Books I Read in 2022
from ggprints on Etsy
* = Stars (rating)
#1 - Redhead by the Side of the Road - 5*
Anne Tyler
It's a quick read and very enjoyable. I've liked every Anne Tyler book I've read. She's a great writer. Her characters and settings (pretty much always Baltimore!) are well-developed. This one struck me as more humorous than others. Not that it's written as a funny book, I don't think, but it amused me to see how the main character was often clueless about how he came off to others--his girlfriend, his family members, and everyone he interacts with. You're inside his mind and you see how he's just missing it. I have to admit it sometimes made me think of my hubby. He's wonderful, of course (just celebrated 43 years!) but sometimes he is clueless like this. I've learned to be very direct. Well, that didn't involve much learning, really. I'm direct to a fault, mostly. Highly recommend.
#2 - The Jane Austen Society - 5*
Natalie Jenner
Fun book! The story is a novel with completely made-up characters, but the location is real—the village of Chawton, with a house and cottage where Jane Austen and her family lived for several years. In the novel 8 people who love Jane Austen come together in the village, some who grew up there, left and came back, some from elsewhere, and end up forming a society to try to make the home and possessions of Jane Austen into a museum in her honor. It’s charming. “sweet, smart escapism,” as People Magazine said, in true Jane Austen style. The house museum actually exists. How fun it would be to visit it someday!
According to the author’s website, People magazine called this book “sweet, smart escapism.” The premise of the book is that 8 people in a small village form a group to save the last home where Jane Austen lived. It is fun to get to know the characters and be in a small English village for a while.
#3 - The Final Case - 5*
David Guterson
Another good book. Guterson wrote Snow Falling on Cedars, which I also highly recommend--and the movie based on that book is good, too. In The Final Case, the main character is a middle-aged man whose father is and defense attorney in his 80's, taking on his last trial. The trial is a heartbreaker involving the child abuse of a young Ethiopian girl adopted by a cult-like family. As the review linked above says, it's not a whodunnit but it's about family love. In spite of the hard subject of the trial, it's a tender story. The trial is central but the son and his father are the true main characters and you also get to know the Ethiopian girl's story. Beautiful writing and storytelling.
#4 - Happy Go-Lucky- 5*
David Sedaris
Glad to see him back to what seems to me himself. I didn’t like his other book based on his diary. He wrote this one during the pandemic and his father is a large factor in the book. They had a tough relationship. His father was more than eccentric, creepy, and mean really.
#5 - The Wet Engine - 5*
Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle is a phenomenal author who died too young. I am thankful he was so prolific. I’ve blogged about him and his books several times, including this one about the first book of his I read. The Wet Engine is a slender book. In it, Doyle tells the story of the birth of his and his wife’s twin boys 9 years earlier at that time. One was fine, but one was born missing a chamber in his heart “which is a problem, as you need four chambers for smooth conduct through this vale of fears and tears, and he only had three chambers, so pretty soon he had an open-heart surgery, during which doctors cut him open and iced down his heart and shut it down for an hour or so while they worked on repair…” Doyle writes about the surgeries his son Liam goes through, the science of the heart, and the heart as a metaphor. It’s a beautiful book.
Shemaiah Gonzalez has written a biography of Brian Doyle which I am sure will be great. You can pre-order it here.
#6 - A Burning in my Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message - 5*
Winn Collier
I have long admired Eugene Peterson and read many of his publications. I also find The Message a useful tool in my devotions, giving me a perspective of Bible passages that is easy to understand often gives me insights I would not have come up with myself. This biography was interesting and gave me a good idea of Eugene Peterson the man. He was such a man of God, but his humanity and humor come through, too. This is a good interview of Collier about the book and Eugene Peterson.
#7 - Where the Light Fell - 4*
Philip Yancy
#8 - The Joy and Light Bus Company - 4*
Alexander McCall Smith
#9 - Klara and the Sun - 4*
Kazuo Ishiguro
#10 - The Emigrants - 4*
Vilhelm Moberg
#11 -- Apeirogon
Colum McCann
#12 - 37 - Leaphorn & Chee Books - 5*
Tony & Anne Hillerman
#38 - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - 5*
Ocean Vuong
I did a full blog entry on this one. It is a novel written as if it is a letter from a son to his mother. My dad served in Viet Nam so Vuong’s story naturally caught my eye. Having grown up, as many of us did, when the Viet Nam war and the peoples' responses to it were in the news constantly, I thought it was interesting to read about the story of people who were a product of that war. Even though it is a novel, the book is, from all I've read and heard, quite autobiographical. The main character in the novel, is writing to his mother who is the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier. Like Ocean Vuong, the main character came to America as a refugee from Saigon along with his mother and grandmother. We read it for my book club and many did not like the book at all.
#39 - Thin Blue Smoke - 4*
Doug Worgle
#40 - The Outsiders - 4*
S.E. Hinton
#41 - Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others - 5*
Barbara Brown Taylor
I had lots of thoughts about this one. Here’s my blog entry. The book is a memoir of sorts about her years as a professor of world religions at Piedmont University, a small Christian university in Georgia. BBT explores how learning about other religions made her envious of some of the aspects those religions have that Christianity does not and how her mind and soul were opened to other paths to a relationship with God. She understands this could threaten her (and our) faith and directly addresses that fear. As I read this book I was filled with gratitude, relief, and joy.
#42 - Fox Creek - 5*
William Kent Krueger
This is another Cork O’Connor mystery by William Kent Krueger. I have liked all of the books in this series. This is the nineteenth one! I’m not sure I’ve written about or listed all of them but I have read them all. Cork is an ex-law officer, half Irish, half Native American, who lives in Minnesota. Although he quit being a policeman and then sheriff and instead owns and runs a hamburger joint, he does PI work. You get to know his family and friends as they are often integral to the stories. You learn a little about Native American spirituality, too. In this book an Ojibwe healer who has been a friend and mentor to Cork and his family for many years is forced to run for his life with two others and the book follows him—Henry Meloux—Cork, his wife, his son, and the “bad guys” who are all tracking Henry. Henry is over 100 years old but still so wise he is able to outwit his trackers through the deep forest he knows so well.
#43 - Rooster Bar - 5*
John Grisham
#44 - Balancing Act - 5*
Joanna Trollope
#45 Lessons in Chemistry - 4*
Bonnie Garmus
We chose this on in Book Club. I don’t think I’d have read it otherwise but I did enjoy it. I would call it quirky. It’s funny, too. The narration style reminded me of one of my favorite movies, “Stranger Than Fiction.” In that movie Emma Thompson narrates the life of the main character. At one point he realizes there is someone narrating his life, that he is living what someone is writing in a novel, then he realizes she is going to write his death and goes on a search to find the novelist and stop her from doing that. Great movie. This book had nothing like that sort of plot or storyline but I kept hearing a narrator like Emma Thompson (who plays the novelist) in my mind.
The main character is a woman chemist, set pre-Vietnam. She is harshly discriminated against as a woman plus she is raped, harassed, put down, has her work stolen, many unfair things. She is extremely smart but people don’t like her. She seems autistic, her mind focused on one thing—chemistry—and she does kind of weird things such as calling food by its chemical formula such as NaCl for salt. She marries a quirky, one-minded, also very smart chemist and they have a child born posthumously after the husband dies. They have a dog named “6:30.”
One of the reasons I heard a narrator’s voice was the reader often knew the inner thoughts of the characters, not just the main one, even the dog. And she would say things in a kind of familiar, conversational, sardonic way, such as something like, “He did this many times, by which I mean never.” There’s a nice twist at the end I did not guess or foresee.
#46 - Crying in H Mart - 4*
Michelle Zauner
A memoir centralized in familiar food—Korean food.
#47 - Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan
Recommended by Karen Swallow Prior. A very short, slim book. Kind of like a parable.
#48 - Because of Winn Dixie - 5*
Kate DiCamillo
A children’s book, classic, that I had never read
#49 - 55 - Faye Kellerman Decker Lazarus mysteries - 5*
Re-read a bunch of these.