2022 Book Reading and Reviews in Review: The Highs, the Lows, and my General Thoughts

 



2022 was a very different year for me.  In prior years, reading was something I did on my commute, in Court, and often at home for fun, given that I had a lot of free time.  For really good reasons this year however (I found my soulmate and got engaged), my reading at home was largely curtailed this year, resulting in me finishing "only 145 novels and 18 novellas", down from around 220 books and like 30 novellas each of the past two years.  I still read a lot of great stuff this past year, so in this post (and only this post, as I don't have time for three separate posts this year), I'll go over how my reading went overall, my goals and misses, and the best stuff that I can really recommend.  

As in prior years, my reading met a few of my goals pretty damn well.  Of my 145 novels, 82 (56.55%) were by authors of color (as far as I can tell) and just over 3/4 (108 or 75.86%) were by Women (96) or Non-Binary authors (12).  I've tried to read books by authors who aren't just the classical white male authors every year, and I think I generally succeed at this point.  

One area I'm not sure I succeeded in is reading new authors with only 56 (38.62%) of my 145 novels coming from authors I hadn't read before.  I think I'd like to get that closer to half if at al possible but that's hard given how many authors I read who I like and have more stuff coming out.  

More on my favorite novels after the jump.

Favorite Novels of 2022:

Ten out of Ten (Must Reads):

A Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez (Review Here):

I only had one Ten out of Ten this year, which was this book, A Spear Cuts Through Water.  Some of this might just be me having higher and higher standards for my top grade, which I usually define as something that blows me away such that I don't care about its faults at all.  That said, this novel cleared that mark for me easily, leading it to be an instant recommend to everyone.   

To be fair, this is a novel with a very unique and different style of narration, with the novel mixing in second person, third person omniscient, and more as it tells a story within a story - or is it - which takes place in a dream theater which showcases events straight out of myth, following two young men escorting a dying divinity, representing the Moon, as her three monstrous and magically powerful sons give chase...and along the way, the two young men realize more about themselves and each other.  The narration is such that some readers will bounce off it near immediately, but if it works for you, it REALLY works and the result is incredible.  I just loved this.  

Nine and a Half out of Ten (Really Really Great Works):

1. The Keeper of Night by Kylie Lee Baker (Review Here)
2. Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus (Review Here)
3. The Merciless Ones by Namina Forna (Review Here)
4. Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura (Review Here)
5. Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine (Review Here)
(Books listed in no particular order) 

These five books hit just below my perfect scores, making them incredibly good with some minor flaws along the way.  There's also a few that are part of series - The Keeper of Night and Sweep of Stars are firsts in series (although Keeper can be read stand alone) while Merciless Ones is the second in a trilogy.  Bu they're all very good - some quick explanations for each choice:

The Keeper of Night is a Young Adult Dark Fantasy featuring a girl with mixed heritage trying to find a home as a Japanese Shinigami as she deals with beings out of Japanese myth...and has an astonishing ending.  

Sweep of Stars is an Afrofuturist Space Opera that mixes multiple narration styles and probably is trying to pull off more than it can chew off as it shows off its anti-capitalist society, but it is utterly fascinating and I can't wait to read more in this series.

The Merciless Ones is the sequel to the Gilded Ones and turns a first book that was very much a YA misogynist dystopia novel with women having to fight back against a patriarchal society into something far more, dealing really interestingly with questions of gender and what it actually means.  

Lonely Castle in the Mirror is the translation of a Japanese YA (although its marketed here as adult) novel dealing with a group of troubled teens struggling with issues - trauma and abuse of different kinds - that make them not want to go to school, as they go to a magical castle which can grant one of them a wish, with the story dealing impressively with recovery from truama.

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti is another novel with an unconventional narration as it details a world filled with constant war and regime change and a traveling circus goes through it all trying just to entertain with its performers whose bodies are in part magically made of mechanical devices...devices that may conceal their own personal traumas.  

Really all recommended.  

Below these are the books I scored a Nine out of Ten 

These are the books that are really good, even if they don't stand out as all time greats in any way or even close.  I really enjoyed and would recommend all of these.  

1. The Magic Between by Stephanie Hoyt (Review Here)
2. Riding the Trail of Tears by Blake M. Hausman (Review Here)
3. Azura Ghost by Essa Hansen (Review Here)
4. After the Dragons by Cynthia Zhang (Review Here)
5. Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston (Review Here)
6. Star Wars: Queen's Hope by E.K. Johnston (Review Here)
7. From Dust a Flame by Rebecca Podos (Review Here)
8. Siren Queen by Nghi Vo (Review Here)
9. The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah (Review Here)
10. Nettle & Bone by T Kingfisher (Review Here)
11. The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison (Review Here)
12. Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap (Review Here)
13. Invisible Things by Mat Johnson (Review Here)
14. Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett (Review Here)
15. Be the Serpent by Seanan McGuire (Review Here)
16. Violet Made of Thorns by Gina Chen (Review Here)
17. The Art of Prophecy by Wesley Chu (Review Here)
18. The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope (Review Here)
19. The City Inside by Samit Basu (Review Here)
20. Fault Tolerance by Valerie Valdes (Review Here)
21. Holiday Heroine by Sarah Kuhn (Review Here)
22. Speaking Bones by Ken Liu (Review Here)
23. A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys (Review Here)
24. The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg (Review Here)
25. Babel by R.F. Kuang (Review Here)
26. The Empress of Time by Kylie Lee Baker (Review Here)
27. Neom by Lavie Tidhar (Review Here)

The above books are not in any order, but are just listed roughly by when I read them.  These novels all hit a wide range of genres and concepts and I really liked and recommend them all.  Due to a lack of time, I'm not going to go into specifics about all of them - check the linked reviews - but there's a mix of fun,, serious, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, some combinations of the above, and more in this group, and really you can't go wrong with any of them, although a few may be sequels that I don't recommend starting without reading predecessors first.  

All in all, this was an excellent year, and I had a great time reading - even my lows for this year were better than normal: I had two 4.5s as my lowest scores, and two 5.5s as my only other two books below a 6, which is my score for a book that I think is fine but utterly ordinary.  Having only 4 books I disliked, none of which were really strong dislikes, is an incredible feat when you've read 145 books - part of that may be me DNFing a bit more liberally this year, but the result is a happier reader at the end of the year.