2022 in Reading

Back at it and even less able to provide commentary than I was this time last year, but hot damn I love books.

(Previously: 2021 in Reading)

LegendRough Guide to Ratings
🎭 – Plays
📝 – Poetry
📖 – Books (Fiction)
📓 – Books (Nonfiction)
💬 – Graphic Novels
❤︎ = Yes
❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Priestdaddy
  1. 💬 Five Worlds: The Sand Warrior – Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma,  Matt Rockefeller,  Boya Sun
  2. 📖 Pirate Freedom – Gene Wolfe
  3. 💬 Thirsty Mermaids – Kat Leyh ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  4. 🔄 📖 Going Postal – Terry Pratchett ❤︎❤︎
  5. 📖 A Dark and Starless Forest – Sarah Hollowell
  6. 📖 Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
  7. 🔄 📓 The Do-it-yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad — Adam Gnade 
  8. 💬 The Daughters of Ys – M.T. Anderson, Jo Rioux
  9. 📓 How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne – Sarah Bakewell
  10. 🔄 📓 Burnout – Emily & Amelia Nagoski
  11. 🔄 📖 Small Gods – Terry Pratchett ❤︎❤︎
  12. 📓 At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life – Fenton Johnson ❤︎❤︎
  13. 📖 A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers ❤︎❤︎
  14. 📖 Luster – Raven Leilani ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  15. 📓 A Primer for Forgetting – Lewis Hyde ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  16. 📓 The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  17. 📓 Tiny House Living – Ryan Mitchell
  18. 💬 Amulet Book 1 – Kazu Kibuishi
  19. 💬 Amulet Book 2 – Kazu Kibuishi
  20. 💬 Amulet Book 3 – Kazu Kibuishi
  21. 💬 Amulet Book 4 – Kazu Kibuishi
  22. 💬 Amulet Book 5 – Kazu Kibuishi
  23. 💬 Amulet Book 6 – Kazu Kibuishi
  24. 💬 Amulet Book 7 – Kazu Kibuishi
  25. 💬 Amulet Book 8 – Kazu Kibuishi
  26. 📖 Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
  27. 📖 River of Teeth – Sarah Gailey ❤︎
  28. 📓 The Four Agreements – don Miguel Ruiz
  29. 📖 The Echo Wife – Sarah Gailey ❤︎❤︎
  30. 📓 When Strangers Meet – Kio Stark
  31. 📖 Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward ❤︎
  32. 🔄📓 The Sabbath – Abraham Joshua Heschel ❤︎
  33. 📓 On Imagination – Mary Ruefle
  34. 📓 The Timeless Way of Building – Christopher Alexander ❤︎
  35. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack – Ben Hatke
  36. 💬 Dancing at the Pity Party – Tyler Feder
  37. 💬 Zita the Spacegirl – Ben Hatke
  38. 📖 A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles ❤︎
  39. 📖 The Decagon House Murders – Yukito Ayatsuji
  40. 💬 Salt Magic – Rebecca Mock & Hope Larson
  41. 📖 Lies Sleeping – Ben Aaronovitch
  42. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack & Zita the Spacegirl – Ben Hatke
  43. 💬 Making Comics – Lynda Barry ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  44. 📖 A Master of Djinn – P. Djèlí Clark
  45. 💬 Coyote Doggirl – Lisa Hanawalt
  46. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack and the Goblin King – Ben Hatke ❤︎
  47. 💬 Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? – Roz Chast ❤︎❤︎
  48. 📖 Fair Play – Tove Jansson ❤︎
  49. 📖 Plus One – Christopher Noxon
  50. 💬 Berlin – Jason Lutes ❤︎❤︎
  51. 💬 Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe – Yumi Sakugawa ❤︎
  52. 📖 Matrix – Lauren Groff ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  53. 💬 Belonging – Nora Krug ❤︎❤︎
  54. 💬 My Depression – Elizabeth Swados
  55. 💬 This Woman’s Work – Julie Delporte ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  56. 📖 Shadowshaper – Daniel José Older
  57. 💬 Genderqueer – Maia Kobabe
  58. 📖 Full Dark House – Christopher Fowler
  59. 📓 Polysecure – Jessica Fern
  60. 📖 Spear – Nicola Griffith
  61. 💬 Dying for Attention: a Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care – Susan MacLeod
  62. 📓 300 Arguments – Sarah Manguso ❤︎
  63. 📓 More Than Two – Franklin Veaux & Eve Rickert
  64. 📖 Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls – Alissa Nutting
  65. 📓 Notes from Walnut Tree Farm – Roger Deakin ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  66. 📓 Unmastered, A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell – Katherine Angel ❤︎❤︎
  67. 📖 Maxwell’s Demon – Stephen Hall
  68. 📖 Magic for Liars – Sarah Gailey
  69. 📖 A Prayer for the Crown Shy – Becky Chambers
  70. 🔄📓 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard ❤︎❤︎❤︎ (last read in 2017)
  71. 📓 Everybody: A Book About Freedom – Olivia Laing ❤︎❤︎
  72. 📖 Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  73. 📓 The Joy of Small Things – Hannah Jane Parkinson
  74. 📖 Fisher of Bones – Sarah Gailey
  75. 📖 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John le Carré
  76. 🔄📓 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write – Sarah Ruhl
  77. 📓 Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again – Katherine Angel ❤︎
  78. 📖 Toad – Katherine Dunn ❤︎
  79. 📖 No One is Talking About This – Patricia Lockwood ❤︎❤︎
  80. 📖 The Impossible Us – Sarah Lotz ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  81. 💬 Sheets – Brenna Thummler
  82. 📓 Priestdaddy – Patricia Lockwood ❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎
  83. 📖 Upright Women Wanted – Sarah Gailey ❤︎
  84. 📖 When We Were Magic – Sarah Gailey
  85. 📓 Emergent Strategy – adrienne maree brown ❤︎❤︎
  86. 📖 The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey
  87. 📖 Fantasian – Larissa Pham ❤︎
  88. 📓 A Handbook of Disappointed Fate – Anne Boyer ❤︎
  89. 📓 Love – Leo Buscaglia
  90. 📓 Delight – J.B. Priestley ❤︎❤︎

Zip Books

Stumbled onto this page on my local library system’s website while looking for a way to request a graphic memoir about care homes and learned about something magical: ZIP BOOKS.

It does my heart good when I yell about library stuff on Twitter and lots of people share the tweet. The Internet being hot for libraries gives me faith in society. Although it’s also rough that the library’s website is so labyrinthine that I had to stumble onto this program by accident. I wish every library had a website as functional and fancy as a startup meditation app.

(I really liked The Library Book by Susan Orlean.)

Haven’t been blogging because my brain is really excited about thinking in images right now and also I can’t seem to muster the follow-through, so this is one of those “done is better than perfect” posts.

Literary Archipelagos

Last week, in a moment of Peak Bellwood Weakness I signed up for an online class/study group called Literature at Sea: A Brief History of Existence. The facilitator shared something in today’s intro call that I can’t believe nobody sent me when it was released back in July. It’s called An Ocean of Books and it looks sort of like this:

A screenshot of the homepage for An Ocean of Books. It shows a pale greenish blue chart with a mass of tiny, tan islands spread across it. They're loosely grouped by subject: History, Science, Novels, Classics, etc.

This “poetic experiment” was made by Gaël Hugo during his time as an Artist-in-Residence at the Google Arts & Culture Lab. It pulls from the entire Google Books library and uses a bunch of (I’m waving my hands vaguely here) technology to generate a chart of Author Islands whose distance from each other is determined by their relationships on the web.

The site’s a little awkward in places, but I find the whole concept delightful. The weird aesthetic mix of pixelated game art and old nautical chart elements!1 The playful mechanism for revealing keyword searches within a bank of fog! There’s also little factoids beside various islands, like this gem about Maurice Sendak:

A screenshot from A Sea of Books showing a drawing of a boy riding a horse. The text beside it says The original title of Sendak's famous book was Where the Wild Horses Are but he couldn't draw horses. So, when his editor asked what he could draw, his reply was Things.

Anyway, I spent a lovely afternoon poking around in here, but what it really got me hungry for was a similarly attractive way to organize one’s own library for others to explore. The trouble is that I’m just not moved by reading lists—even ones curated by subject. I’m a visual thinker, and I need to make a big mess and tack a lot of red string to the wall before I can truly understand how all these ideas are contributing to the electric pinball machine.

I don’t want the map to be dictated by an algorithm; I want to play cartographer.

I rediscovered a piece of technology this week that might hold the key, but I’m saving it for now. You’ll just have to wait.


1. Fun pedantic terminology fact: if it’s to do with the ocean, it’s a chart, not a map. Yes, there will be a quiz on this later.