Books I read in 2022
Another year, another books roundup. This one is slightly late because I was traveling with Yee Aun at the beginning of the year, so please file any complaints with her.
Some changes in reading technology -
This year, I got a bookshelf - the Ikea Hemnes, which turned out to be slightly taller than makes sense for my room. I'm still very happy with it. As a consequence, I ended up buying and reading more physical books.
I also got a new Kindle (the Paperwhite I think, though Amazon's Kindle has too many undifferentiated variations for a mortal to understand now). Warm lighting and better battery life is nice, though the larger size is a mixed bag - it's more viewing area, but doesn't quite fit in some of my pockets anymore.
And, I left Twilio about halfway through the year, which meant I also gave up the monthly book stipend perk. This spurred me to finally try Libby to borrow books from the SF public library. Libby has been great and I really should have tried it earlier - it's been a seamless experience, including sending books to my Kindle.
Some notes on things I read this year -
I think I've now burned myself out of a genre that I'm going to call "business disaster". This year I read books on Enron, WeWork, and General Electric; in past years it was Theranos, the 2008 financial crisis, Blackberry, whatever. The stories all rhyme in the same ways. Perhaps that says something about how these disasters occur, or about which stories get books, or maybe just about the influence of Michael Lewis in the genre. But I heard he's writing a book on FTX now, so I won't be able to resist reading that.
I was also quite surprised by a few books which apparently received great reviews and did not even come close to living up to the hype. I feel bad giving anti-recommendations publicly, so I won't name them, but in general I'm leaning in harder to recommendations from friends and other sources who I personally trust.
On a more positive note, I really enjoyed reading Emily St. John Mandel this year. Between the style and the unexpected connections in the three books (reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's Discworld), she has easily leapt to the top of my fiction author recommendations.
And, this is not quite a book, but Disco Elysium was also an excellent story-driven experience. I was in the same mode of staying up late to find out what happens, with the additional stress of trying to make the right decisions so that my favorite characters could be happy at the end.
Towards the end of December, I started preparing this blog post. With just a week or so left in the year, I had read 51 books so far. On one hand, neat - that's like one per week, a milestone I wasn't even trying to hit. On the other hand, I suddenly felt the need to go read another book in the final week of 2022. And that's super lame and not the point of the post, which makes me not want to do it. Isn't it funny how measurement can mess with your intrinsic motiviation?
I resisted the urge for a bit, but then I got bored and ended up reading the 52nd book, just in time for the end of the year.
In 2022, I read 52 books, mostly on Kindle, but also a good number of physical books from the SF library and various real-world bookstores.
In the list below, books marked with an exclamation mark (!) are the ones I enjoyed especially.
- The Smartest Guys In The Room - Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
- The Midnight Library - Matt Haig
(!)The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury- Thread of the Silkworm - Iris Chang
- All The Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
- The Pumpkin Eater - Penelope Mortimer
- Little Brother - Cory Doctorow
- The Other Bennet Sister - Janice Hadlow
- Obviously Awesome - April Dunford
(!)The Best We Could Do - Thi Bui- Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut
- Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
- Consider The Lobster: And Other Essays - David Foster Wallace
- Earthlings - Sayaka Murata
- And The Band Played On - Randy Shilts
(!)No One Is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood- Escaping the Build Trap - Melissa Perri
(!)The Book of Two Ways - Jody Picoult- Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch - Dai Sijie (translated by Ina Rilke)
- Bestiary - K-Ming Cheng
- Like Water For Chocolate - Laura Esquivel
- Ajax Penumbra 1969 - Robin Sloan
- The Making of Asian America - Erika Lee
(!)Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir- Funny You Should Ask - Elissa Sussman
- Under The Banner Of Heaven - Jon Krakauer
(!)Red Rising - Pierce Brown- Good Eggs - Rebecca Hardiman
- The Cult of We - Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
(!)Trust Exercise - Susan Choi- Golden Son - Pierce Brown
- Nightbitch - Rachel Yoder
- Docs for Developers - Jared Bhatti, Zachary Sarah Corleissen, Jen Lambourne, David Nunez, and Heidi Waterhouse
(!)Autonomous - Annalee Newitz- The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles - Jon Bois
- The Art of Hearing Heartbeats - Jan-Philipp Sendker
- Talk to Me - T.C. Boyle
- The 9/11 Commission Report - National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
- Lights Out - Ted Mann and Thomas Gryta
- Action Park - Andy Mulvihill and Jake Rossen
- The Ocean At the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman
- Ward - J.C. "Wildbow" McCrae
(!)Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel(!)Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel- Fanatical Prospecting - Jeb Blount
- Frog Music - Emma Donoghue
- How to Blow Up a Pipeline - Andreas Malm
- Another Now - Yaniv Varoufakis
- Bliss Montage - Ling Ma
- How Beautiful We Were - Imbolo Mbue
- The Glass Hotel - Emily St. John Mandel
- Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
Thanks to everyone from real life who gave me recommendations this year: Yee Aun, Bex, Jennifer, Joseph, Connie, Arpita, and Meesha. I also took suggestions from Cedric Chin's book summaries (Commoncog), Alison Green's yearly book recommendations (Ask a Manager), and Hayley Nahman's newsletter (Maybe Baby).
As always, please send me any book recommendations. Even (and especially, really) if we don't know each other well!