Marginalia, 2022

A year in books

11 min readJan 6, 2023

Last year, I read more books than ever before. I’m pretty ambivalent about that. (Skip to the bottom if you just want the books!)

Even before Goodreads, it was common enough to ask after another’s reading habits in social conversation. If the inquiries more frequently concern numerosity now, so be it; but I’m deeply uncomfortable with the framings that assume a higher number is better, even as I’m committed to the notion that reading is, if not inherently good, then a frequently useful and enjoyable pursuit.

For years prior I assumed this discomfort was just a prickly kind of humility, or perhaps an aversion practiced to avoid feeding the arrogance I know or fear within. (Even now, a voice suggests my protestations are false, cultivated, dissembling…)

This year I realized that this line of questioning also made me uncomfortable because reading is — can be, sometimes — a way to avoid, rather than engage with, the world. And why I would be avoiding the world is an uncomfortable subject. Suffice for these purposes to say that I’ve been in a new place, with fewer friends than I’m used to, having to build new social scaffolding and finding myself somewhat unequal to the task, particularly under the epidemiological specter of covid-19.

So I’m not proud, exactly, of reading so much this year. It’s a better way of passing the time than others, but I won’t be setting a goal to read more next year.

Don’t take this for a lack of bibliophilia. I’m very enthusiastic about what I read in 2022, and about the thoughts and conversations these books have sparked. Instead, think of it in the light of “a refusal of the myth of limitlessness,” from LM Sacasas continuing a thought from Iris Murdoch:

“If there is anything that makes us complicit in propagating the exhausting, depleting, surface skimming way of life, it is the refusal to acknowledge our good and proper limits as mortal, embodied creatures.”

So in 2023, I’ll double down on reading more intentionally, by picking books up more selectively in the first place, then emphasizing retention and engagement with them once they’re in hand.

Here’s some of what I noticed about my reading in 2022.

How I picked books

Almost anything I read comes with some kind of a recommendation. Notably in this age, these are not ‘algorithmic’ in the parlance of the day; but they are often from year-end lists (shoutout Tournament of Books), favorably reviewed in a publication, given by a friend or recommended by a social media follow.

And…this works well, for my purposes? I don’t recall any of the books I read this year as dreadful; they were, maybe uniformly, above-average books. You should have high standards for your reading time; no matter how much time you dedicate to reading, there is so much to read and so little time — you do not have to read bad books! (And I am not going to say what bad books are, because that is entirely up to you. Even if we were to grant Samuel Johnson’s idea that a good book must be of use, well, anything can be useful in the right hands!)

However, one place where things got haphazard: Public-library holds. I put things on hold when I hear about them. Sometimes they show up the next day, sometimes they show up in six months. This can create a when-it-rains-it-pours cascade of books, and a rush to finish them. No bueno! I’ll be utilizing that ‘Deliver Later’ button more often in 2023 as I try to focus on reading not just what I want, but when I want to.

New formats

I listened to audiobooks for the first time this year. What took me so long? Most days I walk the dog for up to an hour. From April or May onwards, I replaced podcasts with audiobooks for that time. It became a favored strategy for visiting classics I’d previously passed over, starting with several of the Austen novels. I don’t need a highly-produced audiobook to be engaged, but I did enjoy a few of those, in addition to the public-access, one-narrator versions of several classics.

For walking, social novels seemed best; it’s no surprise Gravity’s Rainbow was hard to follow, because it would be no matter how you tried to take it. However, the conversational call-and-response of Austen or Wharton, for example, was easy to digest, perhaps because it mimicked the format of some podcasts. I found that plot-heavy audiobooks also worked well. Dorothea Brooke, Heathcliff, Dr. Frankenstein, Emma, Lily Bart, Adam Trask and Robert Jordan made great companions to come with me and my dog on walks.

This is where I admit to starting most books at 2x, then increasing the speed, all the way up to 3x, depending on the narrator’s starting pace, accent, and number of voices… it drives plenty of people batty, but it works for me!

Also in new formats: Dracula haunted my inbox from May 3 through November 6. Written as an epistolary novel, someone adapted it for email. How neat!

Dracula Daily

Bram Stoker's Dracula is an epistolary novel - it's made up of letters, diaries, telegrams, newspaper clippings - and…

draculadaily.substack.com

A year for big series

I had a lot of fun reading big series this year. Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels both delivered on the commitment of something like two thousand pages of reading. The rewards of getting to know a character over that span yields such a deeper involvement. As with the difference between a two-hour movie and following a TV series that unfolds over the course of a decade, the characters accrete sedimentary layers season after season, like Better Call Saul or The Americans.

Intertextuality is rewarding, and inevitable if you read enough

You can create your own sequels by pursuing several books overlapping a single subject. And if you read enough, this will happen by accident, a network effect. Just as I was reading the Neapolitan novels, I was also taking a short seminar on Kathi Weeks and antiwork politics, the feminist strain of which owes much to the socialist women of Italy’s autonomist movement. These theorists pointed out the ways that the output of a factory depended not just on the [male-coded] labor of employees but also on the [female-coded] labor of caregivers at home who raise, feed and house the employees, as well as the public goods provided by society and the state, such as education. Thrilling stuff, and then, knowing nothing of the plot, I picked up Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, in which an American artist eschews the NYC scene for increasingly complex entanglement with an Italian industrial heir at the same time as Ferrante’s Lenù is raising children and the autonomists waging class war. I felt that, through these different texts, I got several different ways of looking at a similar moment, with compounding rewards.

Later I would read Middlemarch after Crossroads, another fun moment of intertextuality, though less rewarding…

Talk to your books

Out: Being able to sell your used books as “Like New.”

In: Underlining, highlighting, annotating, marginalia, the zanier the better!

Talk about your books

Some of my favorite memories of 2022 come down to talking about books, or using books as tools to talk about ourselves (Johnson again). Shit-talking Crossroads, even if it turned out to be … fine. DMing to ask, did you finish it? Trying to figure out why icky narrators bother us in some books but not others. Trying to figure out if Hana is right in The Gold Coast when she says, “But everyone is ambitious.” Trying to figure out why we were so worried that Autumn would take a turn for darkness. Lamenting the boyish and doomed alcoholic Sebastian Flyte, and all the people he reminds us of.

Most talked-about: The Neapolitan Novels, definitely The Secret History, Reconsidering Reparations, Pachinko, Brideshead Revisited, Sea of Tranquility, Fates & Furies, Crossroads, Wuthering Heights, and of course No One Is Talking About This.

Goals for 2023

I’m really excited to read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, which sat on my shelf for years before being consigned to a storage unit. I rescued it from that dismal locale over winter break, and can’t wait to start — and perhaps continue on with some of Lessing’s science fiction, too!

I’ve ordered books by a number of friends and acquaintances: Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow, The Rebounders by Amanda Ottoway, Home Bound by Vanessa Bee.

Continuing my reading in California Studies: City of Quartz by Mike Davis (RIP) and Always Coming Home by Ursula LeGuin. I might sneak in Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey, annexing Oregon into the fold. (For years I thought the title was Sometimes a Great Nation. Which would be a great title!)

I’m lining up a chance at interviewing Kim Stanley Robinson, which would be a treat. I’ll be focusing on his time spent in Washington, DC, and the relationship of that experience to the rest of his fiction — which means a close read of the Science in the Capital trilogy, reprinted as Green Earth. I’ll also try to close out the rest of Fredric Jameson’s book on science fiction and utopia, Archaeologies of the Future, since it has some critical treatment of KSR (his onetime student).

Speaking of Jameson, I’ve also got a massive backlog of Verso sale material — highlights include Sophie Lewis’ Abolish the Family, Ilya Prigogine’s Order Out of Chaos, the compilation Democratizing Finance, and Adolph Reed’s The South.

I think I’m going to try to tip the balance, generally, towards nonfiction this year. Books with ONE BIG IDEA are fun, but so are books with A FACT ON EVERY PAGE. I think that Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches might deliver on both fronts; do you know any others?

What else should I read this year?

Highlights from 2022

These are books that, I feel, offered not only an attractive premise, but over-delivered on that idea; they are “serious texts with a surface that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to satisfy that desire.”

2022 joints

The Trees — Percival Everett
Sea of Tranquility — Emily St. John Mandel (interesting because I hated Glass Hotel, and thought the first chapters of Station Eleven were worth the rest combined!)
All This Could Be Different — Sarah Thankam Mathews
The Mountain in the Sea — Ray Nayler
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse — Louise Erdrich

21st c fiction

Autumn — Ali Smith
The Years of Rice and Salt — Kim Stanley Robinson
Matrix — Lauren Groff
Oh, William — Elizabeth Strout

20th c classix

Stoner — John Williams
Housekeeping — Marilynne Robinson
The Street — Ann Petry
Fear — Gabriel Chevallier
Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro

Weird little guys

McGlue — Ottessa Moshfegh
Three — Anna Quin

Big classics that delivered

For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway
Gravity’s Rainbow — Thomas Pynchon
Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry
The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton
East of Eden — John Steinbeck
Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell Trilogy) — Hilary Mantel
My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave & Those Who Stay, The Story of a Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels) — Elena Ferrante

Nonfiction I brought up in conversation too often

The Control of Nature — John McPhee
On Freedom — Maggie Nelson
The Problem with Work — Kathi Weeks
I Love Dick — Chris Kraus
South to America — Imani Perry
The End of Tsarist Russia — Dominic Lieven
The Mushroom at the End of the World — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue — Samuel Delany
Heavy — Kiese Laymon

A few books I had strong, negative feelings about

Fates & Furies — Lauren Groff
When We Cease to Understand the World — Benjamin Labatut
A Bend in the River — VS Naipaul
How Should a Person Be? — Sheila Heti

All the books I read in 2022

Bold = Strong general endorsement, above and beyond reputation.

Fiction

The Gold Coast — KSR (unfinished)
A Manual for Cleaning Ladies — Lucia Berlin (unfinished)
Three — Anna Quin
Bliss Montage — Ling Ma
Oh, William — Elizabeth Strout
Home — Marilynne Robinson
Fear — Gabriel Chevallier
Housekeeping — Marilynne Robinson
For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway
The Mountain in the Sea — Ray Nayler
And Chaos Died — Joanna Russ
The Keep — Jennifer Egan
The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison
Autumn — Ali Smith
Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh
Our Lady of the Flowers — Jean Genet
Pachinko — Min Jin Lee
Breathing Lessons — Anne Tyler
Manhattan Beach — Jennifer Egan
Dracula — Bram Stoker
Gravity’s Rainbow — Thomas Pynchon
The Mirror & the Light — Hilary Mantel
The Farthest Shore — Ursula K. LeGuin
Desperate Characters — Paula Fox
The Tombs of Atuan — Ursula K. LeGuin
Waiting for Godot — Samuel Beckett
The Trees — Percival Everett
The Secret History — Donna Tartt
Little Brother — Cory Doctorow
Dirty Snow — Georges Simenon
Bring Up the Bodies — Hilary Mantel
A Room with a View — EM Forster
Harrow — Joy Williams
A Bend in the River — VS Naipaul
Red Moon — KSR
Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore — Robin Sloan
Fates & Furies — Lauren Groff
Beautiful World, Where Are You? — Sally Rooney
Cloud Cuckoo Land — Anthony Doerr
All This Could Be Different — Sarah Thankam Mathews
Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel
Railsea — China Mieville
Jane Eyre — Charlotte Bronte
The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton
Memories of My Melancholy Whores — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Passage to India — EM Forster
Stoner — John Williams
McGlue — Ottessa Moshfegh
Shaman — Kim Stanley Robinson
Empire of the Summer Moon — SC Gwynne
Real Life — Brandon Taylor
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — Susanna Clarke
The Street — Ann Petry
Sea of Tranquility — Emily St. John Mandel
Wuthering Heights — Emily Bronte
Objects of Desire — Clare Sestanovich
The Years of Rice and Salt — Kim Stanley Robinson
The Turn of the Screw — Henry James
Aurora — Kim Stanley Robinson
Changing Planes — Ursula K. LeGuin
Emma — Jane Austen
Intimacies — Katie Kitamura
Matrix — Lauren Groff
Crossroads — Jonathan Franzen
When We Cease to Understand the World — Benjamin Labatut
Harlem Shuffle — Colson Whitehead
Sense & Sensibility — Jane Austen
Severance — Ling Ma
Heavy — Kiese Laymon
Long Division — Kiese Laymon
Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro
The Book of Form & Emptiness — Ruth Ozeki
The Story of the Lost Child — Elena Ferrante
Those Who Stay and Those Who Leave — Elena Ferrante
The Flame Throwers — Rachel Kushner
The Story of a New Name — Elena Ferrante
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse — Louise Erdrich
How Should a Person Be? — Sheila Heti
No One Is Talking About This — Patricia Lockwood
Erasure — Percival Everett
My Brilliant Friend — Elena Ferrante
Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry
Piranesi — Susanna Clarke
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe — DG Compton
The 39 Steps — John Buchan
East of Eden — John Steinbeck
Middlemarch — George Eliot
The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton
The Immoralist — Andre Gide
Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro
Several People Are Typing — Calvin Kasulke
Binti — Nnedi Okorafor

Nonfiction

How Music Got Free — Stephen Witt
Anti-Oedipus — Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (unfinished)
Archaeologies of the Future — Fredric Jameson (unfinished)
Planetary Mine — Martin Arboleda (unfinished)
Build — Tony Fadell
The Will to Change — bell hooks
Reconsidering Reparations — Olufemi Taiwo
The High Sierra — Kim Stanley Robinson
Elite Capture — Olufemi Taiwo
How the Word is Passed — Clint Smith
South to America — Imani Perry
Chelsea Girls — Eileen Myles
I Love Dick — Chris Kraus
The Shock Doctrine — Naomi Klein
The Warmth of Other Suns — Isabel Wilkerson
Two Cheers for Anarchism — James C. Scott
Against the Grain — James C. Scott
The Control of Nature — John McPhee
The Mushroom at the End of the World — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Empire of the Summer Moon — SC Gwynne
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue — Samuel Delany
The End of Tsarist Russia — Dominic Lieven
The Right to Sex — Amina Srinivasan
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency — Olivia Laing
Entangled Life — Merlin Sheldrake
Emma — Jane Austen
Orwell’s Roses — Rebecca Solnit
The Utopia of Rules — David Graeber
Incompleteness — Rebecca Goldstein
The Dawn of Everything — David Graeber & David Wengrow
Heavy — Kiese Laymon
On Freedom — Maggie Nelson
The Problem with Work — Kathi Weeks