What I Read In 2022
So many truly great books this year
I read 17 books this year — 3 less than last year, but, as I wrote about 2021, I don’t really have reading goals based on the number of books. I read some dense, chewy nonfiction this year which takes longer than lighter books. That said, I read more fiction this year, mostly inspired by my book-obsessed teen.
Let’s start with the nonfiction …
Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters, by Laura Vanderkam: I’m a huge fan of all of Vanderkam’s writing. She interviewed me for a story she did once on women out of the workforce so I became a bigger fan. I pre-ordered this book in support of all the great work she does. It’s very fun. It’s a big more deeply self-help than I recall her other books being. I Know How She Does It and Off The Clock tell stories of what works for the people she studies and then let’s you draw your own conclusions. This book is much more prescriptive — do this, here’s how, here’s some additional ideas, how did that work for you? For people who are looking for a more detailed roadmap to making better use of their time this book will be very appealing.
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder: After Russia invaded Ukraine (again), Tim Snyder was everywhere — MSNBC, the Ezra Klein podcast, The Chris Hayes podcast — because he is the world’s expert on that part of the world. I had been aware of him because he actually wrote the Road to Unfreedom after Trump won in 2016, along with On Tyranny. The Road to Unfreedom is terrifying — and also fascinating. A must-read to understand not just what is happening in Ukraine now but also what’s happening here. I also highly recommend his Substack Thinking about … .
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder: Having read the Road to Unfreedom I decided to dive into Bloodlands. This is one of the very dense and chewy nonfiction books I read this year. I can’t say I enjoyed it — it’s a brutal, brutal book. But I’m glad I read it. It’s essentially a new history of WWII — and if you can’t imagine how that can be possible, it’s because the collapse of the USSR opened up archives in Eastern Europe that shed light on events that previously were poorly understood, if they were even known. As a history, it’s fascinating and revealing. As a way of understanding why Putin invaded Ukraine, it’s invaluable.
Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity, by Claudia Dale Goldin: Books like this are a buswoman’s holiday for me as my day job is running a nonprofit that works primarily with women who’ve left the paid workforce to take on unpaid caregiving. Goldin is the definitive scholar on the gender pay gap. This book looks at women’s economic participation — and how the need to care for others has always impacted that — by looking at women in cohorts over the last 100 years. She shows how each cohort learned from their ancestors in the ongoing question of whether and how to balance a paid career with unpaid domestic labor. Books like this mostly confirm my priors, and this was no exception, but so valuable for giving me research to back up what I know (and have experienced in my own life and have seen so many others experience).
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, by Priya Parker: I read this on the advice of my coach, Caroline Kim Oh (link to her newsletter) when we were planning for my staff’s in-person retreat this past summer. Very helpful for that and a few other important gatherings I had in 2022.
The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans--and How We Can Fix It, by Dorothy A. Brown: Last year I read The Sum of Us, which details how disinvestment in public goods has been both driven by and then in turn exacerbated racism. This book dives deeply into our tax law and shows how it has been use to advantage white families to the expense of Black families. There was some of it that was familiar (I knew about the two-income penalty that couples with two working spouses pay, for example) but much of it was new and the way it is all laid out is eye opening.
Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?: A Story of Women and Economics, by Saskia Vogel: What would economics look like if we took into account the work of caring — for children, the elderly, and others in our house or community? Work that is, incidentally primarily done by women and generally done for free or for extremely low wages? This book asks and then very ably answers that question.
Most of my fiction reads this year were recommendations from my 15-year-old daughter. In fact, so many were from her that I’m going to break them out that way. Let’s start with the ones she recommended:
The Witch Haven, by Sasha Peyton Smith: This was the last book I read this year and it was very fun. There are witches in Queens!
True Biz: A Novel, by Sara Novic: My daughter and I were both super disappointed in this one. It’s set at a school for the deaf and it started out so strong. It was great at getting at the nuances of Deaf culture, including the controversy around cochlear implants and sign language, children of deaf adults (CODA) and so much more. And these issues illuminate the issues that all teens face in new and interesting ways. And then it just … ended? The last quarter of the book was weird in how it left some threads hanging and tied up others in confusing and unsatisfying ways.
Written in the Stars: A Novel, by Alexandria Bellefleur: This book inspired my daughter to ask if we could take our family summer vacation in Seattle. It’s a fun, frothy, sapphic romance.
Shadow and Bone (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy Book 1), Siege and Storm (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy Book 2), and Ruin and Rising (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy Book 3), by Leigh Bardugo: My daughter bought these books, but I actually ended up reading them first. Loved, loved, loved. Bardugo did an amazing job building a complex and realistic world. Lots of great twists and turns with a great ending that isn’t too neatly wrapped up in a bow.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club, by Malinda Lo: This might have been my favorite book of the year. Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s, it is a glorious coming of age novel full of beautiful and heartbreaking moments. We are all of our time. It won’t the National Book Award and a whole bunch of other awards and deserved every one.
And somehow I did choose a few of my own fiction picks this year …
The World We Make: A Novel (The Great Cities Book 2), by N. K. Jemisin: The sequel to The City We Became, which was my favorite book of 2020. This was great and a worthy second book to a novel that was written in a different world than it got launched into, in ways that necessarily changed what the second book had to be about.
You Think It, I'll Say It: Stories, by Curtis Sittenfeld: I’ve been fan since Prep and I picked this collection of stories up on a whim from the library. So good it made me bookmark a few more of her books, in particular Rodham.
A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel, by Amor Towles: Recommended by a friend, this book follows the long and incredible life of a Russian aristocrat who is arrested during The Bolshevik Revolution and sentenced to life in prison – at a posh hotel in Moscow. For a book that is set almost entirely in one building it is unbelievably rich and engrossing.