Favourite Books of 2022

After last year, I wanted to slow my reading progress and hopefully find more joy in it, rather feeling like a hamster on a wheel. Of course, that’s not really how it turned out. For whatever reason, I flew through quite a few books early in the year and things just went from there.

Like last year, I read a lot of series, so that helps to really stack up the number, and for the most part, I enjoyed them. It does make picking “favourite” books harder though, as you can’t really pick one book from a series as a favourite. I suppose I could pick a series, like I did last year but…

I read a few “classic” sci-fi books this year in Dune and The Peripheral. Interestingly, both have found their way onto a screen, one as (finally!) a very good movie and the other as an Amazon Prime series. The finale of The Peripheral Amazon series was way out there, so while I’m somewhat interested to see where they go with it, I’m not as invested as I was early on. Eagerly waiting Dune part 2.

No real blockbusters I was looking forward to this year, although new books from James Rollins, Steven Konkoly, Jeremy Robinson, and Andrew Mayne were all good. If there was a disappointment among this year’s reads, I would have to say it was Starry Messenger by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’ve really like some of his earlier work, and while this one was “okay”, it just felt too “both sides ism” for me.

I didn’t read Dennis E. Taylor’s new singleton book, Roadkill? I don’t even know the title, yikes! Bobiverse books 1-3 were still strongly represented though. I’ve even started to write a few posts about the books, trying to explain some of the science. The other thing you may notice is the Pinterest widget/embeds are now gone, replaced by something I coded myself. The Books page now shows all books read every year (instead of only the last 50) and the covers conveniently like to their Amazon Kindle page.

Okay, my favourite books of 2022. Despite being the much smaller percentage of my reading volume, non-fiction titles continue to dominate. I wouldn’t really put any of these books ahead of the other, they are all about the same. The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko was fantastic. It had an unfair advantage as one of the trips I took this year was rafting the Colorado, so this book was such a great setup for that. American Prometheus, by Kai Bird was also great. A bit detailed at times but a very interesting perspective on Oppy. Christoper Nolan is making a movie, Oppenheimer, based on this book, really interested to see how that turns out. Also interesting that Oppenheimer was finally “cleared” of all wrongdoing and/or suspicion this year and issued an apology for his treatment and the stripping of his security clearance in 1954. Finally, Blake Crouch continues to impress, this year with Upgrade. Interesting idea and very interesting perspective.

There you have it. I really don’t want to read over 100 books again next year, I need to savior them, and hopefully remember more of them, although that is probably asking too much. May all your reading dreams for 2023 come true.