Books of the Year, etc.

December 11, 2022 9:44 AM

In a long article similar to a recent Meta, "The White Review asks friends and contributors what books they've enjoyed reading and rereading." This year, Sofia Samatar (previously) suggests books such as Amina Cain's A Horse at Night: On Writing, and Elvia Wilk (previously) suggests books such as Ned Beauman's Venomous Lumpsucker.

A few other suggestions--not necessarily published in 2022, or even recently:

• Édouard Louis, A Woman's Battles and Transformations (suggested by Rachel Andrews, who also this year published an "Interview with Silvia Federici," whose "essays articulate, in anger and clarity, what I and other women of my generation have begun, stutteringly, to understand: that the mass introduction of women into the waged workforce has not changed the fact that domestic chores outside of paid work continue to be conducted by women, nor the fact that this work remains invisible, or if seen at all, utterly devalued.")
• Nuar Alsadir, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (suggested by Katherine Angel, who also published this year "Valerie Solanas, Bad Dads, and the Literary Pleasures of Pure Rage": "For a while there, I became obsessed with Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto.")
• Tove Ditlevsen, The Copenhagen Trilogy (suggested by Jessica Au, who was also interviewed this year about her novel Cold Enough for Snow--"Chasing the Echoes of Belonging": "Au captures the particular dynamic between adult children and their parents with complexity, allowing for moments of recognition as well as estrangement, frustration as well as tenderness. Although we often conflate being loved and being understood, perhaps an essential part of being close to someone is accepting the ways in which they’ll always be a mystery.")
• Chris McCabe, Buried Garden: Lockdown With The Lost Poets Of Abney Park Cemetery (suggested by RZ Baschir, who this year published the short story "Leaves": "The woman cannot leave the apartment, and now, after what’s happened, the man cannot stay.")
• Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (suggested by Oliver Basciano, who recently published "'What happened in Russia can happen anywhere': Pussy Riot interviewed": "As she recalls a decade of infamy, Maria Alyokhina wanders one of the many anonymous apartments she has lived in since escaping Russia six months ago.")
• Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide (suggested by Andre Bagoo, who recently published the short story "Hunger": "Three months after the breakup, you meet Paquito. Well, at first his name isn't Paquito. It’s RightNow95.")
• Matthew McNaught, Immanuel (suggested by Polly Barton, who recently published an excerpt from her memoir on becoming a literary translator, "Connection Fever": "Looking back at myself then, I can’t help feeling that I had come down with a type of connection fever, and maybe what I was in love with above anything was the glimmers of togetherness glimpsed across the lakes of difference.")
• Joelle Taylor, C+nto and Othered Poems (suggested by Julia Bell, author of the essay "Really Techno": "I'm not here to take drugs, or get drunk, I'm not really looking to hook up; in fact, once I get in, if you dance too close to me I'll probably move. I'm here as a 45-year-old woman, to be on my own, surrounded by techno music played on one of the best sound systems in the world, the harder and louder the better.")
• Máirtín Ó Cadhain, The Dirty Dust: Cré na Cille (suggested by Rahul Bery, who recently translated Michel Nieva's short story "War of the Species": "It was shortly after I'd moved to Harlem, during that first pandemic summer, that I first learned about the war of the species.")
• Kirsty Bell, The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin (suggested by Aaron Bogart, whose Floating Opera Press recently published Marie-France Rafael's Passing Images – Art in the Post-Digital Age: "an attempt to write with art, rather than just about it. Rafael aims to retrace the living spirit of art and the procedural-performative experience of art in her writing.")
• Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (suggested by Clare Bogen, publicity director at Fitzcarraldo Editions recently quoted in The Guardian: "Four Nobels and counting: Fitzcarraldo, the little publisher that could": "Fitzcarraldo Editions' publicity director Clare Bogen woke to a barrage of hearts, clapping hands and other excitable emojis. The outcome wasn’t clear until one text: 'Annie!'")
• Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid (suggested by Kevin Brazil, author of the essay "Fear of a Gay Planet": "Shortly after the disease erupted some seven years previously, a group of gay men made contact with aliens, living on a planet called Splendora ...")
• Wendy Erskine, Dance Move (suggested by Luke Brown, author not too long ago of the essay "Cod wars to food banks: how a Lancashire fishing town is hanging on": "My parents moved to Fleetwood on the coast of Lancashire in the years when the British fishing industry was beginning its dramatic decline.")
• Fanny Howe, The Needle's Eye: Passing Through Youth (suggested by Sam Buchan-Watts, recently a participant in "Warped Pastoral: Ralf Webb and Sam Buchan-Watts in Conversation": "Sam Buchan-Watts’s Path Through Wood, published in October 2021, begins where you would think: in a coppice, where branches tick and greenery fidgets.")
• Moyra Davey, Index Cards: Selected Essays (suggested by Thomas Bunstead, author not too long ago of "Marching on London with Extinction Rebellion": "One conversation went from a discussion of Bolaño's bad teeth to our being guardians of the water.")
• Preti Taneja, Aftermath (suggested by Kimberly Campanello, who discusses her work MOTHERBABYHOME at The Learned Pig: "I soon realised I would have to do 796 pages, one for each child, and include a name, age, and death date on each page. The 'single poem about the very bad terrible thing' felt insufficient, perhaps has always been insufficient.")
• Kathryn Scanlan, Kick the Latch (suggested by Samir Chadha, editorial assistant at The White Review and music reviewer, e.g. "St Vincent's Gig at O2 Academy Brixton": "There isn’t a support act tonight, our evening with Clark starts with the short horror film she directed and cowrote, 'The Birthday Party', and it only gets more theatrical from there.")
• Guadalupe Nettel, Still Born (suggested by Helen Charman, author of a political history of motherhood who gave a talk on the same topic, "Mother State: on Housing": "Mothering is a spatial practice: housing is everything.")
• Amalie Smith, Thread Ripper (suggested by Sophie Collins, author of "Small White Monkeys": "About three years ago I sustained an injury ... and in the wake of this my mind did something both for and against itself. I experienced what is sometimes referred to as an 'unfreezing' – that is, I reaccessed a traumatic experience ...")
• Darryl Pinckney, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan (suggested by Lauren Aimee Curtis, whose "Notes on Craft" discusses her novel Dolores: "I could say this book began when I read a one-paragraph news story about a nun who gave birth after complaining of stomach cramps, and this would be true. But it goes back further than this")
• Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook (suggested by Theodora Danek, not too long ago profiled "about managing a not-for-profit press and changing the representation of global literature in the publishing industry")
• J.O. Morgan, Appliance (suggested by Sasha Dugdale, who has several poems at the Poetry Foundation and who translated a recent anonymous "Letter from Moscow")
• Nate Lippens, My Dead Book (suggested by Andrew Durbin, editor-in-chief of frieze who also published this year a brief review essay "At the Gay Bar")
• Sara Deniz Akant, Hyperphantasia (suggested by Jacqueline Feldman, who recently translated Nathalie Quintane's short story "On Your Feet (Marine Le Pen Pays a Visit)" and wrote an essay about the work of translation: "I had been dozing, waking occasionally to a disturbing feeling of delinquency in duty, dozing on the bus in the hour before I was to meet Quintane")
• Eugene Lim, Search History (suggested by Charlotte Geater, whose work at Itch.io includes GPT-based poetry and "dropping calls," an interactive call center horror story)
• John Keene, Annotations (suggested by Jay Gao, whose poetry includes the recently published "Mozart's Starling," which has a brief explanatory essay)
• Marguerite Duras, Writing (suggested by Simryn Gill, whose artwork "Full Moon" and artist's page appear at the Guggenheim website)
• Emma Heaney, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (suggested by Kristin Grogan, who last year co-edited a special cluster of Post 45 Contemporaries on Bernadette Mayer: "If the last half century has a poet of daily life — of its dreams, babies, children, jokes, meals, sex, love, labors, and writing — she is Bernadette Mayer.")
• Deborah Levy, Real Estate (suggested by MK Harb, whose short story "My Time with a Censor" was published last year in The Bombay Review: "In his vision, Minister Hameed understood the importance of safeguarding tradition as we evolved into modernity. He asked the perennial question, what do we want our generation to read?")
• Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (suggested by Isobel Harbison, whose recent work includes an interview with Tilda Swinton looking back on Orlando and the essay "A Strange Bird": "My parakeets fly over us at dusk. There are maybe 40 of them. They fly low, not low enough to touch or to get caught in the knotted mess of our unbrushed hair but low enough to startle, to arrest our upward glances by creating fine streaks of green.")
• Sam Johnson-Schlee, Living Rooms (suggested by Alice Hattrick, whose memoir/essay on ME/CFS, Ill Feelings, has been excerpted at The White Review and Granta: "'That was the day I couldn't walk,' she says.")
• Max Blecher, Adventures in Immediate Irreality (suggested by David Hayden, author of stories such as "City of Pigs": "The weather tells us how to feel. Today is a nothing day. Descriptions fail us.")
• Mieko Kawakami, Heaven (suggested by Johanna Hedva, whose short story "Who Listens and Learns" is online at Modern Art Oxford: "I'd bought her nine months into lockdown to have some company. By then I was really starting to squirm. Coconut: Your AI-Enhanced Virtual Companion. Who Listens and Learns.")
• Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (suggested by Jackson Howard, author of the essay "Wonderland Lost": "Sometime in September 1980, at a recording studio deep in North Hollywood, my father tried to play with Earth, Wind & Fire.")
• Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties (suggested by Sophie Hughes, editor of Untold Microcosms: Latin American Writers in the British Museum who recently translated Fernanda Melchor's "Life’s Not Worth a Thing" and not too long ago wrote an essay about translating Melchor's fiction, "The Silent Transformation of Language": "Actors, ventriloquists, musicians, spies. Invisible, treacherous ghosts. There are a lot of metaphors for translators, but few that wear the easy grace of plain truth.")
• Rob Mimpriss, Pugnacious Little Trolls (suggested by Emyr Humphreys, who recently translated Leonardo Garzaro's short story, "The Functionary's Story": "It was said that a man who kept names lived in those parts, and it was easier for the visitor to find the town, street and house than he had thought.")
• Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (suggested by Megan Hunter, whose novel The End We Start From was reviewed at Tor.com and will feature Jodie Comer and Benedict Cumberbatch in a film adaptation)
• Daisy Hildyard, Emergency (suggested by Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou, whose art criticism includes "Seeing Green with Megan Baker": "In the work of Megan Baker, female figures are situated in the half-light and half-time of their lives. Pausing between roles of mother, daughter, sister, friend or lover, Baker’s forms exist alone, unadorned, in an exuberant, rolling landscape. They stand alone in a wild wilderness of transporting greens, refracting browns and transpiring blues.")
• Jacques Roubaud, The Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations (suggested by Juliet Jacques, whose book Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021 collects much of her work)
• Jennifer Egan, The Candy House (suggested by Thomas Jones, editor of the LRB Blog and author of recent essays including "Meloni's Moment" and "Hard Eggs and Radishes: Shelley at Sea")
• Daisy Pitkin, On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union (suggested by Jiaqi Kang, author of short stories such as "Class of 1985," which won The White Review Short Story Prize for 2022, and "Monologue of a pirate ship that doesn’t have a figurehead, or maybe it did, long ago, but it's hard to tell now because its bow is encrusted with these ossified clam shells and barnacles, which, during a storm, scuttle about and open up and scream, as though they had mouths")
• Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb, The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (suggested by Joanna Kavenna, whose novel ZED has a long extract at Granta)
• Margaret Busby, ed., New Daughters of Africa (suggested by Omar Kholeif, whose art criticism includes recently published "Curated Highlights from 1-54 London 2022")
• Hernan Diaz, Trust (suggested by Laurence Laluyaux, whose essay "The Comparison Game" reflects on comp titles in publishing)
• Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night (suggested by Quinn Latimer, whose group exhibition "SIREN (some poetics)" is described in an essay by Elvia Wilk)
• Orhan Pamuk, Nights of Plague (suggested by Max Lawton, interviewed earlier this year at The Untranslated: "On reading Russian literature, translating Sorokin, books in need of translation and retranslation, learning languages, and ambitious projects")
• Donna Tartt, The Secret History (suggested by Joanna Lee, who appeared on "WIT LIT: the funny books podcast" to discuss "Witty Poetry")
• Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand (suggested by Jeremy Atherton Lin, who reviewed Holleran's novel for The Guardian and whose book Gay Bar: Why We Went Out was reviewed above by Andrew Durbin)
• Lao She, Mr Ma and Son (suggested by Rebecca Liu, author of many articles including "The Hidden Stories of Britain's Chinatowns")
• Vinciane Despret, Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left Behind (suggested by Benoît Loiseau, whose work includes the recent ArtReview editorial, "The 'Museumification' of Queerness")
• Fanny Howe, Radical Love: Five Novels (suggested by Kristian Vistrup Madsen, whose art criticism / art-related criticism includes "Oil-Rich Norway's New National Museum, Home to Munch's 'The Scream,' Is Like a $650 Million Vault. But What Is It Really Protecting?" and "The Nothing Special: On The Andy Warhol Diaries")
• Akwaeke Emezi, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (suggested by Željka Marošević, profiled in MagCulture several years ago on her work as co-editor of The White Review)
• Ross Macdonald, The Chill (suggested by Cian Mc Court, editor of fiction at Verso Books)
• Anthony Passeron, Les enfants endormis (suggested by Jarred McGinnis, a novelist whose essay "You don't have to be disabled to write about disability, but you'd better get it right" appeared in The Guardian last year)
• Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (suggested by Rosanna McLaughlin, whose art criticism / art-related criticism includes "Ana Mendieta Deserves Better than a True Crime Podcast")
• Daniel Levin Becker, What's Good: Notes on Rap and Language (suggested by Daniel Medin, editorial advisor to the journal Music & Literature)
• Emily Berry, Unexhausted Time (suggested by Lucy Mercer, whose poems include "Dream Houses" and "Nightdial," and whose work for ArtReview includes "'The Worst Book I’ve Read in Some Time': Sheila Heti's 'Pure Colour' Reviewed")
• Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Manchester Happened (suggested by Gloria Mwaniga, whose fiction includes the short story "How Much is that Doggie in the Window")
• Menachem Kaiser, Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure (suggested by Megan Nolan, whose debut novel Acts of Desperation garnered praise from Karl Ove Knausgård, as mentioned in a review in The Nation)
• Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time (suggested by Rastko Novakovic, a filmmaker e.g. recently working with Beatričė Bukantytė on "Wormwood Maria," a meditative film on Lithuanian history)
• Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams, Diego Garcia (suggested by Tom Overton, biographer and archivist focusing on John Berger, e.g. in this radio commentary on a self-portrait by Berger)
• Elif Batuman, Either/Or (along with The Idiot, suggested by Vanessa Peterson, associate editor of frieze who recently interviewed curator KJ Abudu on how "'Living With Ghosts' Reckons with Africa's Past, Present and Future")
• Stephen Loye, Le Ventre de la Montagne (suggested by Nathalie Quintane, mentioned above--author of works such as Tomatoes [excerpt] and "Why Doesn't the Radical Left Read Literature" [first page])
• Isobel Wohl, Cold New Climate (suggested by Hannah Regel, whose poetry collection Oliver Reed received attention in The Paris Review)
• Andrey Kurkov, Grey Bees (suggested by Silvia Rothlisberger, producer and host of the Literary South podcast)
• Constance Debré, Love Me Tender (suggested by Samuel Rutter, whose work includes an "Interview with Alejandro Zambra")
• Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (suggested by Hannah Rosefield, who recently published "Gwendoline Riley's Brilliantly Stubborn Fictions" in TNR)
• Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob (suggested by Ariel Saramandi, author of "Death Takes the Lagoon," an essay--one of Longreads's "Best of 2021: Reported Essays"--on the wreck of the MV Wakashio off the coast of Mauritius)
• Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool (suggested by Lucy Scholes, a regular contributor to The Paris Review who this past week wrote for The Telegraph about Ludwig Bemelman's To the One I Love Best--previously on Metafilter--and who earlier this year explained "Why We Should All Be Reading English Novelist Kay Dick")
• Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (suggested by Izabella Scott, an editor at The White Review and author of "Trapped in an Imaginary World," a review of the podcast Sweet Bobby)
• Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (suggested by Deborah Smith, translator of Han Kang's The Vegetarian [excerpt] and founder of Tilted Axis, "a non-profit press publishing mainly work by Asian writers")
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Inseparables (suggested by Rose Higham-Stainton, author of the recent essay "A Cunning Stunt" about a women's alternative theater company that performed from 1977-1982)
• Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now (suggested by Aparna Surendra, author of the recent short story "Mothers in the Hague": "The mothers check their belongings into lockers and pass through metal detectors. They learn the rules of the public gallery and the name of each judge.")
• Julietta Singh, The Breaks: An Essay (suggested by Rebecca Tamás, who also last week published a roundup of "The Best Recent Poetry" for The Guardian)
• Priya Satia, Time's Monster: History, Conscience and Britain's Empire (suggested by Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath, recommended numerous times in The White Review's list and see for example "Writing the Unspeakable in 'Aftermath'" in the Chicago Review of Books)
• Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Quiet (suggested by Adam Thirlwell, novelist and author of many reviews, e.g. "Giant Eye Watching")
• Olivier Guez, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele (suggested by Skye Arundhati Thomas, editor of The White Review with a recent post at the LRB blog: "The Floods in Pakistan")
• Alex Niven, Letters of Basil Bunting (the poet; suggested by Stefan Tobler, publisher of And Other Stories, "an independent, not-for-profit publisher of innovative contemporary writing from around the world")
• Charlotte Van den Broeck, Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy (suggested by Zakia Uddin, author of the short story "Signal," longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Prize: "I had begun to google the therapist reflexively whenever I was bored on the gallery reception. It was three weeks into my therapy, and she had posted a review for the first time in two years, of a device for relieving facial stress.")
• Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (suggested by Francis Whorrall-Campbell, whose criticism includes a review of exhibition on music, song, families, and communities: "Let the Song Hold Us")
• Perumal Murugan, Poonachi: Or, the Story of a Black Goat (suggested by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, author of the essay "All the Stain is Tender: The Asian Deluge and White Australia")
• Niina Pollari, Path of Totality: Poems (see also her selected and in one instance illustrated poetry online; suggested by Kate Zambreno, author of books such as To Write As If Already Dead [excerpt] and essays such as "The Missing Person: Kafka the Tourist": "In July 1908, a twenty-five-year-old Franz Kafka quit his post at the Assicurazioni Generali with a medical note claiming he was suffering from 'nervousness' and something potentially complicated having to do with his heart.")

Previous "Books of the Year" roundups at The White Review: 2021; 2020; 2019; 2018; and 2017.

See also LitHub's "Best Reviewed" roundups for Fiction, Literature in Translation, Graphic Literature, and Nonfiction, not to mention the Goodreads Choice Award Winners and largehearted boy's Online "Best of 2022" Book Lists.

posted by Wobbuffet (18 comments total)

Flagged as fantastic and saving for a full read later. Thanks for all the links/reading recommendations. :)
posted by Fizz at 9:50 AM on December 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

wow. thank you Wobbuffet this is amazing.
posted by supermedusa at 10:02 AM on December 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

Klemperer's notebook is essential for understanding the creeping language of fascism. Also highly reccomend his diaries, which document the language and every day life of a German Jew 1933-1941 - very observant chronicling of fast (but more interestingly) slow changes in terminology, rules, and principles in the 3rd Reich.
posted by Rumple at 10:33 AM on December 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

so is white any good or not
posted by dismas at 11:21 AM on December 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

(this is amazing)
posted by dismas at 11:21 AM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is a wonderful post destined to swell my "to read" list which is already impossibly large. Many thanks for collecting and posting!

At the risk of giving even more coverage to an old white American man with critical aperçus out the wazoo, I must recommend both The Passenger (mentioned offhand by Max Lawton in the White Review piece) and the companion book Stella Maris, both by Cormac McCarthy
posted by chavenet at 12:21 PM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Fabulous post! Thanks for sharing this!
posted by danabanana at 12:27 PM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

"an attempt to write with art, rather than just about it."

I'm going to be irritated by that quote all afternoon.

But not the post, though, which is wonderful!
posted by ZaphodB at 12:55 PM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

"Free" by Lea Ypi was soooo good. As a person who also grew up in a 'socialist country', albeit on the other side of the continent, I found much to identify with in her stories.
posted by of strange foe at 1:37 PM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ooh thanks for this, even if only for the Really Techno essay(?), which I enjoyed.
posted by TangoCharlie at 2:46 PM on December 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

Wendy Erskine, Dance Move (suggested by Luke Brown

This book is fantastic, but was hell to find in North America until recently. I brought in copies for my shop (which is run out of a loft in Toronto, and by no stretch a "bookstore"). At the time, I was the only shop in the country to have the title (which I bought directly from the author). I did this only after contacting every indie bookstore in the city and no one had it or had any plans to bring it in. Amazon and Indigo also didn't have it. Erskine was kind enough to sign copies for my shop and even personalized ones I got pre-orders for.

Mind-boggling to me that no Canadian or North American publisher seems to have picked it up. It was first published by Stinging Fly in Ireland and then Picador in the EU. Looks like Amazon now has copies as an import. Highly recommended.

Other books in this excellent post that I recommend are The Copenhagen Trilogy, Kick the Latch, and Small Things Like These.

Another fave read of the year is Septology by Jon Fosse (still working through it).

I did my annual re-read of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son and it was as marvelous as always.
posted by dobbs at 3:53 PM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Started Venomous Lumpsucker this evening...
posted by supermedusa at 4:52 PM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

There's a lot to digest here.
posted by ovvl at 5:27 PM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Fabulous post. Thank you. I don’t think this is included but I would love to give a shout to ‘The Island Of Missing Trees’ by Elif Shafak, which I just finished yesterday. As someone who was born on a British Air Force base in Cyprus in ‘67, so many memories of my father came flooding back, him still being posted there in 1974 when the Turks invaded the island. In the last year I have been conducting interviews with him about his life but had forgotten about this period. Excited to ask him about it. Anyway I digress. Wonderful book.
posted by grumblemf at 10:23 PM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is excellent stuff.

That Clare Keegan book —Small Things Like These—is a marvel. Highly recommended. I’m about 1/2 way through Books of Jacob and i’m delighted to say that it is living up to the hype
posted by thivaia at 5:50 AM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks Wobbuffet for such a well thought out and detailed list of recommendations and the people who recommended them. Very nice work, bookmarked for future reference.
posted by drossdragon at 11:16 AM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

As if I don't have twenty odd unread books on my Kindle already... But seriously, great list. I could just pick all my books from here for the next year or two.
posted by zardoz at 5:50 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

UK comedian Matt Green on Books of the Year [YT 2 min.]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:03 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]