As with last year, this list isn’t composed only of books released in 2022. It’s a list of books I read this year, regardless of when the book was published. Also, this list doesn’t include books I reread this year, only those books I read for the first time.

I read 64 books in 2022. Here are my 10 favorite books I read (or listened to) this year.

10: The Cartographers

As a lover of maps and cartography in general, perhaps I was destined to be drawn to this imaginative spin on proprietary (and seemingly forgettable) maps, regardless of its literary quality. Thankfully, it’s a thrilling, fantastical story, with an unmistakable affection for cartography at its heart.

9: A Brief History of Equality

I’ve read both Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Capital and Ideology, each prodigious in both scholarly achievement and volume. Nearly 2,000 pages combined, and steeped in the history of economic inequality, they don’t necessarily lend themselves to optimism or present a coherent path toward greater equality.

A Brief History of Equality seeks to change that, serving simultaneously as a summary of the two preceding works and as a set of proposals for how we might achieve greater equality through social democratic programs—and it does so in 288 pages. It’s a sanguine book, and I wonder if climate change pressures alone will preclude much of what Piketty proposes (even if desperately needed), but this distillation of his previous work is most welcome.

8: I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche

In my second year of college (many years ago), I decided to take a philosophy class to fulfill a requirement. The class was ancient philosophy, but one of the first books we read was Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Before even finishing the book, I’d changed my major from multimedia design to philosophy, and later graduated in philosophy and religious studies.

Nietzsche is one of the most complicated, controversial, and misappropriated philosophers in history. Perpetually ill and frequently ostracized, he famously suffered a mental breakdown at age 44 (either from witnessing a horse being beaten, or from syphilis, or both) and suffered insanity until he died at age 55.

This biography rescues Nietzsche from some of the more egregious misappropriations and misunderstandings of his work, while confronting head on the contradictions and complexities of this dynamic thinker.

7: Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

I first heard about this author by reading Nick Offerman’s Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside. Offerman actually visits and works on James Rebanks’s farm for a time, getting to know the ways of the “pastoral song”. This book is largely autobiographical, tracing the history of agriculture through the perspective of one family’s English farm, and how we might preserve a way of life—and the accompanying sustainable farming practices—that continue to be undermined by corporate mechanization and consolidation.

6: Sea of Tranquility

At this point, I’ll read just about anything written by Emily St. John Mandel. This carefully and imaginatively constructed work of science fiction includes yet another pandemic (as with Station Eleven), but adds space-and-time travel to this impressive non-linear tapestry. Somehow, despite exploring themes that have been tread over and over again, St. John Mandel’s work never feels unoriginal or gimmicky, but reliably fresh and unique.

5: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this illuminating book is that the author paused work on it for years to become one of the most trusted voices during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

This is the most revelatory book I read this year, encouraging the reader to, by way of detailing the various and fascinating ways in which other creatures sense and perceive the world, try to escape our confining Umwelt, or the limits of our own anthropocentric sensory bubble. In doing so, Yong helps us cultivate an understanding of, and hopefully an appreciation for, the literally miraculous non-human world.

4: Demon Copperhead

Apart from its setting in Appalachia, this is unlike any Kingsolver book I’ve read (which is most of them). An American retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, this persistently tragic (yet unmistakingly hopeful) narrative follows its titular character through the uniquely American devastation of the opioid crisis.

3: The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

One of two excellent books I read this year about trees (the other—The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors—narrowly missed making this list), The Treeline focuses on the boreal forest (taiga), the vast stretches of northern coniferous forests found largely in North America, Siberia, and Scandinavia. The northward retreat of the taiga is among the most alarming indications of rapid climate change, and the results could be devastating. Author Ben Rawlence travels to various regions of the taiga, and documents present and future impacts of the taiga’s northward migration. It’s a concerning read, but one full of ethnographic, geologic, and botanic revelations. I would have read this book for the sections on larch trees alone.

2: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to read this iconic book. As a prolific producer of “shitty first drafts,” I could have used it a long time ago.

This book is packed with humor, wisdom, and heart, but it’s difficult to describe or categorize. Ostensibly, it’s about writing (and all writers should read it), but it’s about so much more than that (as its title implies). It’s a lovely read, start to finish.

“Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.”

1: Orwell’s Roses

Unfortunately, I missed this book when it released last year. As a fan of both Rebecca Solnit and George Orwell, I would have been first in line for this one. Thankfully, I discovered it a few weeks ago, and read it over a single weekend.

I dog-eared nearly half the pages in this book while reading it. The book may have both Orwell and roses in its title, but at its heart, it’s about neither. Rather, as the book jacket conveys, it’s a “meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.”

🌹🌹🌹

“Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated rather than prescribed. ‘We know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,’ Orwell declares at the end of ‘The Prevention of Literature,’ and the roses in ‘bread and roses’ mean a kind of freedom that flourishes with privacy and independence.”

“Bread for All, and Roses Too.”