Year in Review - 2022

I’m recapping my 2022 reading year while rocking to sleep the reason why I came up so short. In a year when I set out to make up for lost ground since the pandemic, I found my attention pulled away more than ever. At any rate, I left 2022 with twenty more books under my belt (due to last minute crunching) and a new reason to be tired and thankful for the future.

It was a very up and down year for books. I found myself taking hard tangents into specific topics for two or three (or more) books at a time. I don’t regret it, but looking back I’m realizing I didn’t have as much fun reads this year as much as I had explorative ones. I guess I had things I wanted to know, and I damn well tried my best to know them.

But first, I did start my 52+2 challenge after years of imagining the set list. A year later and four books down, it’s fun finally getting to some of the bigger, harder books from my to-read list and eventually forgetting what I’ve even put in the deck, though it’s been frustrating wanting something now when I’ve committed to waiting for it to be drawn. I thought I’d be a lot further along with it at this point, but sometimes the draw doesn’t match the current interest or mental capacity (looking at you pick #5).

In preparing for our trip to Portugal and Italy, I spent a five book journey immersing myself in history and culture as much as possible. I’d always been a classics nerd, and this was the perfect excuse to prove it. While I did gain some great background and perspective on our travel sites, I found myself completely switching gears with big news only a day into our trip — Rachel was pregnant! Incredible curveball that began a probably life-long side quest into pregnancy and parenting books. Ever since we got back to the states, I’ve had a handful on my nightstand, finishing two huge ones over the course of nine months and starting three more since Meadow was born a week before 2023. It’s probably an obnoxious thing to try reading about fatherhood instead of just practicing it, but I don’t see why I can’t do both 🤷🏻‍♂️ haha.

It was a wild year, covering all sorts of ground, and the stats are all over the place. My lowest page count since 2016. Lowest average length since 2019. Only one 1000 pager, lots of quick shorties, seven nonfiction, a bit of genre work and a short story collection, some novels I’ll probably never visit again (for so many different reasons), and an average rating of 4.2 stars. And even that’s skewed since two of the best were just pregnancy references that saved my anxiety toward the end.

Only four others earned a five star. Told ya it wasn’t as much of a “fun” year to read as I had planned.

Anyway, the highlights of the year are:

SPQR

The Cave

Calypso (5 star)

Skeleton Crew (5 star)

Home Game (5 star)

And the best book of 2022, hands down:

EAST OF EDEN

What a story, what a classic. It’s easily now in my top three books ever, and I imagine no one who has read it is surprised to hear that. One of hopefully many wins from the 52+2 stack. The others were great for their own reasons, though shout out to the essay collections that have given me new insight and humorous inspiration to record my own. They were both so casually enjoyable.

Looking into 2023, I’m not sure what my goals are. I’ve slept less than 6 hours a night the last two weeks, and I think just surviving most of the year will be impressive enough. But I would like to find more carefree reading again, inevitably mixed in with some parenting advice, baby books, and picks from the 52+2 deck that I’ve always wanted to read, just maybe not while sleep-deprived. Regardless, I’m excited to be a dad, one who makes time for his daughter and hopefully saves some for his own interests too. Here’s hoping one will rub off on the other and she’ll be writing a year in review of her own some day.