty), I read the ideas as if for the first time. And when his words lead me into uncommon territory, he never proposes exact answers, but shifts my thinking five degrees one way or another so I might begin to see for myself.
John Darnielle, Devil House (novel)
Darnielle’s murder mystery lives in the worlds of genre fiction and existential tome; meets the very definition of a page-turner, then keeps turning the reader around until our disorientation compels better questions about how and when our stories are told—and who’s allowed to tell them. Truly a book that deserves a greater share of our attention than we normally pay.
Emma Donoghue, Haven (novel)
Sometimes I face the temptation to cloister, to escape the life I’ve built and stumble upon a secluded place, just me and my God. Donoghue’s novel, about a trio of Irish monks setting sail for a harsh skellig, is both wish fulfillment and a cautionary tale then; the survival of body and soul, of sanity and belief, ring through these pages, lending high stakes to even the smallest motion.
Joy Harjo, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light (poetry)
This retrospective collection takes a gorgeous, soulful sweep across the poet laureate’s canon, baptizing us in the Southwest, displaying the shaping effect of simple desires—and their satisfactions. Harjo helps us remember what the pen and the heart are for, uniting them in glorious fashion.
Edvard Hoem, Haymaker in Heaven (novel)
A quiet and near-perfect novel from the pen of novelist Hoem, and translated into English, follows generations of 19th-century families in his native Norway—tied to the land and to love, yet ever aware of America’s siren call. The book is both as normal and magical as our lives can be.
Hua Hsu, Stay True (memoir)
Hsu offers readers the strange mercy of gazing upon his collegiate experience, on the common processes of discovering yourself and the uncommon, shaping influences of tragedy and particular identity. He introduces us to various sides of himself, and to people we can never know but are better for experiencing on the page.
Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night (novel)
Kawakami’s tale of a socially awkward young copy editor seems slim, but carries the weight of betrayal, of grasping for connection, even the elements of music and color. And it contains my favorite sentence of the year:
“The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright.”
Robert Wood Lynn, Mothman Apologia (poetry)
The temptation in any cultural narrative—from Biblical accounts of wandering Israel to modern dispatches from the eye of addiction’s storm—is to write ourselves off the page, to deem ourselves more inclined to virtue than those we spy. These poems from Robert Wood Lynn pull back the Appalachian curtain, documenting and divining how opioids have garnered a stranglehold; yet they never let readers off the hook, drawing out the nature of desire, pain and our grasping for consolation.
Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility (novel)
In what is a particular work, Mandel furthers the great project of her writing—to tie people, places and times together, thus tugging at the threads of our common humanity. Her handling of plot and narrative are practically peerless, but every detail plunges deeper into something that can only be understood as it is absorbed.
Charles Marsh, Evangelical Anxiety (spiritual memoir)
So many pieces of my own story converge in Marsh’s prose: intermittent mental health, the lusts of youthful flesh, the cocoon—warm yet stifling—of evangelicalism, the fear of (and eventual surrender to) medication and therapy. And yet Marsh is the only one who could tell this tale this way, lyrically and surgically, one eye scrutinizing and the other gazing toward healing horizons.
Mary McCampbell, Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves (religion and culture)
Through the lens of Graham Greene and Paul Thomas Anderson, Flannery O’Connor and Friday Night Lights, McCampbell models what it means to discover the beauty in a character, then pull at that same thread until we tug on the lives of people who cross our paths daily. Her work both affirms and expands the direction of my own, truly representing what it means to tie imagination and ordinary love.
Lydia Millet, Dinosaurs (novel)
I can’t get over (nor do I want to) the kindness woven through Millet’s latest, even as the narrative gestures toward deep social fissures. Through a protagonist who certainly isn’t perfect, but seeks to take one extra second, ask one more question, create one more point of connection, Dinosaurs embodies the beauty and frustration of living as a person-in-community (tilting the scale toward beauty).
Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona (novel)
Moshfegh’s rendering of a medieval village marked by generations of violence passed off as faith, hope and/or love, features gorgeous prose about some of the ugliest acts you can imagine. This book still haunts me months after reading.
Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark (novel)
Unbearably sad yet strangely kind, Nagamatsu’s pandemic novel-in-stories keeps asking the question What makes us human? The answers it dances around, and the very way the question is framed and re-framed, will work on readers long after the novel’s tragic images fade like the strains of a broken-hearted ballad.
Carl Phillips, Then the War (poetry)
Ever faithful to the craft and soul of a poet’s work, Phillips pulls the cosmos closer in this collection of new and selected poems—and underscores where the sacred beats within us. Lines like individual miracles abound, quietly expanding our sense of the possible.
KJ Ramsey, The Lord is My Courage (spiritual memoir)
Moving line by line through Psalm 23, KJ Ramsey explodes the text and thus helps fulfill it. Exercising her trustworthy voice—bearing years of scars across the vocal cords, yet a naturally exquisite timbre—Ramsey calls her readers to drink in the goodness of God and see themselves as worthy of space in eternity’s great poems. This book sits close to its readers until their breathing matches the rhythms of Ramsey’s prose.
Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh (memoir)
Riley writes this memoir with a poet’s touch, but never pulls punches, brushing up against dignity, place, embodiment, rage, rest and more in a way that is true to her own experience—and steeped in Blackness—yet calls every sort of reader to examine the places and purposes of their own lives, what they will accept, discard and transcend.
C.T. Salazar, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (poetry)
A crackling electricity and unparalleled soulfulness marks the poetry of C.T. Salazar, drawing readers back to the line—and the whole—time and again to luxuriate in their magic. Who can resist, or ever shake, phrases such as these:
“+ come dawn I'm a saint blue parable so telling how paradise takes + takes + maybe I wanted the world to wrap around me regardless of what that meant + on my arms these torn constellations made me heaven + my chest of bright stars”
George Saunders, Liberation Days (stories)
We are fortunate to be living in the time of George Saunders. His latest story collection once again fuses orthodoxy and innovation, affirmation and confrontation in ways no one else could, ways that make us instantly, though almost imperceptibly, better.
Sally Thomas, Works of Mercy (novel)
Kirsty Sain, the protagonist of poet Sally Thomas’ debut novel, is nothing special on paper: a widow, an immigrant, a churchgoer, a housekeeper. But Sain notices the world in poems, and eventually the lyricism embedded in the lives of people around her, inconvenient people, cracks the hardness of her heart, opening up worlds within worlds.
Read my review for Fare Forward here.
Lore Ferguson Wilbert, A Curious Faith (spiritual memoir)
My world, over the last 10 years or so, has flipped—from one with more answers to one with more questions. One of my favorite writers (and people), Lore Wilbert treats life’s lingering questions with the reverence and desire they deserve, teaching us to pray with question marks and take pilgrim steps in good faith.