Best Books of 2022
The time has once again come to pull together my favorite blog post of the year.
As reflected upon in my recent Books of November 2022 blog post, despite deciding this year that I wanted to work on reading books I like more, I have only found success in one dimension of that goal. By allowing myself to stop reading books that I am not enjoying (a new development, and something I did several dozen times this year), I have partially read the books I like more, but have still read a significant amount of 3-star books. There have been a good amount of 4-star books, and significantly fewer 2-star reads than in the past, and yet, this list of “best books” is not significantly longer than it has been in any other year.
As usual, the books that stood out were a mix of 3-star and 4-star books, with most being ones that I found myself thinking of often throughout the year or that, in hindsight, were particularly resonant. And so, the best books I read this year were:
Personal Effects: What Recovering the Dead Teaches Me About Caring for the Living
Dead Center: Behind the Scenes at the World's Largest Medical Examiner's Office
A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father . . . and Finding the Zodiac Killer
Blue on Blue: An Insider's Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops
Behind the Bench: Inside the Minds of Hockey's Greatest Coaches
I normally don’t nominate the best fiction and nonfiction books that I read, but this year although I rated them both a 4, one of each really rose to the top of my list and stuck with me all throughout the year. While I almost didn’t start Flicker In The Dark because the cover did little to intrigue me, once I did, I couldn’t put it down. As a thriller, it upholds most of the tropes common to the genre, but the story still stood out and managed to actually thrill me, which is really all I want from a book in this category. Personal Effects: What Recovering the Dead Teaches Me About Caring for the Living stood out as by far the best nonfiction book. It was certainly an intense topic, but it was handled with appropriate reverence and enlightened me with regard to a topic I have given little consideration to in the past, but that is has substantial significance when disasters of any kind occur.
Going into next year, I plan to continue to give up on books that can’t seem to hold my interest, while also exploring different ways to ensure that the books I start are ones that I want to finish and, by extension, will be books that I like more. Hopefully, next year, the list of books that rise to the top will be even longer, as I seek to read better and better books more and more of the time.
Until next time,