books

I knew Catherine Newman was a kindred spirit (“the happy-saddest person who ever lived” – we might be tied) and I knew I loved her writing.   But wow.  I just finished We All Want Impossible Things and I am actively crying and feeling that deep ache of how beautiful life is, at the same time.  This gorgeous book made me sad and happy simultaneously, made me laugh and cry, reminded me of all the ways life is mundane and luminous in the same day, same hour.  It’s about friendship and family and being confused and being clear, about the people who accompany us in this life, about all the ways we abide by and honor those we love most.  Run, don’t walk.  This book is glorious and heartbreaking and abolutely vital.  As CS Lewis said, we read to know we are not alone.  Thank you, Catherine Newman, thank you for doing that with this book (and all your work, honestly).

One of my favorite quotes is below.  The other is:

“Is it better to have loved and lost?  Ask anyone in pain and they’ll tell you no.  And yet.  Here we are, hurtling ourselves headlong into love like lemmings off a cliff into a churning sea of grief.”

I walked the dog this morning before the sun came up and at one point I stopped, head tipped up, looking at the sky spangled with stars and thinking of Waldo.  Waldo who is, as Dani Shapiro said on Tuesday with Claire Messud at Brookline Booksmith, the beating heart of this beautiful book.  I finished Signal Fires last night and it without question belongs on my “best of 2022” list.  What a gorgeous novel, both quiet and compelling, full of the shining strands that weave us together and into our own individual lives and into the great wide world at the same time.  To me, this story is above all about time and memory (which are the great preoccupations of my own life).  It’s also about love and family and forgiveness and the ineffable, unavoidable echo of the past through the present.  I’m so grateful and honored to call Dani my teacher, literally (I took her class for several years) and figuratively (have read all of her work and consider her a role model both on the pages and in life).  If you haven’t read Signal Fires, run.  If you have, I’d love to talk about it.  Thank you, Dani.

I’ve written holiday book roundups for a lot of years – 2021, 2020, 2019. 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.  Old posts include lots of children’s books, if you are looking for that!

Today I want to share the books I’ve loved most in 2022.  It is my firm view that books make the best gift (pity my godchildren), so if you’re in the market for that, these would all be good ideas!

Fiction

Bewilderment, Richard Powers – A gorgeous book about family and amazement and the things that matter the most.  Warning: this is very sad.  Powers’ last novel, The Overstory, was my favorite the year I read it.  The books are very different but share a deep sense of awe about the natural world.

Notes on an Execution, Danya Kukafka – I couldn’t stop thinking about this book after I finished it.  I’m a true crime follower and I found this investigation of the person behind brutality profoundly compelling.

Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel -This novel, which reminded me of my 2021 favorite (Cloud Cuckoo Land), is futiristic and has elements of sci fi (a genre people are often surprised to learn I like).  I found it spare and powerful and beautiful.

Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus – Let me start by saying the cover of this book did not, for me, represent what is a strong story about feminism, intelligence, and pushing forward in the face of a world that’s not really ready for you.  Also, best fictional dog I met this year: Six Thirty.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin – This book might have been the biggest surprise of the year for me. It’s about video game developers – a world I don’t know anything about and would not have told you is a real interest.  And it is also the most beautiful character story about the way we love people in so many different ways, about passion and the ways the past echos into the present.

Memoir

Lost & Found, Kathryn Schultz – This is my favorite book of the year.  Schultz writes gorgeously about the loss of her father, the near-simultaneous finding of her wife, and about the critical, indelible ways the two interact (my favorite section of the book is the third – “&”) to create a richer experience of both.  This memoir is about nothing less than life itself.

In Love, Amy Bloom – Amy Bloom writes with unflinching intimacy about her husband’s decision to end his own life in the face of a terminal diagnosis.  Cliche alert, but also a truth: this is a book about death that sheds new light on life.

Bomb Shelter, Mary Laura Philpott – This book made me laugh and it made me nod in understanding.  Philpott excavates the terror and the sublime and the mundane that coexist in every day of adulthood, parenthood, personhood.  I loved this book.

Left on Tenth, Delia Ephron – A very different story than Philpott’s, but also one that gives us an up close view of life’s roller coaster, and, like Schultz’s memoir, Ephron’s talks about the ways that the hardest and best things in life can often – by coincidence or by necessity? – coexist.

What are your favorite books you’ve read this year?

It’s been a long time since I wrote down so many passages from a book, underlined so aggressively, nodded and shared quotes and blinked away tears.  Thank you Brettne for suggesting that I read Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz.  I have never read a book that captures as precisely and articulately what the experience of mourning a larger-than-life father was.  The book is structured in three parts: “lost,” which talks about the death of her father, “found,” which talks about her finding love shortly before her father’s death, and “and,” which talks about how both losing and finding animate the rest of her life.  I loved all three parts, but the first and last most.  The first section moved me often to tears, as Schulz put words around what my experience was like in the weeks, months, and years after Dad’s death.

The last section did what great literature does for me: made me feel less alone in the world.  Schulz describes the interplay between grief and gratitude that defines my every single day, and argues compellingly that awareness of each augments and enriches the other.  I could not believe this more.  In so many ways Dad’s death made me a more deeply feeling and more keenly aware person, more attuned to life’s beauty and pain, both.

Lately I have found this everyday remarkableness almost overwhelming. As I said, I’ve never been much for stoicism, but these last few years, I have been even more susceptible than usual to emotion—or, rather, to one emotion in particular. As far as I know, it has no name in our language, although it is close to what the Portuguese call saudade and the Japanese call mono no aware. It is the feeling of registering, on the basis of some slight exposure, our existential condition: how lovely life is, and how fragile, and how fleeting. Although this feeling is partly a response to our place in the universe, it is not quite the same as awe, because it has too much of the everyday in it, and too much sorrow, too. For the same reason, it is also not the feeling the Romantics identified as the sublime—a mingling of admiration and dread, evoked by the vast impersonal grandeur of the physical world. This feeling I am talking about has none of that splendor or terror in it. It is made up, instead, of gratitude, longing, and a note I can only call anticipatory grief. Among English words, its nearest kin might be “bittersweet.”

It was a good reading year.  I read a lot of plot, too, and recently discovered James Patterson (I have a well-documented love for Linda Fairstein, David Baldacci, Michael Connelley, and John Grisham, and Patterson joins this pantheon).  But thought it was interesting to reflect on some of my favorite reads from this year.  I’m interested in what you loved, too!

Cloud Cuckoo Land – Anthony Doerr – without question my #1, by a mile.  I adored this book.  Adored, adored, adored.  As I said on Instagram, “This is a simply extraordinary tale, which does that most exalted thing books can do: touches on what it means to be a thinking, feeling human being in the world.”

No Cure for Being Human: (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) – Kate Bowler – I loved Bowler’s first book and this one even more.  It’s a gorgeous exploration of what you learn and think about when you suddenly contemplate dying in your 30s.  I underlined so many passages.  This is a beautiful book.

Great Circle – Maggie Shipstead – This was my #1 of the year until I read the Doerr this fall.  Shipstead’s book is a soaring story of strength, resilence, and pursuing a dream, and the arc of a flight over the world echoes in the narrative.  Just glorious.

A Children’s Bible – Lydia Millet – This slender dystopian novel packs a powerful punch.  I’m still thinking about it 6 months later.  Completely haunting.

Monogamy – Sue Miller – I loved this story about long marriage and midlife, and particularly loved that it’s set not just in my home town but in my actual neighborhood.  Even more thrilling is that Dani Shapiro is writing the film adapatation!  I can’t wait!

The Paper Palace – Miranda Cowley Heller – I found this book profoundly evocative of my childhood summers near Cape Cod, and I also think the central question, of the one who got away in the context of a happy and contented marriage, is very interesting and not frequently explored.

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted – Suleika Jaouad – I found this book inspiring and gloriously written, and it made me look around my ordinary life with (even) more awareness than usual.

Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell – I absolutely loved this book’s exploration of Hamlet from another angle, and the observations O’Farrell makes on marriage and the ways that grief and memory echo through our lives.

What were your favorite books this year?  

Disclosure: these are Amazon links