2022: My Year in Books
Following a blogging tradition, here is a list of the books I read in 2022, brought to you one month late, with comments below. The list is in chronological order and is not a ranking.
1. The Pivotal Players, Robert Barron
2. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
3. Mountain Interval, Robert Frost
4. Shakespeare in a Divided America, James Shapiro
5. The Exorcist, Willaim Peter Beatty
6. Tiny Habits, B.J. Fogg
7. A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
8. New Hampshire, Robert Frost
9. Wagnerism, Alex Ross
10. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
11. The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul
12. The West-Running Brook, Robert Frost
13. Diary of a Country Priest, Georges Bernanos
14. In the Distance, Herman Diaz
15. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Dubois
16. Superman: An Unauthorized Biography, Glen Weldon
17. Reasonable Faith, William Lane Craig
18. A Universal History of Iniquity, Jorge Luis Borges
19. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
20. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
21. A Further Range, Robert Frost
22. Hell of a Book, James Mott
23. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
24. A Secular Age, Charles Taylor
25. The Dead Hand, David E. Huffman
26. Make It Stick, Peter C. Brown, Henry Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel
27. The History of Christianity, Vol. 1, Diarmaid MacColloch
28. Professor Maxwell’s Duplicitous Demon, Brian Clegg
29. The Witness Tree, Robert Frost
30. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbary Kingsolver
31. The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
32. The Epigenetics Revolution, Nessa Carey
33. Othello, William Shakespeare
34. Word on Fire Bible: Acts, Letters, and Revelation, Robert Barron, editor
Notes
Frost
You may have noticed multiple titles from Robert Frost. A few years ago, I decided to make an effort to read books of poetry, not just “best of” collections in anthologies. So I to plowed through a collected edition of Frost, which includes all of his published books. Reading poets at length provides a much better perspective than a few pages of scattered favorites poems. We all know “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” But how about “New Hampshire” or “The Egg and the Machine”? Consider these the Deep Tracks. In my deeper reading of Frost, I find his writing crankier, more political, a bit more conventionally religious, and more unsettling than the poems that make it into the high school textbooks.
A Secular Age
This 777 page monster of a book was one of the most demanding books I’ve ever read. It is a history of the growth of non-religion in Western civilization, and touches on almost every aspect of culture, religion, and philosophy in the West. Taylor’s tendency to lightly pick up serious subjects and assume the reader knows all about them was frustrating. He is a habitual intellectual name-dropper. He doesn’t even have the courtesy to give the first and last name of a writer so I can look the name up — we are just supposed to know when he refers to Butler or Mill that we are talking about the Butler and the Mill. At one point he started discussing a person named Duncan and I had to read the whole paragraph before it dawned on me that he was talking about King Duncan in Macbeth, without mentioning either the play by name or William Shakespeare! This is just assuming way too much. The book was frustrating, and should have been written much more clearly. But, I learned something on every page sometimes more than one thing, so I finished it. It took 9 months, but whatever.
Most Disappointing
I don’t know what people see in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Mostly it’s a collection of gag scenes, with some nihilism thrown in for depth. Funny, but I’ve read funnier. It was okay, in a simple-minded sort of a way.
Honorable Disappointing Mention: The Poisonwood Bible. This book should have ended when the mother left Africa. It had shot its wad by then. But no….that was the halfway point!
Best Book
A House for Mr. Biswas. V.S. Naipaul’s novel about the life of a Hindu Indian living in Trinidad is the best book I’ve read in many years. It spans almost every experience imaginable — birth, superstition, the story of the immigrant, married life, the extended family, South Asian culture, British colonialism, World War II. And drop-dead funny to boot, unlike some others I’ve read recently (see above). Although it is certainly a novel, I would say this book is, in a sense, a vast collection of short stories. Every ten pages or so, Mr Biswas has a new adventure, beginning with the death of his father and progressing through his experiences as a newspaper writer, burning his business down for the insurance money, and the endless fighting and bickering with members of his extended family. All through it the constant is his wife, who, while not always portrayed favorably, is faithful and keeps Biswas on the path to semi-stability all his life, to the very last paragraph.
Funniest book
A tie between Scoop and A House for Mr. Biswas. Scoop has some very dated references that are racially offensive and mar an otherwise fine book, but Evelyn Waugh was writing almost a hundred years ago, and was a well-known cranky Brit in his day. That doesn’t exactly excuse his attitude towards Africans under British rule, but if you can forgive that, Waugh is a glittering writer. (Pro tip: Evelyn Waugh was a man.)
Souls of Black Folk
I was surprised at the depth and beauty of this book. I always thought it was a polemic about equal rights for African Americans. Its reputation as the first work of racial sociology in America put me off from reading it for far too long. It isn’t that exactly. It is a collection of essays that looks at Black life from a variety of angles, only some of which are political and social. The most interesting thing about it is that it was published in 1904. DuBois was born after slavery, but slavery was so recent that he knew many people who had been enslaved. It gives the book a fascinating perspective that no book written today could ever hope to replicate.
His chapter “Of the Passing of the First-Born” was one of the most harrowing and arresting accounts of the death of a child that I have ever read. “I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness in its train.”
And the chapter “Of the Coming of John” is one of the best depictions of the inevitable destruction racism produces that has ever been written. Every American should read it. And then read it again.
Book I Barely Remember Reading, let alone remembering what was in it
The Extended Mind. Still don’t remember much about it. Certainly didn’t leave an impression.
Honorable If I Had Remembered It I’d Mention It:
Tiny Habits The author of this book was referenced in another book I’d read, and I didn’t recognize him because I’d totally forgotten I’d read it.
