I count myself lucky to live in this time.
Maybe every generation feels this way, peering around to notice the great writers of their day and age, counting their blessings with every page. All I can speak for is myself, in this moment, and affirm that (just six months in) 2022 has already yielded a year’s worth of great books. I’ll thumb through my favorites for you, while feeling the weight of leaving off another dozen texts that have shaped my year—and also acknowledging the many titles by friends and trusted writers that I have yet to finish or even begin.
For now, consider these 15 offerings and hear me say in steady voice that I am a better writer, and a person better equipped to handle this year’s particular storms and harness its particular joys, because of these books.
Claude Atcho, Reading Black Books (literature and theology)
Two of my favorite books of the young year should change the way we read (more on the other momentarily). My friend Claude Atcho offers a series of dense yet deeply expressive meditations on the work of authors such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Nella Larsen, demonstrating how their prose was always inherently theological and only ever augments Biblical themes of justice and personhood. Reading along with Atcho, we slip between layers of text to sit with the true soul of these books and their makers—and find the implications they left us on and off the page.
Megan Mayhew Bergman, How Strange a Season (stories)
Bergman’s stories read both as visionary character studies and dispatches from a modern world held together with paint and decaying plaster. These are stories from within a changing climate, stories of women wrapping at least one fist around their own destiny, stories that raise gooseflesh but also light synapses on fire. To read them separately is to sink into specific worlds; to read them all is to glimpse the bigger picture and dare yourself not to flinch.
Caylin Capra-Thomas, Iguana Iguana (poetry)
Some musicians make their fortune with early singles; some novelists change the wind with their first published pages. With Iguana Iguana, Caylin Capra-Thomas releases a debut that announces and cements her talent. No doubt, the poet has been paddling beneath the surface of the water for years (with several chapbooks and other publications to her credit); but this is a complete artistic statement, a work of depth and breadth, hyper-specific references and equal measures of relatable dread and playfulness. Astute readers will clutch this book with both hands and not let go till the last line breaks.
Phil Christman, How to Be Normal (essays)
The Biblical author James warns his readers against an eagerness to become teachers, lest they call down judgement upon themselves. Taking this truth to heart (and winking at roles and responsibilities), Phil Christman shows how much we actually need sages of his kind. An anti-how-to guide becomes an unassuming model for how to wrestle faith and politics and pop culture while maintaining dignity and kindness. These essays never tell you what to do and, by dodging that temptation, actually gesture toward the shape of a life well-lived.
John Darnielle, Devil House (novel)
Perhaps it goes without saying that I’ve never read anything quite like the books on this list; but this is especially so in the case of the latest from superlative songwriter and novelist John Darnielle (frontman of The Mountain Goats). On its face, this is a genre(s) novel, horror and mystery locked in fevered embrace. But Darnielle does so much more than keep certain beats or honor conventions. He fundamentally challenges our understanding of who, how and why stories are told. Whereas many murder mysteries keep us looking over our shoulders for shadowy characters, Devil House has us peering inside to seek out and wrestle down the darkness within.
Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night (novel)
Plot out the latest from this Japanese novelist and the summary might take two, maybe three, lines. But substance reveals itself in other ways; and, in Kawakami’s work, it shows up in an uncommon treatment of light and loneliness, the contours of classical music and the steam rising from a cup of coffee. What might read (at first blush) like the tale of a discontented young professional becomes the rarest of cautionary tales: to not miss the pleasure and wonder within our reach.
Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (essays)
Every writer should aim to take their reader on a journey; the late Barry Lopez did so better than most, shepherding his audience to Earth’s remote corners, plumbing the particularity of place while forever standing on common ground. This posthumous collection of essays is global and deeply personal, full of universal concern and intimate friendship, never failing to leave the reader with soulful observations.
Robert Wood Lynn, Mothman Apologia (poetry)
I just want to sit you down and read you lines from this collection, pausing at the end of each page to ask “Don’t you see it?” But I’ll leave the discovery to you, as Robert Wood Lynn cuts just-wide-enough paths through the inner and exterior wilds of Appalachia. These poems both document the crises of our day (opioids, poverty, particular isolation) and whisper testimonies about the way people from every time and place fall on swords of their own making.
Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility (novel)
One of the great storytellers of our time, St. John Mandel writes prose so beautiful it hurts yet nourishes. Here, that prose spills out in service of a story that is both in and out of time, connecting the dots between mystery and reality, art and whatever imitative lives we lead, our futures and all the ways the past proves its twin. This is a physically slim book compared to others tackling similar ideas, but it proves its weight at the sentence level and as its ink disappears.
Charles Marsh, Evangelical Anxiety (memoir)
Part modern-day Augustinian Confessions, part therapy memoir, part analysis of the evangelical experiment, Marsh wrote the sort of book I long to (but not yet). Evangelical Anxiety is among the most honest, lyric writing on mental health I know, tasting the sacramental in medicine, affirming the prayers inherent in four-letter words, juxtaposing youthful sexual urges with Larry Norman songs in a manner only washed-in-the-blood church kids would recognize. Reality is here, and it reaches off the page to correct, console and identify with those shifting their weight in the pews.
Mary McCampbell, Imaging Our Neighbors As Ourselves (theology and pop culture)
A spiritual partner to Atcho’s book (read them in concert and your heart will grow several sizes), McCampbell holds “high” and “low” art to even higher standards, exploring pop-culture artifacts as engines for empathy, as keys which unlock the doors to our neighbors’ hearts and homes. Through the lens of Graham Greene and Paul Thomas Anderson, Flannery O’Connor and Friday Night Lights, she 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. This pursuit feels like the great project of my life, perhaps the only way I’ve ever known to recognize the humanity in others, and McCampbell’s book both confirms my instincts and takes my hand in the process.
Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark (novel)
I keep telling friends Nagamatsu’s debut novel is among the most unbearably sad books I’ve ever read. To know me is to know what a sterling recommendation that is. This is also benevolently lyrical and forward-thinking fiction, an apocalyptic novel about the connections which make even the most ill-fated life absolutely worth the price of admission. Yes, this is formally-inventive work that ties its stories together without showing the seams. But there is a huge, beating heart here, a recognition of all that makes and keeps us human no matter the circumstance, no matter how and when the end draws near.
Carl Phillips, Then the War (poetry)
Phillips writes quiet poems that work wonders in and around their readers—pulling stars down to our level, taking solace in the witness of trees, ferreting out hope where it resides. This collection of the new and selected both underlines Phillips’ faithfulness as one of our gentle guides and shows his vision ever-expanding to meet readers where they are. The work is shot through, page after page, line upon line, with small but sticky miracles.
Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh (memoir)
Few writers reach into the marrow like Riley. This memoir, united and organized through themes of dignity, place, embodiment, rage, rest and more, both uniquely captures a life lived within Black communities and churches and sings sweet hymns to readers of all backgrounds, calling them to be “in that number,” counting themselves saints worthy of wholeness, known in their traumas and doubts. Riley writes with a poet’s touch yet pulls no punches; everyone says “honesty is the best policy,” but only writers like her can actually fulfill that platitude’s meaning and explode its significance.
C.T. Salazar, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (poetry)
I could quote verse after verse from Salazar’s first full-length collection, but these words need to be experienced in full. They build upon and converse with each other like songs on a Coltrane album, calling down holy fire while massaging the tender places of the soul. This is not merely a great book from this year, but a collection that deserves to be treated as an inheritance, passed down from person to person as a lifeline.