Another year in reading has passed, and like last year, I kept track of the books I read. The year started out with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a superb memoir about grief, one I read after Didion died in December 2021. I followed that up with Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. We also lost Rice in December 2021. I ended the year reading Joe Lansdale’s Rusty Puppy, a Hap and Leonard mystery, and the SF classic The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.
Along with full-length books, I also spent a lot of time catching up on short stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as stories from best-of anthologies such as The Best American Mystery Stories 2018 and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019. As a shout-out to a fellow local scribbler, I’m going to recommend you find the March/April 2022 issue of Asimov’s and read William Ledbetter’s “The Short Path to Light”.
The only book I didn’t finish this year was Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
Book List 2022
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
- Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
- The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson
- Tool of War by Paolo Bacigalupi
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
- Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Euthyphro by Plato
- Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham
- The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
- Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
- Mindset by Carol S. Dweck
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
- Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Zero Stone by Andre Norton
- The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
- Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer by J. Michael Straczynski
- The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis
- Worlds of Wonder by David Gerrold
- Mockingbird by Walter Tevis
- The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Coldest Mile by Tom Piccirilli
- Ringworld by Larry Niven
- Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
- Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
- White Butterfly by Walter Mosley
- The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
- Rusty Puppy by Joe Lansdale
Exile on Ninth Street 