Here’s a look back at the best I read during 2022. These are roughly listed best, first; but the quality was generally so high as to make fine distinctions specious. Some comments on each follows the lists. I’ll be fleshing those out over the next few days so visit to see updates, if you like.
Also, I have to give a shout-out to my wonderful wife, who bought me most of these books last Christmas and keep me happily swamped in reading material for most of the year.
Fiction
- Star Trek: Year 5
- Academic Exercises by K.J. Parker
- All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay
- The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
- The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
- Da Vinci’s Cat by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Non-fiction
- How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
- Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Mir Tamim Ansary
- Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing by Jacob Goldstein
- Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston
- The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English by Hana Videen
- Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer
- Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman
- Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo
- Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University by Richard White
- The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin
More inanity from the author of “Ending Online Church”
This piece (7 Thoughtful Reader Responses on Ending Online Church, NY Times, 2022 Feb 6) reeks of the same dismissive (and unimaginative) hubris as the first. With obvious great reluctance, the author admits – halfway through and fleetingly – that whole swaths of people are necessarily and deliberately left out by in-person worship. It’s nice to see that acknowledged, rather than blithely downplayed (“churches have been dealing with the homebound for centuries”), but the author is clear to inoculate her arrogance by first showcasing a convenient “we’re immunocompromised but agree 100%” story that gets paragraphs, before tucking away the counter argument in a short bit sandwiched between two “you’re so right” pieces. Seven insightful responses but only one that can be read as disputatious. But what struck me the most was the “insightful” response that the author chose to emphasize by putting first and at length:
Its main harm is increasing isolation? Its main harm? There are roughly 900,000 (and counting!) dead Americans who might disagree with your analysis, doctor, not to mention the literal millions who are “isolated” from their loved ones by having seen them die from this disease.