The best books I read in 2022

I’ve had to keep my head down and push forward this year, not coming up for air in any meaningful ways, yet despite this year being the most intense year of my adult life, professionally- and scholastically-speaking, I was still able to sustain my first and most abiding love of reading (even if I had to supplement it with more audiobooks and less handheld books than I prefer). I am just now coming out of the most stressful part of the year and am very hesitatingly yet gratefully starting to breathe a bit. In fact, the morning I started a draft of this post was my first morning in months where I read a book at my leisure during breakfast like I’ve done for years instead of reading an accounting article for school or a CPA exam prep book like I’ve been doing the past few months. It was beautiful.

Now that I have completed the courses for my degree, I am so looking forward to having time again to read for pleasure and contemplation. Maybe I will even revive this blog with my thoughts and musings. Until then, here is my annual list of the best books I read throughout the year, in no particular order (including a bonus at the end of the list).

The Hall of Uselessness by Simon Leys

Simon Leys was the pen name for Pierre Rychmans, a Belgian professor of Chinese Studies in Australia who wrote in both French and English. He was also deeply Christian (Catholic), which undoubtedly shaped his thinking and writing, both of which are clear-sighted, honest, and deeply insightful. He loved literature, so his writings on books and authors are personal, not detached or distanced. And though I don’t know or love China as much as he did, I learned a lot about it from this book. This collection was superb. I was sad when I finished it and was sad to learn that Leys died in 2014 and therefore isn’t writing more for me to read.

Chesterton put it well, in one of the introductions he wrote to Dickens’s novels: The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only be one function–that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author’s mind which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the author’s mind, which the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots. The closer a book comes to being a genuine work of art, a true creation with a life of its own, the less likely it is that the author had full control over and a clear understanding of what he wrote. D. H. Lawrence, who was an exceptionally perceptive critic, summed this up in a statement I have already quoted many times but which one should never tire of invoking: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”

– Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness

Saint Augustine— probably the very first modern psychologist— identified it 1,600 years ago:

People have such a love for truth that when they happen to love something else, they want it to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be proven wrong, they refuse to be shown their mistake. And so, they end up hating the truth for the sake of the object which they have come to love instead of the truth.

– Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness

String together all the pages that you have copied out over the course of your readings and, without there being a single line by you, the ensemble may turn out to be the most accurate portrait of your mind and your heart. Such mosaics of quotations resemble pictorial “collages”: all the elements are borrowed, but together they form original pictures.

– Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness

Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple

Dr. Anthony Daniels (whose pen name is Theodore Dalrymple) is a psychiatrist who worked in prisons in England, and this book is a compilation of some of his thoughts and experiences from working with the underclass. He pulls no punches: abused women are co-authors of their misery, criminals should be held accountable, and the liberal elite are the worst of them all by originating and perpetuating theories of criminality/poverty that remove all responsibility/accountability from those doing the crimes. It’s also scary how the culture and habits of the lower class bleed upwards rather than vice versa. This is such a good book for those interested in looking at the world as it is.

Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that nonjudgmentalism is at best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised form of sadism. How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness? How can people learn from experience unless they are told that they can and should change? One doesn’t demand of laboratory mice that they do better: but man is not a mouse, and I can think of no more contemptuous way of treating people than to ascribe to them no more responsibility than such mice.

– Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom

And if I paint a picture of a way of life that is wholly without charm or merit, and describe many people who are deeply unattractive, it is important to remember that, if blame is to be apportioned, it is the intellectuals who deserve most of it. They should have known better but always preferred to avert their gaze. They considered the purity of their ideas to be more important than the actual consequences of their ideas. I know of no egotism more profound.

– Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom

Saint Francis of Assisi by G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton has been mentioned and quoted in several books I’ve read lately, so I’ve wanted to read him for a while. This is my first of his, and I listened to it one morning. It did such a good job of painting a portrait of St. Francis– his love of the world in very specific ways (each individual bird, tree, man, etc.), his quickness to act, his pursuit of all that we avoid (poverty, fasting, going without). This was so well-written.

But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.

– G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps that divine darkness out of which the divine love had called up every colored creature one by one. He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its setting, not all of a piece like a picture but in action like a play. A bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose, though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. A bush could stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as ready to welcome the brigand as the bush.

– G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

In plain fact he was ready to live on refuse; and it was probably something much uglier as an experience than the refined simplicity which vegetarians and water drinkers would call the simple life.

– G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry

This is Wendell Berry’s first novel in his Port William series, and I thought I’d start here and work my way through his fiction. But I think I already read this one, or at least I read excerpts of it somewhere, because I knew some scenes and wasn’t surprised by what happened. It doesn’t matter, though– it was a well-written, good book that follows young Nathan in his adolescence from his mother’s death to his and his brother’s moving in with their grandparents to his apprenticeship under the wayward but worthy Uncle Burley to the fight between his father and his brother and ultimately to the death of his grandfather. It is a very sweet book.

Big Ellis giggled. “We heard you were dead, Burley.” “So did I,” Uncle Burley said. “But I knew it was a lie as soon as I heard it.”

– Wendell Berry, Nathan Coulter

These Precious Days by Ann Patchett

This collection of essays touches on topics of marriage, childlessness by choice, writing, fathers (the author had three in her life), divorce, friendship, cancer, nightstands, and more. It was much better than I expected– because I had seen it recommended so much in the previous year, I figured that it must be ideological in some way, but it was surprisingly not. The author openly admires John Updike, meets regularly with a Catholic nun, and runs a bookstore with no mention of being privileged or feminist or anything like that. Her friendship with Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki was the most heartbreaking part of the book, but her experiences with her as Sooki went through cancer treatment while staying at the author’s house were touching. 

People want you to want what they want. If you want the same things they want, then their want is validated. If you don’t want the same things, your lack of wanting can, to certain people, come across as judgment.

– Ann Patchett, These Precious Days

I’d been afraid I’d somehow been given a life I hadn’t deserved, but that’s ridiculous. We don’t deserve anything – not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.

– Ann Patchett, These Precious Days

I would tell you we were idiots, but that’s only true in retrospect. In fact we were so exactly in the middle of history that we had no way to understand what we were seeing.

– Ann Patchett, These Precious Days

Simone Weil by Francine du Plessix Gray

This biography of Weil was my first in-depth look into Weil’s life and writings, though I’ve run into her through other people’s books and recommendations. She is very interesting: an anorexic, brilliant, anti-Semitic Jew who loved Christ and believed that other religions could access God equally. She fought for the poor, factory workers, and the dispossessed. She made enemies with her arguing and arrogance and yet had some very close friends and loved people as a whole. She was odd, and I’m sure I disagree with some of her ideas. But she intrigues me, and I want to read more.

But however much his convictions differed from hers, she exerted a powerful fascination on [Georges] Bataille, and they must have met occasionally, for he left the following portrait of her:

“Few human beings have interested me more deeply; her undeniable ugliness was repellent, but I personally felt that she also had a true beauty. she seduced by a very gentle, very simple authority; this was certainly an admirable being, asexual, with a sense of doom about her. Always black, black clothes, raven’s wing hair, pallid skin. She was surely very kind, and she was decidedly a Don Quixote who both pleased and terrified by her lucidity, her bold pessimism, and by an extreme courage that attracted her to the impossible.”

– Francine du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil

Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse

When writers talk about authors they love, P. G. Wodehouse is often mentioned. I had never read any of his books until this one, but it made me feel like I have been missing out all these years. The dialogue was perfectly timed, entertaining, and so witty with all that was said (or not said), and though so much in the plot goes wrong, it never feels forced. The butler Jeeves is, of course, the genius everyone needs but who is not always looked to when he should be, while Bertie, Jeeves’s master, messes everything up (“Attila the Hun,” as his aunt calls him). This was such a fun read (and I would highly recommend listening to the version read by Simon Jones).

Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum.

– P. G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves

Nikolai Gogol by Vladimir Nabokov

I’m wary of calling this a biography, though its quirkiness fit its namesake and was as strange as Gogol was. Gogol sounds like a strange little man with strange obsessions and wanderings and strange people living in his imagination who can’t help but push their way into his stories. The book did not give a clear outline of Gogol’s life, nor did it provide the plot of any of the works of Gogol that it deconstructed. But (according to Nabokov), that is all much more in line with who Gogol was and the spirit of his works than a neat biography or anthology would be. I quite enjoyed this book.

We all know that trite trick, that coy spirit haunting first acts in Scribia as well as on Broadway. A famous playwright has said (probably in a testy reply to a bore wishing to know the secrets of the craft) that if in the first act a shot gun hangs on the wall, it must go off in the last act. But Gogol’s guns hang in midair and do not go off– in fact the charm of his allusions is exactly that nothing whatever comes of them.

– Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol

He did something else, too. In fact he did the worst thing that a writer could do under the circumstances: he started explaining in print such points of his play as his critics had either missed or directed against him. Gogol, being Gogol and living in a looking-glass world, had a knack of thoroughly planning his works after he had written and published them.

– Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

If David Sedaris writes a book, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that it will end up on my best-of list. This one is the most recent of Sedaris’s books of autobiographical essays, mostly covering his time in COVID and coming out of it: the shuttering of businesses; his staying in New York with his partner, Hugh; traveling to North Carolina to see his dad; his dad’s death; getting back on the road again once venues opened up; etc. It was fascinating to read about aspects of his dad that he waited to share until after his death– he was an odd man, his dad. And I was happy to read that Sedaris got his teeth fixed so that he is no longer ashamed of his smile. Reading his books is like catching up with a friend (albeit one who doesn’t know I exist). I can’t help but want to know about his life.

The terrible shame about the pandemic in the United States is that more than nine hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn’t get to choose a one of them. How unfair that we lost Terrence McNally but not the guy on the electric scooter who almost hit me while he was going the wrong way on Seventh Avenue one sweltering afternoon in the summer of 2021. Just as I turned to curse him, he ran into a woman on a bicycle who had sped through a red light while looking down at her phone. Both of them tumbled onto the street, the sound of screeching brakes all around them, and I remembered, the way you might recall a joyful dream you’d once had, that things aren’t as bad as they sometimes seem, and life can actually be beautiful.

– David Sedaris, Happy-Go-Lucky

The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life by Frederick Buechner

This short book is nevertheless rich with Buechner’s trademark kindness, honesty, and faith. He writes about his father who committed suicide, his daughter who was an alcoholic and anorexic, his mother who was embittered, his unlikely path to Christ and seminary, the joy of the small things in life and of Christ, and so much more. I listened to the audiobook version of it, but I would have been writing down excerpts if I had been reading the actual book. I love reading Buechner– he gives me hope. 

It seems to me almost before the Bible says anything else, it is saying that—how important it is to be alive and to pay attention to being alive, pay attention to each other, pay attention to God as he moves and as he speaks. Pay attention to where life or God has tried to take you.

– Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary

We’ve all had saints in our lives, by which I mean not plaster saints, not moral exemplars, not people setting for us a kind of suffocating good example, but I mean saints in the sense of life givers. People through knowing whom we become more alive.

– Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary

An Apology for Idlers by Robert Louis Stevenson

I started reading this book before my semester started and was only able to return to it once my semester ended. It is a collection of essays on idleness, art, artist communities in France, forests, Monterey, love, youth vs. age, and enjoying unpleasant places. I enjoyed his perspective on all of these– I got the sense that he was both clear-sighted and joyful. I highlighted so many sections of this short book that my Kindle stopped saving them to the “My Clippings” file where highlights are saved on Kindle. It just says, “<You have reached the clipping limit for this item>,” that’s how much I liked it. Luckily, I can still see the highlighted sections in the actual book because I will want to go back and re-read them.

It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by any means certain that a man’s business is the most important thing he has to do.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

There should be no honours for the artist; he has already, in the practice of his art, more than his share of the rewards of life; the honours are pre-empted for other trades, less agreeable and perhaps more useful.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

Special Addendum:

The Angel That Troubled the Waters by Thorton Wilder

This is not a book, so it isn’t technically one of the best books I read this year. But nothing I read this year affected me as much as this brief, three-page play. It takes so little time to read, but it resonates so deeply, so profoundly, that there is a hint of eternity in it. For me to describe it would take almost as much space as the play itself, so I would encourage everyone to read it for themselves. However, I will leave with this excerpt, which is perhaps the most affecting part of the entire thing (and is actually quite reminiscent of the ending of the Simone Weil biography):

THE ANGEL: (Without turning makes himself apparent to the NEWCOMER and addresses him.) Draw back, physician, this moment is not for you.

THE NEWCOMER: Angelic visitor, I pray thee, listen to my prayer.

THE ANGEL: Healing is not for you.

THE NEWCOMER: Surely, surely, the angels are wise. Surely, O, Prince, you are not deceived by my apparent wholeness. Your eyes can see the nets in which my wings are caught; the sin into which all my endeavors sink half-performed cannot be concealed from you.

THE ANGEL: I know.

THE NEWCOMER: It is no shame to boast to an Angel of what I might yet do in Love’s service were I but freed from this bondage.

THE MISTAKEN INVALID: Surely the water is stirring strangely to-day! Surely I shall be whole!

THE ANGEL: I must make haste. Already the sky is afire with the gathering host, for it is the hour of the new song among us. The earth itself feels the preparation in the skies and attempts its hymn. Children born in this hour spend all their lives in a sharper longing for the perfection that awaits them.

THE NEWCOMER: Oh, in such an hour was I born, and doubly fearful to me is the flaw in my heart. Must I drag my shame, Prince and singer, all my days more bowed than my neighbor?

THE ANGEL: (Stands a moment in silence.) Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve. Draw back.