Pleasure Reading 2022
What I read this year:
*reviews (mostly from the New York Times) linked*
Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility (2022) and The Glass Hotel (2020): The former is the kind of novel I dream of writing.
Julia May Jonas, Vladimir (2022): Brilliant debut—and about academics.
Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing (2018): Finally read this one (after seeing the movie), and am glad I did. Very compelling.
Mark Leibovich, Thank You for Your Servitude (2022) and Tim Miller, Why We Did It (2022): Two books examining Republican elites’ kowtowing to Trump.
Xochitl Gonzalez, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022): Great debut about Puerto Rican siblings in New York.
Matt Haig, The Humans (2013) and How to Stop Time (2019): The latter had such a fascinating premise, but was under-realized.
Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (2018): Pretty standard political bio, with an amusing and memorable tidbit about Obama and Susan Rice dancing to Macklemore.
Danya Kukafka, Girl in Snow (2017) [skippable] and Notes on an Execution (2022): The latter focuses on the lives of three women intimately connected to a serial killer who is a day away from his execution. It’s so good, and will take over your life while you read it.
Emily Ratajkowski, My Body (2021): Much-more-insightful-than-anticipated musings from one of the world’s most beautiful women…because that’s a talent, too.
Meghan O’Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022): Stellar memoir by a truly beautiful writer about the long, trying road of diagnosing an autoimmune disease.
Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (2020): So good I ended up using it in my Intro to American Politics class this summer.
Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape (2016): Interesting, but not much new here.
Thrillers:
Ruth Ware, The Death of Mrs. Westaway (2018), One by One (2021) and The It Girl (2022) [my favorite of the three]
Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife (2021) and The Last Housewife (2022): The latter was inspired by the Sarah Lawrence cult.
Ellery Lloyd, The Club (2022)
Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment (2022)
Kimberly McCreight, Friends Like These (2021): Has a twist that I genuinely didn’t see coming; highly recommended.
Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here (2021) and The Lost Night (2019): Both focus on one of my favorite literary topics—female friendships.
Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, The Girls Are All So Nice Here (2021)
Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, The Golden Couple (2022) [my favorite of the three], The Wife Between Us (2018) and An Anonymous Girl (2019)
Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing (2015) [incredibly twisty; couldn’t put it down], Eight Perfect Murders (2020), Nine Lives (2022) [skippable—a lame update on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None] and Before She Knew Him (2019)
Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place, Wrong Time (2022)
Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming (2021)
