My 2022 in Books

As part of a broader overhaul of my end of year series, I’m ditching my usual “lists of note” about books and shows and movies and everything else in favor of a single post with both my favorite books and the long list of everything I read (including both academic and non-academic reading lists).

I had planned to release this post on the final day of the year, but I have a good sense of how much I will read tomorrow and the post I had in mind for today is not yet ready.

I see a few trends from this list. My reading volume took only a small step back from 2021, despite the busyness of my year. I increased the amount of ancient history I read, and I generally kept my reading diet stable at thirty percent nonfiction, more than forty percent written by women (among other metrics that I track). As the list below indicates, I was particularly blown away by a lot of the general nonfiction I read below. However, as compared with the past few years, each of which included two or three of my all-time favorite books, almost all of my favorite fiction of this year were fantasy or science fiction. This reflects not only the type of books I had the capacity to engage with most of the year, but also the quality of recent speculative fiction, and I actively disliked the few literary novels I read that have been appearing on “best of 2022” lists.

What follows is three “best” lists for things I read this year: Ancient History, general nonfiction, and fiction of all sorts. Then comes a roughly-sorted list of the remaining nonfiction, followed by the remaining fiction, lightly sorted so that books by the same authors appear together. Links go to any book that I wrote about this year, though time constraints meant that I wrote about fewer books than usual this year.

Top ancient history

• Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, David M. Lewis
• The Breadmakers, Jared T. Benton
• The Rise of Rome, Kathryn Lomas
• King of the World, Matt Waters

Top other nonfiction

• Lost & Found, Kathryn Shultz
• Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew
• Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes du Mez
• The Gospel According to the Klan, Kelly Baker
• Smashing Statues, Erin Thompson
• Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
• The Cooking Gene, Michael Twitty

Top fiction

• Empire of Gold, Shannon Chakraborty
• Speaking Bones, Ken Liu
• Babel, R.F. Kuang
• Jade War, Fonda Lee
• Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr

Nonfiction (everything else)

• The Landscape of History, John Lewis Gaddis
• Rome and Provincial Resistance, Gil Gambash
• Three Stones Make a Wall, Eric Cline
• The Athenian Empire, Lisa Kallet and John Kroll
• Other Natures, Clara Bosak-Schroeder
• For the Freedom of Zion, Guy Maclean Rogers
• Masada, Jodi Magness
• The Greco-Persian Wars, Erik Jensen
• The Roman Retail Revolution, Stephen Ellis
• Remembering the Roman Republic, Andrew Gallia
• Invisible Romans, Robert Knapp
• Sasanian Persia, Touraj Daryaee
• The Ancient Near East, Amanda H. Podany
• Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World, Emma Dench
• The Bronze Lie, Myke Cole
• The Bright Ages, Matt Gabriele and David Perry
• The Medieval Crossbow, Stuart Ellis-Gorman
• Sourdough Culture, Eric Pallant
• Koshersoul, Michael Twitty
• A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage
• The Paradox of Plenty, Harvey Levenstein
• Bad Jews, Emily Tamkin
• Branding the Nation, Melissa Aronczyk
• The End of Burnout, Jonathan Malesic
• Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman
• All About Me, Mel Brooks
• Story Mode, Trevor Strunk
• Specifications Grading, Linda B. Nilson
• Born to Run, Christopher McDougall
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
• Origins of the Wheel of Time, Michael Livingston
• Billion Dollar Loser, Reeves Wiedeman

Fiction (everything else)

• Abaddon’s Gate, James S.A. Corey
• Cibola Burn, James S.A. Corey
• Nemesis Games, James S.A. Corey
• Babylon’s Ashes, James S.A. Corey
• Tiamat’s Wrath, James S.A. Corey
• Leviathan Falls, James S.A. Corey
• Persepolis Rising, James S.A. Corey
• A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar
• The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri
• The Silence of the Sea, Yrsa Sigurdardóttir
• A Hero Born, Jin Yong
• The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo
• Kalpa Imperial, Angélica Gorodischer
• Slow Horses, Mick Herron
• Dead Lions, Mick Herron
• Real Tigers, Mick Herron
• The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk
• Transparent City, Ondjaki
• The Life of the Mind, Christine Smallwood
• The Dinner, Herman Koch
• Saga v. 1-3, Brian K. Vaughn
• The Immortal King Rao, Vauhini Vara
• The Final Strife, Saara el-Arifi
• The Candy House, Jennifer Egan
• Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin
• The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa
• Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse
• Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
• The Pharmacist, Rachelle Atalla
• A Psalm for the Wild Built, Becky Chambers
• How High We Go In the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
• The Cartographers, Peng Shepherd
• The Lost Metal, Brandon Sanderson