The Books I Loved Most in 2022

We’re well into the cold and gray and dark here in Portland, and with 2022 coming to a close with alarming swiftness (seriously, what the hell is happening with this passage of time shit? SLOW DOWN!), it feels like a good moment to tell you about some of the books that I loved this year, in case you’re looking for reading suggestions for the months of hibernation ahead.

I read and very much liked many books this year, including a healthy number that came out in 2022, but I’m only going to share the ones that absolutely knocked me out, the ones I would press into your hands if you were here with me in my office. Of those, only two came out this year. So be it. A wonderful thing about books is that they don’t expire. Get to them when the time is right for you.

Interesting…I’m looking at this list I’ve compiled for you, and none of them are by authors who are new to me. I’ve read novels by all of them before. That said, this year I read new novels from two of my favorite writers working today—Ali Smith and Kate Atkinson—and I liked them both very much, but neither made the cut here.

Okay then. Onward? Onward. Presented in no particular order:

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

I’ve liked several of O’Farrell’s earlier books very much. She had a way of pulling at my heart strings in them without making it feel cheap or manipulative, and they went down particularly well as audiobooks. (Confession: audiobooks read by an actor with an English, Irish, or Scottish accent are like comfort food for me.) Then along came Hamnet. I loved the prose—it’s gorgeous and sturdy and smart—but I tried several times to read it (the physical book, not audiobook) and kept putting it down before I even hit the fifty-page mark because I knew the death of a child was coming and I just couldn’t bear it. I might read the book someday, but today is not that day. (I’ve struggled with Kate Atkinson in the past for the same reason—so many dead children—but I pushed through the dread with her and it was worth it, so maybe…)

Luckily, there are no dead (young) children in The Marriage Portrait. O’Farrell, whose prose has always been strong, has even so made a big leap forward in her writing with what I did read of Hamnet and now with The Marriage Portrait. She’s gone all in now with the lushness of language and allowing herself to sink deep, deep into her characters. We live the story so closely with the protagonist here that we feel ourselves in her skin. There’s a confidence in it, an apparent utter lack of self-consciousness, that I found so inspiring. I loved the experience of reading this novel all the way through, and then was given the tremendous gift of an ending that I hadn’t dared hope for. I won’t spoil it for you. Some won’t like it for the same reason that it thrilled me. And isn’t that a wonderful thing about books? My god, I loved this one.

La vida privada de los árboles/The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra

I’m a big fan of Zambra’s work, but had never read this early novel of his before. It’s a haunting, swift, gut punch of a thing for a day when you want to devour something that feels substantial and rewarding in one or two sittings. This novel invites you to inhabit the anxiety of waiting for a loved one who’s late and unreachable. The reader stays awake with the narrator through the long night of his vigil, the novel ending when his wait ends. (No spoilers.) The quality of attention and the level of tension that Zambra manages to maintain, even as we shift with the narrator from the sticky fears and catastrophization of the present moment to recollections of his relationship with his late-getting-home wife, is masterful.

I read it in Spanish, but I see that the English translation was done by Megan McDowell, so I trust that it’s a solid one.

Great House by Nicole Krauss

I’d only read Krauss’s The History of Love before this, years ago when it first came out, and while I remember liking it at the time, I hadn’t sought her other books out. I picked up this copy of Great House on a whim at Goodwill several years ago, and stuck it on a shelf for the day when I’d feel like reading it. Then this summer we were headed back east to visit family, and my rule with travel is to bring books that I don’t mind leaving behind, to free up packing space on the way home. That means books that I either don’t expect to get attached to, or books that are easily replaced. For whatever reason, Great House caught my eye when I was scanning my to-be-read bookcase, and into the suitcase it went. Well. I didn’t leave it behind. I went into it with no expectations and loved it.

This novel does something that I used to tell my fiction students not to do: It has multiple first-person narrators. In fact, it has FIVE first-person narrators. You can have as many point-of-view characters as you can handle, I would tell my classes, but for the sake of clarity it’s best to have only one of them—or none of them—in first person. Well. I told this fall’s classes that I was wrong, and Great House is why. Not only is it absolutely clear that we’re shifting to a new character with each “I,” but the success of the whole project hinges, to some degree, on the very fact that we’re in that ultra-close, intimate point of view with each of the characters. But it’s a feat, for sure, that Krauss pulled it off as well as she did. The only thing that connects these characters, at first glance, is an old desk that was taken from a Jewish family’s home during the Holocaust. As we read, those connections are shown to run deeper. I’ll leave it at that. It’s a brilliantly constructed, deeply felt thing.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

My friend Mitchell S. Jackson visited with my novel-intensive students via Zoom last spring, and mentioned that Song of Solomon was his favorite Toni Morrison novel. I’d read several of her novels before, but somehow not that one, and I decided then to correct it. I wish I’d read it decades ago, but what a treat when I finally did. It’s now my favorite of hers, too.

The novel centers on the life of Milkman Dead, from birth into adulthood, with a cast of beautifully rendered, captivating, and at times infuriating characters growing and changing and challenging along with him. The writing is beautiful, because…well…Toni Morrison. I mean…my god, what writing. And the story is rich and complex and surprising. But it’s the people that really caught me up. I found myself loving and rooting for all of them, even when I couldn’t like them. The ending is a heartbreak and a revelation, and I’m still chewing over it, months later.

Tu rostro mañana #3: Veneno y sombra y adiós/Your Face Tomorrow #3: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell by Javier Marías

At the beginning of 2022, I read the final book in this trilogy. To be honest, I can’t imagine them standing alone. It’s more accurate to say that Tu rostro mañana is one very long book published in three volumes. So let’s say, by that logic, that the three volumes combined form one of my favorite books that I finished in 2022, with the caveat that I read the first volume in 2020, the second in 2021, and the third in January of 2022.

This isn’t the place I would recommend starting if you haven’t read anything by Javier Marías. Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí/Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me or Corazón tan blanco/A Heart So White are probably better introductions to his work. But if you are familiar with him, do take on this three-part work. (But you’d be best served by reading Todas las almas/All Souls first, as it lays the groundwork for Tu rostro mañana.)

The thing I love most about reading Marías is the way you can watch his mind move across the page. He’ll go off on the most incredible, ten-page tangents and I just roll happily along with him. This trilogy invites you to really sink in to that. We lost him this year, and it hit me hard. I wanted so many more books from him.

I read these books in Spanish and can’t speak to the quality of the English translation, but Marías was fluent in English and I trust that he read and approved them, which is good enough for me.

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

Well. What a strange, wonderful ride this was. It’s a novel that breaks with form, with whatever you might have thought a novel had to be or contain. A novel that dares to openly believe in God in the twenty-first century. A novel that takes on the death of a loved one with such absolute open-hearted grief and love and belief. I won’t try to describe it. I don’t think I can. Just read it.

(And then go listen to her talk about it with David Naimon. Stick around for the end, when the interview is supposed to have already ended, because that’s the very best bit.)

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

I was probably the last person on earth to read this one, but just in case you are actually the last, I recommend it and it totally lives up to the hype. I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to it, but the way my brain works it could honestly just be that the copy I picked up at Goodwill however many years ago has—as you can see—movie art on the cover, and movie art automatically biases me against a book. (Read into that whatever you will. I won’t unpack it here.) But I did finally read it. Like Great House, I pulled it off the shelf for travel reading this summer, as something that could be easily left behind if it was just okay and easily replaced if I loved it. Like Great House, it made it home again.

As you may have gathered by this point, I’m a sucker for character. Ishiguro gives us a brilliant character study here of a man toward the end of his life presenting his experiences and truths to us and himself as one thing, only to realize, at the end, that it’s been something else entirely. A perfect rendering of the weight of what we’ve believed about ourselves and the world, and what happens when we see it, suddenly, horribly, through clearer eyes. It’s all pulled off with the measured, subtle prose we expect from Ishiguro, and the end hits all the harder for it.

Brief Lives by Anita Brookner

Brookner is kind of hit-or-miss for me, which is reasonable considering she published so many books. It would be strange to love them all. This one was, obviously, a big hit. It moved me as much or maybe even more than Hotel du Lac, which seems to be everyone’s favorite Brookner, and had been mine before this one.

Brief Lives is the story of a long friendship, in a way, but it’s more the story of one woman’s life reflected back to her through her relationship with a difficult woman who she’d never really liked very much at all. It’s bare and brutal, and made me realize how much I’ve been craving novels from the unsentimental point of view of women who are middle-aged and older. (Later Doris Lessing has been good for that lately as well. The Summer Before the Dark was particularly satisfying.)  I think this would be a good first Brookner, if you haven’t read her before.

Like many of you, I have way more books on the to-be-read shelf than I’ll ever be able to read, plus holds coming in from the library every week, but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? The embarrassment of riches? So much choice? I’ve just begun Sacrificio by Ernesto Mestre-Reed in anticipation of his visit to my Novel Intensive workshop in January. I love his work, and am excited for this latest novel.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to you all! Wishing you health and happiness and many cozy hours in your reading chairs.