With 2022 drawing to a close, I’m delighted to share my annual list of books I’ve (mostly) enjoyed over the past twelve months.* This year I’ve grouped these 60 books into broad categories, to help you find those of special interest. Scroll down to find:
- The top five (I’ll revisit these over the years)
- History and biography (and all that entails)
- The places where we live (natural and man-made)
- The times we live in (politics and civic life)
- Memoir and story (tell me about yourself)
- Fiction (novels, mysteries, short stories, poetry)
- Theology and more (thinking about purpose and mindfulness)
- Sports (really just baseball)
- Outbursts of radical common sense and whatever else tickled my fancy (otherwise known as the miscellaneous section)
I hope you enjoy learning about the treasures I pulled from my reading shelf this past year. The more intriguing works get slightly longer reviews, while I’ve tried to limit most to 1-2 sentences because of the number of books. Clicking on the link under the book title will take you to my original review.
The top five (books that I’ll revisit over the years)
Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) by Howard Thurman.
The book by this philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader may best be known as Martin Luther King Jr.’s inspiration before he led the Montgomery bus boycott. In chapters on fear, deception, hate, and love, Thurman “demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised.” He writes that in the end Jesus affirmed life and rejected hatred “because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father.” As Martin Luther King demonstrated, Jesus and the Disinherited can be a life-changing book.
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016) by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
An examination of the many ways we remember wars and how those memories are shaped through the years, this comprehensive look at what Americans call the Vietnam War and what the Vietnamese call the American War pushes the reader to think beyond simple frames, self-serving myths, and established timelines. Nguyen calls for a process of commemoration which remembers others as well as one’s own. His book is as current and important as today’s headlines over who owns and who sets the narrative of American history.
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, (2020) by Anne Applebaum.
This work stands as a sobering and clear-eyed assessment of the motivations and tactics of authoritarians and their followers who have taken over political parties formerly dedicated to democracy. These authoritarians — individuals driven by resentment and envy, true believers in the righteousness of a moral system that elevates them while punishing those they do not like, grifters looking to make a windfall, and elite intellectuals who will destroy their countries to maintain power — have adopted a similar playbook in a variety of countries. Applebaum is a compelling narrator who brings context while synthesizing history over centuries into digestible portions.
How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, democracy and the continuing fight for the soul of America (2020) by Heather Cox Richardson.
A searing, provocative, and masterful history of how America’s oligarchs have tapped into the extraordinary strength of the ideology of American freedom to undermine freedom and liberty for anyone who is not white and male. After their defeat in the Civil War, these oligarchs regrouped and aligned with business and extraction interests in the West to create a new political power based on hierarchies. That shift changed America’s trajectory toward equality. How the South Won the Civil War is full of surprises and insight.
Lost & Found: A Memoir (2022) by Kathryn Schulz.
A gem of a book, this is that rare memoir by someone who is happy that is worth reading. Schulz knows that there is both a wonder and fragility to living in this world, but she is constantly amazed by life. Lost & Found is a meditation on loss and love in three parts, beginning as she is losing her father. She considers loss from the trivial to the consequential, the cosmic to the personal. At the same time, she is finding her life partner. Every love story, writes Schulz, “is a chronicle of finding, the private history of an extraordinary discovery.” The final section considers how in the midst of the transitions of losing and finding, life goes on. Schulz ends this wonderful meditation by noting that disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. “We are here to keep watch, not to keep.”
History and biography (and all that entails)
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America (2021) by Clint Smith.
A groundbreaking book by Smith, a poet and author, who asserts that slavery is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. Smith’s well-researched work takes the reader to landmarks and monuments all across America where some of the stories he hears are true, some are willfully false, and others take less than complete information to try and point towards truth. Smith works to understand what these places mean today, what we’ve told ourselves about them, and how that impacts the way we live.
One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018) stands as historian Carol Anderson‘s ringing condemnation of the rollbacks to Black and Brown Americans’ participation in the vote both before and especially since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Faced with demographics that were quickly shrinking the party to permanent minority status, “the Republicans opted to disfranchise rather than reform.”
The American Spirit (2017) is a collection of fifteen speeches given over twenty-five years by David McCullough, who passed away on August 7th. A sense of history, he wrote, “is an antidote to self-pity and self-importance…history is a lesson in proportions.”
The Architecture of Suspense: The built world in the films of Alfred Hitchcock (2022) by Christine Madrid French is academically sound, insightful in its conclusions, and — perhaps best-of-all — a page-turner that a reader simply cannot put down. Chris looks at the ways Alfred Hitchcock made buildings into characters for his films, including the mid-century modernist house as the new villain’s lair and, of course, the famous dilapidated mansion and roadside motel.
1368: China and the Making of the Modern World (2022) by Ali Humayun Akhtar makes a compelling case that China’s “first modern global age” began in 1368 when the Ming dynasty sent out a series of diplomatic missions to various parts of the world resulting in extensive commercial and cultural ties. The Opium Wars signaled the ending of China’s first great global era, leading reformers to push for a western-style industrialized empire that has generated a new set of problems along with enduring questions for the west.
American Dialogue: The Founders and Us (2018), an insightful work by historian Joseph J. Ellis, includes sections on the law and James Madison that were especially relevant during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The Constitution presents a “framework for debate” and that understanding provides the springboard for Ellis’s strong and sustained attack against the misconception of “originalism” — described by Justice William Brennan as “arrogance cloaked as humility.”
Edvard Grieg: His life and music is a 2002 work written by Erling Dahl, Jr. and published by the Edvard Grieg Museum — Troldhaugen. It is an excellent short intro for those who may have heard a number of Grieg’s compositions through the years but do not know much about the life, influences, and work of Norway’s most famous composer.
History Myths Exploded: How Some of History’s Biggest Ideas are Wrong (2019), by Christopher R. Fee and Jeffrey B. Webb, describes how much of what the general public knows about history — from the myth of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae to Abraham Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves — is at best incomplete and at worst wrong. While we often find truthful accounts of the past less than inspiring, what really excites Americans is a tale well told.
The places where we live (natural and man-made)
Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures (2020) by Merlin Sheldrake.
As his name suggests, the author can conjure up delightful prose and mind-blowing connections that educate, charm, enlighten, and broaden the reader’s understanding of fungi — that indispensable part of life on earth. Sheldrake’s first book reads like a page-turning adventure story right from the beginning. He has managed to inject a sense of wonder — and more importantly, a wonder-filled joy — into his vibrant and vision-changing study.
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2016) is a fascinating and controversial work by German forester Peter Wohlleben. There are those who want to criticize his science, while others simply appreciate how much Wohlleben’s love for the forest and his gifts for storytelling help build new metaphors to inspire a public that too-easily forgets what every schoolchild knows: plants are living beings.
Historic Houses of Worship in Peril: Conserving Their Place in American Life (2020) by Thomas Edward Frank takes the reader into the meaning of these community landmarks and the implications of the rapid change that is reshaping the physical and cultural landscape around them.
Why Old Places Matter: How historic places affect our identity and well-being (2018) by Thompson M. Mayes is a vital and timeless series of 14 thoughtful essays. The ones on memory, continuity, and identity position old places in people’s lives in a much more fundamental fashion than the ways in which we often talk about the past.
Taking Tea with Mackintosh: The Story of Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms (1998) — Perilla Kinchin‘s engaging and lovely look at women’s history, tea culture, and design in turn-of-the-century Glasgow — recounts the story of Catherine (Kate) Cranston, the owner of a chain of Glasgow tea rooms who built a business empire by serving both men and women in spaces designed by leading-edge architects and designers of the period, especially the preeminent Scottish architect Charles Reinnie Macintosh and his wife, the artist Margaret Macdonald.
Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities) (2012) stands as architect Daniel Solomon‘s call for understanding and care for our cities, focusing on what makes cities vibrant, livable, sustainable, and places where we would all want to live. Solomon argues that we need to pay more attention to nurturing “continuous cities” where new buildings, new institutions, and new technologies work to accommodate the past, acting with respect and adding vibrant new chapters to history without eradicating it.
The times we live in (politics and civic life)
The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That is Entrenching Inequality and Warping our Culture (2021) by Matthew Stewart.
Philosopher and historian Stewart has produced a wide-ranging survey and urgent call to action on wealth inequality. Stewart reframes the way we usually look at this issue, noting that the really wealthy make up only 0.1% of the population. When you examine the top ten percent to find the people who control more than half of the country’s wealth, it is those other 9.9% — looking a great deal like many of us and our friends — who are helping entrench inequality in our system. There are many suggestions and conclusions in this brilliant work, but most importantly Stewart calls for a strong recommitment to liberal democracy, which works to raise everyone up and which he describes as a truth machine.
Carlos Lozada‘s What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (2020) may be the Trump book you didn’t know you needed to read. As the nonfiction book critic of the Washington Post since 2015, Lozada read upwards of 150 works on a period “suffused with conflict, crudeness, and mistrust” and then created this wide-ranging, sobering, at times funny, and always insightful work focused not so much on Donald J. Trump, but on how we see ourselves in this moment.
Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961), James Baldwin’s powerful collection of thirteen essays written during the 1950s, bears “witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife” as one observer stated. Baldwin notes in the introduction that “Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”
Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (2022) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is a short but important work that examines the polarizing discourse of “identity politics” and how political, social, and economic elites have captured a phrase and political viewpoint for their own use. Táíwò’s work explains the complex process of elite capture and helps the reader move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.”
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003) by Chris Hedges is a book I returned to read again in February as Russia was threatening the invasion of Ukraine that ultimately came later that month. In Hedges’ words, war in Ukraine from the Russian perspective is a “mythic” war, where those involved seek to imbue events with meanings they do not have.
Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (2021) by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey makes an interesting, sometimes compelling, but ultimately unsatisfactory case as to why our pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. The Storeys examine the writings of four French philosophers to make their case against liberalism, but the book misses the point that democracy itself is a moral position that allows people to make their own choices and that is messy by design.
Memoir and story (tell me about yourself)
There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century (2021) by Fiona Hill.
This is foreign policy and national security expert Hill’s very personal story of growing up in England’s coal mining country as part of the wrong class, in the wrong region, with the wrong accent and nonetheless working her way through St. Andrews and Harvard to the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, and service in the White House. Hill uses her story as both backdrop and cautionary tale after having seen firsthand where we are headed without a major change in direction. She argues that our left-behind citizens deserve better in part because if we recognize that life is a “team sport,” we all do better.
Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967 – 1975 (2021), British singer-songwriter Richard Thompson’s witty, moving, and un-ponderous memoir, takes the reader through his early musical career in Fairport Convention, as a session guitarist for hire, and then in a musical duo with his wife Linda. As well-crafted as Thompson’s music, the book includes thoughtful passages about tragedy and resilience, insightful descriptions of 1960s London, and laugh-out-loud stories.
A Grief Observed (1961) by C.S. Lewis is a brief, poignant, and honest journal written following the death of his wife. Lewis works through his grief, the loss of meaning and faith, and his efforts to regain his footing in this world. While each experience of grief is unique, what Lewis describes feels so much like what so many have gone through in our period of mass death worldwide.
Survivor: The triumph of an ordinary man in the Khmer Rouge Genocide (2012) by Chum Mey, one of seven survivors of the S-21 Khmer Rouge prison in Cambodia, is a raw and moving story of a poor Cambodian peasant who became a car mechanic, and — after the Khmer Rouge takeover — was arrested under false pretenses and sent to Tuol Sleng, the name for the S-21 prison and torture center. The story of his resilience and impact is inspiring.
Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1959) is a memoir by the well-known New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling which captures his love for Paris, food, “and for pleasure itself.” While definitely a piece of its time, Liebling’s writing remains juicy and irresistible even today.
Fiction (novels, mysteries, short stories, poetry)
The Lincoln Highway (2021) by Amor Towles.
Towles third novel is a self-described “multilayered tale of misadventure and self-discovery.” Set in ten days in 1954, it begins when eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson and his precocious eight-year-old brother Billy set out on the road with the intention of going to California to begin their lives over. But the misadventure occurs when other characters quickly insert themselves into the trip. Towles explores how “evil can be offset by decency and kindness on any rung of the socio-economic ladder.” We also learn how a single wrong turn on the highway of life can set you off course for years but doesn’t have to last forever.
Raven Black (2006) is the first in the Shetland Island mystery series of author Ann Cleeves. Lonely outcast Magnus Tait stays home on New Year’s Eve and becomes the prime suspect when the body of a murdered teenage girl is discovered nearby the next morning. Inspector Jimmy Perez has his doubts, and in his work to unravel the true tale we find out a great deal about the Shetland Islands and this small, isolated community.
Magnus (1973), the second novel of George Mackay Brown, one of Scotland’s most accomplished 20th century writers. is the fictional account of the real-life murder of Earl Magnus of Orkney who “walked calmly, knowingly and completely unarmed to a terrible death at the hands of his cousin Hakon Paulson.” Told through the eyes of several peasants, it is both atmospheric in capturing the spirit of the islands, and descriptive in recounting the hardships and terror of life in the 12th century.
Christmas Stories (2021) by George Mackay Brown is a collection of seasonal short stories brought together for the first time in book form on the 100th anniversary of the Orkney writer’s birth. Brown was a unique writer who “attempted to capture and re-create the reality of his homeland” through religious and ritualistic themes in these pieces originally commissioned for the Herald and the Tablet.
Holes (1998), a novel by Louis Sachar, takes the reader on a darkly humorous trip. Because of a curse put on Stanley Yelnats no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather, our hero always finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is how he ends up at Camp Green Lake digging very large holes. Winner of the prestigious Newbery Medal, it has delighted pre-teens, teens, and adults alike for years.
The Great Passion (2022) by James Runcie, is “a meditation on grief and music” as imagined through the writing of one of the greatest masterpieces of Baroque sacred music, the St. Matthew Passion. The narrator of this historical novel is thirteen-year-old Stefan Silbermann, taken under the wing of his new school’s cantor Johann Sebastian Bach, who helps teach us how music speaks to grief while capturing, in a very imaginative way, what it must have been like to “sing, play, and hear Bach’s music for the very first time.”
Bronze Drum (2022) by Phong Nguyen brings to life a true story from ancient Vietnam of two sisters who rise up to lead an army of women, overthrow their hated colonizers. and create an independent nation. Their resistance reflects a fierce desire for independence that the Vietnamese never forgot. The lively writing shows how a country’s past and present can be shaped by memory and the telling and retelling of stories.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong is a stunning piece of writing in the form of a letter to the author’s mother, who he knows will not be able to read it because of her limited grasp of English. The masterful work is really about processing difficult memories, from his childhood in Vietnam to the move with his mother and grandmother to America, to his first love. The memories are painful yet written with a bluntness that is honest and real.
Time is a Mother (2022), the second book of poetry by Ocean Vuong, was written after his mother passed away and he describes the aftershocks from the realization of her death. Time is a Mother is a very intimate book that, as others have written, embodies “the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it.”
Lemon (2021), the first novel translated into English by the Korean writer Kwon Yeo-sun, revolves around the murder of a beautiful 18-year-old woman and how the case turns cold when the two prime suspects cannot be convicted. The reader considers issues of fear, guilt, grief, and trauma, while the book, as more than one review has noted, also serves as a “shrewd diagnosis of a culture that disempowers women — commodifying and consuming them, one after another, until their appeal wears out.”
Theology and more (thinking about purpose and mindfulness)
Short Stories by Jesus: The enigmatic parables of a controversial rabbi (2014) by Amy-Jill Levine.
In this highly praised study of the parables of Jesus written by a self-described “Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt,” Levine uses an easy-to-read style spiced with humor to get her readers to understand the parables in the same way as their original audiences did. She notes that these stories are less about revealing something new and more about tapping into “our memories, our values, and our deepest longings”, serving “as keys that can unlock the mysteries we face by helping us ask the right questions.”
Jesus the Forgiving Victim (2013), the fascinating book by priest, theologian, and author James Alison, follows on from the insight into desire associated with the great French historian and philosopher René Girard and focuses on the non-moralistic nature of Christianity. Grace, not laws or morals, is the theme that Alison explores through twelve insightful essays.
Biblical Fracking: Midrash for the Modern Christian (2019) by Francis H. Wade encourages the reader to explore meaning beyond the literal text and traditional interpretations of the Bible, building off the Jewish idea of midrash (to “inquire” or “expound”). In 20 short chapters, Frank asks us to wonder about things that have no authoritative answer in a way that leads to a faith-based reflection on the human experience.
Your True Home: The everyday wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh (2011 — compiled and edited by Melvin McLeod) has been part of my daily reading this year. The 365 meditations in Your True Home are focused on the monk’s embrace of mindfulness. Each meditation is only a few sentences in length, but the brevity is part of what contributes to their power.
Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life (1991) by Thich Nhat Hanh shows us simple techniques around basic human actions — such as breathing, smiling, walking, and eating — in order to make positive use of the situations that pressure and antagonize us. Addressing our personal peace and mindfulness is necessary, Nhat Hanh asserts, before we can deal with the broader, more global issues of peace and justice.
The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, faith, and food justice (2021), by Christopher Carter speaks to the clear, Christian ethical basis for a new system of food justice. “Our foodways are an expression of our identity, a way of maintaining connections to our ancestors and our ancestral homelands; our foodways are personal and communal, emotional and habitual.” This book — part history lesson, part spiritual meditation, and part call to action — is a timely reminder of the often-oppressive underpinnings of our broken food system.
Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973) by Frederick Buechner is filled with witty, slightly off kilter, and unconventional insights and asides. Buechner wrote this book from a desire to reconsider and return to the meaning of well-used words and it is equal parts thoughtful, spirited and entertaining in ways that relate to the doubter and the restless believer.
Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the Everyday (1991) by Gunilla Norris looks at the tasks we do — from awakening in the morning to locking the door at nightfall — and puts them in the context of living in place. “How we hold the simplest of our tasks,” Norris writes, “speaks loudly about how we hold life itself.”
Night Visions: Searching the shadows of Advent and Christmas (1998) by Jan L. Richardson is a series of daily meditations and blessings for the Advent and Christmas seasons, inviting us to encounter the God who dwells in darkness as well as in daylight as we: Stay. Sit. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Wait. Behold. Wonder.
Hidden Christmas: The Surprising Truth Behind the Birth of Christ (2016) is by best-selling author Timothy Keller, who has a perspective that came off to me as very moralistic. I prefer James Alison’s look at the non-moralistic nature of Christianity.
Being There, Peter Keese‘s short book of stories that came from the author’s Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) career, did stimulate conversations among our book group around being there for others. However, we concluded there is not enough of value to recommend it.
Sports (really just baseball)
The Baseball 100 (2021) by Joe Posnanski.
The self-described “writer of sports and other nonsense” has produced “a magnum opus…an audacious, singular, and masterly book that took a lifetime to write.” This is Joe’s intimate and very personal look at baseball history through the lives of the 100 greatest players of all time. Posnanski explains how his rankings came to take their form, which includes some of his personal quirks that set the players in certain places (e.g., #56 for Joe DiMaggio for his historic 56-game hitting streak; #42 for Jackie Robinson for his uniform number, the most famous in baseball). But mostly he wants these rankings to “give this book shape and spark a few feelings.” And they do. I happen to strongly agree with his number 1 ranking, but I know others who would disagree. The Baseball 100 is pure baseball bliss.
24: Life Stories and Lesson from the Say Hey Kid (2020) by Willie Mays and John Shea is a great memoir from a true sports hero. Broken into 24 chapters, Mays recounts stories about his father, “Cat” Mays in Play Catch with Your Dad; recalls his days in the Negro Leagues with the Birmingham Black Barons; and much more. Mays, who grew up in segregated Alabama during Jim Crow and the Depression, still tells us to Have Fun on the Job. I profess to being biased, but Willie Mays is, simply, the greatest baseball player of all time. If you don’t believe me, read Joe Posnanski (see above).
Outbursts of radical common sense and whatever else tickled my fancy (otherwise known as the miscellaneous section)
If Everybody Did (1960) by Jo Ann Stover.
This is the first book I remember reading as a child and it holds up to rereading as an adult. The quirky children’s book with the funky illustrations is a primer on how to live together. We are all a mess of contradictions so living in community is difficult enough in normal times. These are not normal times, in part because too many people in public life today clearly never internalized the lessons found in this classic.
Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers (2022) is Professor Emma Smith‘s delightfully written and thought-provoking work asking us to consider the impact of touch, smell, and hearing on the experience of books. There are fascinating chapters on the “Editions of the Armed Services” from World War II, digital books, book-burnings, a full chapter on Mein Kampf, and bookbinding.
Hokusai Pop-Ups (2016) by Courtney Watson McCarthy, a paper engineer and graphic designer from New York, is a moveable book featuring the work of Japanese artist Hokusai. It contains information on the artist, but the scene stealers are McCarthy’s dazzling pop-ups of Hokusai’s art, which influenced painters such as Claude Monet and architects and designers in both Europe and the United States.
FJ50, the 50th edition of the Fretboard Journal, may not count as a book in your mind, but this high-quality quarterly — which is supported by subscriptions and music-related ads and “chock full of the wild, weird and wonderful from the world of fretted instruments” — gets special consideration. The Fretboard Journal survives and thrives, content to bore in and focus on “the varied talents found in our little universe.”
Eat Your Words: A Fascinating Look at the Language of Food (1999) by Charlotte Foltz Jones was just the recipe for a short, delightful romp through the world of language and food. “Because food is necessary for survival,” writes Jones, “our entire culture is based on it”: our laws, our money, our superstitions, our celebrations, and especially our language.
Vietnam: The Essential Guide to Customs and Culture (2020) by Geoffrey Murray, is a smart and concise overview that pushed me to recognize how much I had to learn and encouraged me to explore paths out of my comfort zone.
The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant) (2004) by Avi is a delightful children’s book that takes the reader through the multiple adventures of Avon, a small snail, and his friend Edward, the ant. Along the way they meet many different creatures and decide that even tiny adventures can broaden one’s worldview.
Thanks for so many comments through the year from those who saw these reviews on More to Come and reached out to add insights and suggest other works I might find of interest. Keep reading!
More to come…
DJB
*To check out previous lists, click here for the posts from 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018.
This Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
Image from public domain on Pixabay
MORE TO COME... 