Top Ten Books of 2022

In total, I read 47 new books in 2022, plus a few rereads, making it my biggest reading year in a few years. There were some disappointments, but I didn’t completely hate anything I read, though I came close once (see the dishonorable mention at the bottom). In no particular order, here are ten of the best standalone books or series I read last year. I do normally read a greater diversity of authors/genres, but the year’s reading was definitely skewed by over a third of my books coming from the Star Wars and Star Trek universes and a combination of Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman.

1. The Camera, Ansel Adams – An explanation of the mechanics behind how (film) cameras physically operate, which was interesting and enlightening, and still relevant for digital photography.

2. Star Wars: X-Wing (1-4), Michael Stackpole – The first four X-Wing books (Rogue Squadron, Wedge’s Gamble, The Krytos Trap, and The Bacta War) form a complete story arc about Wedge Antilles leading Rogue Squadron after the events of the original Star Wars trilogy. Although the Death Star(s) have been destroyed, the Empire still controls large parts of the galaxy so the Rebel Alliance, now the New Republic, continues to have work to do. X-Wing is often recommended as a good place to start in Star Wars literature, and I agree, because it’s well written, with a coherent and compelling plot and a strong cast of characters.

3. Guards! Guards! (City Watch books), Terry Pratchett – Years ago, I tried a couple of Discworld books but didn’t really get into them. This time, I started with Small Gods, a standalone novel, then moved to the City Watch books that feature Sam Vimes and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in their quest to fight crime in their fair city. The City Watch books are urban fantasy police procedurals with a strange cast of characters ranging from trolls and dwarves to gargoyles and golems. So far, I’ve read Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, and Jingo, and enjoyed them all.

4. The Sandman (vols. 1-3), Neil Gaiman – Decided to pick up the comics after watching the well-received Netflix adaptation. It’s on the darker side of what I normally read, but the plot and characters are really good, and deeper than you might expect. Hard to summarize without giving away plot points, so I’ll just say it’s about Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming (aka the Sandman), and his interactions with humans, gods, and other creatures.

5. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte – All the characters are terrible, and it’s (technically?) a love story, so naturally I thought it was great.

6. Dracula, Bram Stoker – Liked how the plot unfolded and the different viewpoints and styles of storytelling. It gets weird at times.

7. The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin (English translation by Ken Liu) – The first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel. This one also gets weird, but it’s aliens this time, not vampires. When scientist Wang Miao starts playing a virtual reality video game called Three Body, he gets caught up in extraterrestrial events started years earlier by Ye Wenjie during the Cultural Revolution.

8. The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard, David A. Goodman – Mostly I got a kick out of reading about Captain Picard’s life and seeing how the book lined up with what’s revealed about him in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

9. Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin – I finally made it through the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire. Solid epic fantasy, and there are already tons of characters and plot threads, but so far it seems manageable, with not too many signs of the corner Martin will later write himself into.

10. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – Something has gone wrong with Armageddon, and demon Crowley must work with angel Aziraphale (don’t worry, they’re friends) to fix things. I think it’s funny. I originally tried to listen to the audiobook, but missed a lot and later went back and read it.

 

Some other enjoyable reads: Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen); The Odyssey (Homer, Fagles translation) – I’ve read a prose version (The Adventures of Ulysses by Bernard Evslin) and didn’t realize how much of The Odyssey isn’t about Odysseus’s odyssey; The House in the Cerulean Sea (T. J. Klune); Jurassic Park (Michael Critchton) – not markedly better or worse than the movie, which I’d say is a pretty good adaptation; Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir) – very entertaining, if a little farfetched sometimes, and I didn’t love the main human character (Rocky was great). Also, Weir doesn’t write dialog particularly well. Inner dialog is fine, but anything two people would actually say, out loud, to each other, not so much; Federation (Star Trek) (Judith and Garth Reeves-Stevens); Women of the Silk (Gail Tsukiyama); Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein)

Books I wanted to like more than I did: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Charles Yu); The Midnight Library (Matt Haig); Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler)

Dishonorable mention: Ready Player Two (Ernest Cline). Ready Player One barely held together with its riddle contest plot, so Ready Player Two was not set up for success with an unlikable narrator, various inappropriate actions performed by said narrator, Wikipedia info dumps every other page, and a worse riddle contest plot. Also, the riddles weren’t riddles. I expected it to be bad before I started, and it still managed to be an even greater disappointment.