In 2022, I sought out to read 20 books by the end of the year. By the end of May I had realized that I had set an unrealistic goal for myself and instead upped the goal to 52, or averaging one book a week. The challenge I set for myself, as well as every book I read this year can be found on my goodreads profile, here.
I consumed mostly audiobooks for the first half of the year until I received a Kindle Paperwhite for my birthday, when I started to balance audiobooks with actual eyeball reading fifty-fifty. The following list is a collection of ten of the books I personally really enjoyed reading this year. It includes books both new and old, new reads as well as re-reads. For the most part I tend to favor horror, sci-fi, and thrillers. I hope this list will inspire someone to seek out a book they might not have otherwise have interest in.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The first time I read In Cold Blood was for an extra-curricular assignment in my junior year of high school. It was one of the first books I actually read from cover to cover that wasn’t mandatory for school. I had retained very little from my first read, but everything came flooding back to me once I started to settle in with the grim-fated Clutter family.
As a recent fan of true crime, I’m actually surprised at myself for how long it took me to return to this story. Although I have my suspicions of how much of this story’s gaps were filled in by Capote, it was still an enthralling but ultimately upsetting story to revisit.
Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak
One of the few 2022 releases that I read this year that I unequivocally loved from cover to cover. The story follows Mallory, a recovering addict trying to put her life back together. Fortune favors her when she scores a job as nanny for a well-to-do suburban couple and their young, albeit somewhat strange, son Teddy.
At its core, this one is a very solid mystery with some supernatural stuff at the far fringes, which is exactly how I like my thrillers. The act that sealed the deal, however, was the absolutely bonkers, yet extremely satisfying, twist ending and finale. For the final stretch, I could not put this one down.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
I started reading House of Leaves a few years ago and only just this summer finally put it to bed. The story at the core of the several nested narratives involves a house whose insides grow unfathomably beyond its earthly boundaries, creating a seemingly endless maze that swallows up those that dare to venture too far inside. But this story is actually told from the point of view of a blind man scrutinizing a fictional documentary about said house, analyzing it as if it’s a work of nonfiction.
But actually that story is being told through journal entries of a slightly-degenerate tattoo shop employee who is reading said blind man’s manuscripts, interspersed with bits of his personal life. Footnotes upon footnotes upon endnotes annotate the book, sometimes sprawling off into meaningless citations, sprawling forwards and backwards, upside-down and back across the page. To say this book was a head trip would be a severe understatement, but I loved it all the way through.
Last Days by Adam Nevill
After not loving one of Nevill’s more recent novels, The Reddening, I decided to try out one that sounded right up my alley. Last Days is about Kyle Freeman, a documentary filmmaker tasked with cobbling together the past of a notorious 1970s cult, The Temple of the Last Days. As he and his one-man production crew visit pertinent locations and interview surviving members and associates, Kyle begins to feel marked by the cult, forever changed by the things he sees and hears.
At a whopping 531 pages (which is pretty hefty for me, a budding reader) I was surprised at how quickly I blew through this one. It kept me on the edge of my seat up through the admittedly wacky and a bit overblown finale.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Neuromancer is another of a few re-reads for the year, one of first books I sought out on my own to read, back in college. It’s one of the progenitors to the “cyberpunk” genre and follows Henry Case, a down-and-out hacker who is given a second chance at doing what he loves if he participates in the theft of a powerful artificial intelligence.
Gibson creates an astounding fleshed-out world, complete with tons of interesting side characters and tons of novel sci-fi concepts that predate the modern internet as we know it. It’s essential reading for anyone looking for an intense heist thriller set in the grimy underbelly of a hacker-ridden future.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Ryland Grace awakens alone with little memory on what he soon discovers is a spaceship hurtling through space. As he begins to recall the events that led up to his current situation, we learn that he is on a mission to save humankind from a threat beyond the stars. Project Hail Mary feels as much a sci-fi adventure as it does a science textbook, jam-packed full of real hypothetical science in the face of disaster, much like Weir’s 2011 novel The Martian.
At first I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy this one. There was too much information being thrown at me too quickly. But the book quickly opens up and begins to lean on the fiction a bit more, and for that I really grew to love it.
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
Teddy Daniels is a U.S. Marshall investigating the disappearance of an escaped patient from the titular isolated hospital for the criminally insane. As he digs into the history of the island and its inhabitants, he begins to piece together that things aren’t what they seem and that he may have been brought to the island under ulterior motives.
I went into reading this one after having been very familiar with Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio and after finishing it I realized how excellent an adaptation it was. Some of the dialogue is taken straight out of the novel, which already lends itself to feeling film-like. This may have been one of the breeziest reads of the year, satisfying to read even though I already knew every aspect of the outcome.
Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon
In a near future, Will Bear has been living for more than half of his life outside the confines of normal society. He has adopted several pseudonyms and takes careful considerations to stay off the grid while he works as a hired hand for a mysterious corporation, dealing in human trafficking, assassination, and other unsavory deeds. His perfectly manicured lack of an identity is threatened, however, when he gets an unsolicited call from a daughter he never knew he had.
I decided to pick up this one almost completely in the blind, having only heard that it was gaining buzz for being one of the top sci-fi novels of 2022. It’s light on plot, but instead tends to linger and explore this near-future world and Bear’s place within (or outside of) it. It’s a very funny book, darkly comedic in its irreverent portrayal of a man who isn’t a good person but who is trying his best.
The Deep by Nick Cutter
The Deep is a sci-fi horror story about a worldwide pandemic, but that’s only the beginning. In an effort to research a solution for the horrible plague dubbed the ‘Gets, a team of scientists have set up a lab at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to study a potential miracle cure. Communications suddenly go dark and it’s now up to the lead scientist’s brother to go down and find out what has happened.
Nick Cutter (pen name for novelist Craig Davidson) may be one of my favorite authors that I have discovered in the past few years. After reading The Troop, a novel about a boy scout troop hunted on an isolated island by a killer tapeworm, I knew I had to see what else this guy had done. The Deep is disgusting, disturbing, and mind-bending horror that shows inspiration from John Carpenter’s The Thing and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon.
Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle
In anticipation for Darnielle’s Devil House, this year I read his previous two novels. I was less enthusiastic about the plot bait-and-switch performed in Universal Harvester, but I thoroughly enjoyed Wolf in White Van, which I think remains his strongest story.
Wolf in White Van is told from the perspective of Sean Phillips, a disfigured man who operates a play-by-mail role-playing game. The novel is told out of order and chronicles his life before and after the accident that caused his disfigurement. I normally don’t tend to enjoy stories without much of a plot, but I fell right into Darnielle’s clever and sometimes darkly comedic style of writing.