2022 is winding down and I don’t really have the brainpower at the moment to do much more than a lightning round reading year in review; a Spotify Wrapped, if you will, of the books that filtered into my brain. (Via my eyes. From the page. As books do.) I hope you’re coming up on some time off to rest and recharge. I hope you might get to lop a few tomes off your to-read pile, and maybe add a few from here.
Some caveats, before we begin: I don’t keep a running list of the books I’ve read, so I’m sure that I’m forgetting some great ones. This post is pulled from things I’ve written about, little notes I’ve taken, and my own shifty memory. I read a lot of new books, because I handle some of the books coverage at Vanity Fair; I’ve read so many wonderful ones forthcoming in 2023 but haven’t included them here so as not to scoop my day job. And as always, the links are just there for ease; I don’t get money from your clicks.
To kick off, I read a few wonderful novels set in my adopted home state, Maine: the beautiful exploration of friendship, class, and land ownership that is Fellowship Point by Alice Elliot Dark (with whom I am extraordinarily proud to share an editor, the brilliant Marysue Rucci); Landslide, in which author Susan Conley renders a fishing boat explosion, a possible affair, and a teen boy’s drowning not as melodrama but as intimate beats in the life of a family; and, on a recent unexpected drive up the Maine coast to Canada and back, I listened to Adam White’s crime drama The Midcoast, about a writer tracking down the story of one family’s rise and fall.
I think I have recommended Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson to more people this year than any other book—I really do think everyone will love it. It’s a psychological nesting doll of a story: the narrator runs into an old acquaintance at an airport and sits down to hear about how saving a man’s life ended up changing his own, set in the cut-throat glitter of the L.A. art world. Elsewhere in art fiction, I whipped through Hammer by Joe Mungo Reed, with its Russian oligarch, London auction house, and love triangle. Sirens and Muses, by Antonia Angress, is as about art making as it is about the financials, following students and a teacher at an art college as they make their way off campus and into New York. Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda does art angst plus the main character is a vampire! Like, a realist vampire. Very good. For a nonfiction dose of the lives of artists, Finding Dora Maar: An Artist, an Address Book, a Life by Brigitte Benkemoun, translated by Jody Gladding, has a setup that reads like fiction: the author bought a secondhand leather address book for her husband and found that the original owner was none other than Dora Maar; the book is a portrait painted through her acquaintances.
In the making-things vein: In They’re Going To Love You, by Meg Howrey, a choreographer revisits familial rifts as her father’s health fails—there’s ballet, career aspiration, inspiration, and half a dozen kinds of heartbreak. Picture, by Lillian Ross, is a study in moviemaking in which the journalist follows John Huston’s making of The Red Badge of Courage. Both of these sent me spinning down rabbit holes in search of references, which I love. Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, by Mark Rozzo, tracks a Hollywood romance, it’s destruction, and the big names in its orbit. Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy, by Larissa Pham, is a great essay collection on art, pop culture, and love.
I reread Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, because I always reread Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. For a triple feature of academic farce I followed it up with Vladimir by Julia May Jonas and Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Philip Roth’s The Ghostwriter is another perpetual reread and slots in nicely with this group.
In terms of personal nonfiction: Ancestor Trouble by Maud Newton and Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone by Itabari Njeri are two great memoir-y investigations of family and the psyche. Courtney Maum’s The Year of the Horses, which explores the author’s relationship to riding and its affect on her mental health arrived, in 2021, on the day of my first riding lesson in over a decade, but I returned to it this year so including it here. (A semi-autobiographical novel about mental illness that reads as a grittier The Bell Jar: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg.) How Far The Light Reaches, by Sabrina Imbler, is a beautiful exploration of identity—and deep sea creatures! Oh The Glory of it All, by Sean Wilsey, is all the San Francisco socialite gossip (pre Silicon Valley boom) you didn’t know you needed. The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing, by Betsy Bonner, was really tough and perfectly done. I Came All This Way To Meet You, by Jami Attenberg, and How To Write An Autobiographical Novel (another reread), by Alexander Chee, inspired me to keep writing, even when writing felt very hard to do. The Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm, upped my existential writerly angst in the best way. Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back In September filled me with longing to have been born a few decades earlier, and to have been a student of Elizabeth Hardwick. It also prompted a dive into Hardwick and Pinckney’s respective backlists.
I noticed at some point that a bunch of Pulitzer Prize-winners and finalists were putting out sequels to their winning books, so I wrote a piece about that. Happily, I thought all the sequels (or follow-ups or sister novels or whatever they want to be called) were great. They’re all very different, but all employ humor in interesting ways. Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer, The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout (another Maine novel!), Either/Or by Elif Batuman, and The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Two weird and wonderful story collections: Liberation Day by George Saunders and
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma. Less weird, quite wonderful, Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones, which I last read in college and remembered loving but got so much more out of—the subtle shifts in relationships, especially—this time around.
For beauty and inspiration: Deeda Blair: Food, Flowers & Fantasy and A Book of Days by Patti Smith.
Because I am running out of steam, a handful of terrific novels that have nothing to do with each other except that I very much enjoyed them, with stars next to rereads. I think you should pick one at random and buy it from your local bookstore and let me know what you think:
Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou
Not That Sort of Girl by Mary Wesley
Real Life by Brandon Taylor*
Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro
Winter Love by Suyin Han
Swing Time by Zadie Smith*
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell
Flight by Lynn Steger Strong
Joan is Okay by Weike Wang
Idol, Burning by Rin Usami
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
First Love by Gwendoline Riley
My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
I think that’s about it. I think this’ll be the last newsletter until 2023. If you liked reading it this year, let me know by: tapping the heart on this post, signing up to receive in your inbox, forwarding it along to a friend. And it’s always such a joy to hear from you so drop me a line (a comment, an email) if you’re so inclined: tell me what books you read and loved this year, what you wish you’d loved but didn’t, what you can’t wait to read.
And of course I would love if you preordered my own book, The Mythmakers, out in June.
Thank you for being here, see you next year.
xx KW