The Best Books of 2022

I confess: the title of this post is a lie. I haven’t read enough new books this year to say these are the best out of everything published in the English language in 2022. I read more than 300 books this year (so far), but I spent way too much time wallowing in nostalgia and looking for the literary equivalent of comfort food. If a hot new book, fresh from a rave review from the New York Times was hard going in the first few chapters, I tossed it aside. Same for all the books that were praised on my Twitter feed as scathing indictments or revelations or revolutions or whatever. It was probably me in most cases, and I feel guilty for not bringing my A-game as a reader.

But that made me all the more grateful for those books that broke through my various distractions or personal failings. The books that dragged me away from my phone and kept me glued to the page were gifts. And so, I’m sharing them with you.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan — I’m not sure I’ve read anyone as good at describing what it’s like to be human as Jennifer Egan. A Visit From The Goon Squad got a great deal of praise for its style and its intelligence, but this sort-of sequel companion novel shows that Egan uses her narrative devices and jump-cuts through time to fully illuminate the characters. She reveals a depth of feeling and loss almost clinically, like she’s laying open her subjects on a steel autopsy table while they’re still breathing. But Egan also has such great sympathy for them, even the obvious fuck-ups, as they travel through time in the only direction we’re allowed. We are all living in a science-fiction novel now — we get to see billionaires self-destruct in real time and watch nations fight with drones while robot cars run people down in the streets — and Egan manages to capture that insanity and still make the people the most interesting part of the story.

Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson — This is where I humblebrag through full disclosure: Antoine is a friend of mine, and one of my favorite people in the world. So I am thrilled to report he’s finally getting the recognition he deserves for Mouth to Mouth, which was on Barack Obama’s reading list as well as a host of honors, and is currently being developed as a TV series. It literally could not happen to a nicer guy. Maybe that will cause you to discount my verdict here, but Mouth to Mouth is a goddamn triumph. It starts as a seemingly mundane encounter in an airport, and reveals years of envy and resentment and secrets and lies in less than 200 pages. It’s been compared to Highsmith and Hitchcock. Antoine takes a situation familiar to anyone who’s lived in LA, when you can actually save someone’s life —you stomp on your brakes and let them pass rather than smash into a concrete highway divider; you put out your arm as they’re about to step into traffic while staring at their phone— and they barely give you a nod of recognition. Gratitude is not a growth market here. Antoine turns an entire world on one of those moments, and forces us to consider whether there’s any such thing as a truly good deed.

Illuminations by Alan Moore — I already did a whole review of the legendary comic book writer’s collection, and I’m aware this wasn’t everyone’s particular favorite. But I was glued to the pages just like when I first read Moore’s Miracleman or Swamp Thing as a pasty adolescent. “What We Can Know About Thunderman” is the main attraction for the comics geeks, but the best pieces in the book are “Not Even Legend” and “Hypothetical Lizard.” Moore is a chameleon, a mimic, and a magician.

Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon — A near-future road trip piloted by an oddly charming thug-for-hire as the world falls apart. Will Bear, AKA the Barely Blur, is the perfect guide through the decaying corpse of America, a guy who’s doing his best to hang onto his own version of morality when he gets a call on his burner phone from a young woman who claims to be his daughter. This slim thread might be a way to drag him back to humanity, or it might be a lure that’s going to get him killed. But either way, it tugs at him, and at us. Chaon’s prose is smart and funny enough to stand on its own, while the plot provides plenty of highbrow violence as Bear finds his way to the end of the road. There are some impulses that can’t be denied, whether they’re only genetic leftovers from a time when primates huddled around the fire for warmth, or the way we discover our own souls.

The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer — A million people died from Covid in the United States alone, and the U.S. mortality rate spiked from overdoses and suicides at the same time. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Geoff Dyer used the quiet time of the pandemic to think about endings. Ranging from tennis great Roger Federer to Nietzsche to Burning Man, Dyer grapples with the stubborn truth that he is getting old and this ride has only one destination. Dyer wrestles with final acts and big finishes, burning out and fading away. Unlike the many writers who writhed in their existential crises in times of relative peace and plenty, Dyer confronts the big questions with his usual grace and good humor and honesty even when death is closer than anyone wants to admit.

When We Cease To Understand The World by Benjamin Labatut — This one is a cheat, because it came out last year, and it’s already been praised to high heaven by everyone who matters. But I just got to it this year, and I’ve been buying copies and forcing them on anyone who will take it. It’s a deceptively slim little volume of related anecdotes about scientists that somehow reads like a horror novel. Labatut describes how these great minds invented the science that unleashed terrors on the 20th Century. There is something awful and inhuman in the story of Fritz Haber, who invented Zyklon-B and condemned millions to death in the Nazi camps — but who was also the man who invented a way to extract nitrogen for fertilizer, and saved millions more from starvation. The same darkness waits for the mathematicians who work with harmless-seeming numbers and find an absence where they expected God. By the end, you see how that void consumes them all.

Other books I loved and/or impressed me this year, some by friends and acquaintances and well-wishers: Bleeding Shadows by Joe R. Lansdale; The Date from Hell by Gwenda Bond; Dr. No by Percival Everett; The Furies by John Connolly; The Goodbye Coast by Joe Ide; Hokuloa Road by Elizabeth Hand; The Human Target by Tom King and Greg Smallwood; The Maker of Swans by Paraic O’Donnell; The Men by Sandra Newman; Neom by Lavie Tidhar; A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance by Rick Remender and André Lima Araújo; Secret Identity by Alex Segura; These Prisoning Hills by Christopher Rowe; and The Wheel of Doll by Jonathan Ames.