Believe it or not, I read 112 books in 2022. Many were fantastic, but not all of them. I’ve taken my lists from past years off this site, but I’ve decided to add this list here for old time’s sake.
I use Goodreads to track my ratings and reviews. If I write a review for another publication, I only add the star rating to Goodreads and leave the words for the other review. I use the five star scale, though sometimes I wish it wasn’t so simplistic. Still, it helps me figure out if I want to keep reading an author’s canon each year over.
So here are the books, organized by the star rating, and then in alphabetical order by title.
The Fantastic Fives (71 Books)
A History of the Theories of Rain by Stephen Collis
A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers by Kyle Schlesinger
A Summoning by Nicole McCarthy
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Aerial Concave Without Cloud by Sueyeun Juliette Lee
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Amanda Paradise by C.A. Conrad
Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth by Craig Childs
Autobiography by Rob Mclennan
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Castles in the Air / Time of Sky by Ayane Kawata
Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History by Eduardo Galeano
Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat
Cleave: Poems by Alex O. Bleecker
Commonplace by Hugo García Manríquez
Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi
Contra Natura by Rodolfo Hinostroza
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta Lynn Hammond
Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh
Defying Extinction by Amy Barone
Devil House by John Darnielle
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century by Alice Wong
Diving Makes the Water Deep by Zach Savich
Doctor Strange, Vol. 1: The Way of the Weird by Jason Aaron
Doctor Strange: The Oath by Brian K. Vaughan
Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature by Jordan Fisher Smith
Feed by Tommy Pico
Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms by Joe Feldman
Guard The Mysteries by Cedar Sigo
Haibun de la Serna: 99 Neo-Barroco Haibun by Paul E. Nelson
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Mannie Murphy
IRL by Tommy Pico
Junk by Tommy Pico
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price
Love, Poetry by Paul Éluard
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy, #1) by Stephen Graham Jones
Nature Poem by Tommy Pico
Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Notable Native People: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present by Adrienne Keene
Of Beings Alone: The Eigenface by Lissa Wolsak
On Photography by Susan Sontag
Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit
Poetry as Insurgent Art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry by Jason Schreier
S O S: Poems, 1961-2013 by Amiri Baraka
Smiling in an Old Photograph by Kim Ki-taek
Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet by Tim Hwang
Tango Below a Narrow Ceiling by Riad Saleh Hussein
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
The Beloved of the Dawn by Franz Fühmann
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa by Chika Sagawa
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh
The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero
The Labyrinth of the Spirits (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books #4) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg
The Place of Scraps by Jordan Abel
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
The Vanguards of Holography by Annie Christain
The Vertigo of All Those Stars by Teri Zipf
The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
The Witcher Omnibus by Paul Tobin
The Witcher: Ronin by Rafał Jaki‚ Jaki
White Magic by Elissa Washuta
Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters by Rebecca Solnit
Yellow Rain: Poems by Mai Der Vang
The Fueling Fours (30 Books)
Above the Bejeweled City by Jon Davis
All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
All This Time by Cedar Sigo
Bamboophobia by ko ko thett
Bit by Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World by Andrew Ervin
Black + Blues by Edward Kamau Brathwaite
Call Them by Their True Names by Rebecca Solnit
Casino Lounge Gospel by Nicole Sarrocco
Doctor Strange: Damnation by Donny Cates
Drive by Elaine Sexton
Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World by Eve Rodsky
Five Wishes: How Answering One Simple Question Can Make Your Dreams Come True by Gay Hendricks
Float Me Away, Floodwaters by Adam Gnade
Instrument for Distributed Empathy Monetization by William Lessard
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester
Long Division by Kiese Laymon
Oregon Lighthouses by Sharlene Nelson
Patriarchy Blues by Rena Priest
POLO SILK Presents: POP THAT THANG !!! by Polo Silk
Refugee by Pamela Uschuk
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Cost of Knowing by Brittney Morris
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
The Lighthouse Activity Book by Elinor Dewire
The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae
The Poetry of Zen by Sam Hamill
The Water Museum by Luis Alberto Urrea
the wind is sacred there by Kyld Watkins
Water: A Visual and Scientific History by Jack Challoner
The Thriving Threes (7 Books)
Catalogue d’Oiseaux by Aaron Tucker
Collected Poems by Sonia Sanchez
Dear Ted by Kim Vodicka
Elephants in Our Yard by Meral Kureyshi
Normal Distance by Elisa Gabbert
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
The Tepid Twos (4 Books)
The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson
Desert Oracle: Volume 1: Strange True Tales from the American Southwest by Ken Layne
The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty, #1) by Ken Liu
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong