A 202(2) Bookish Year in Review

Another year over, so it goes, a new one just begun. Calendar anniversaries are nothing if not the time to pause, assess and ultimately, if necessary and/or desired, recalibrate. So let’s do just that. I’ve never been one to eschew anything due to its popularity. I’m about as generic, suburban cul-de-sac as they come. Not remotely hipster. Never been accused of being anywhere near Covid-discouraged spitting distance of anything approaching a leading edge (with the exception, maybe, of wanting that undercut haircut approximately seven days before everyone else got it about eight years ago. I let myself be talked out of it. I was almost, almost hip. I regret it to this day).

With a birthday just two days before the New Year, I’m twice doomed to attempt to pause the inevitable progression of time and look back and review the last trip around the sun. So, once again, here we are. I can stop, open my blog page, re-read all the articles I’ve written to look for themes or highlights and share them. Great plan! Except I didn’t write any. I had to look up the password to get back into this WordPress account. In fact, the last article prior this one is my 2021 year in review. It begs the question- what happened?

Good news here is very simple answer- I had a kid (I realize I didn’t have a kid, but you know what I mean. Don’t get semantic). Our son was born just a few weeks into the new year and what followed was a strict redefinition of my relationship with time. I don’t mean to lean too heavily into that cliché that your life is suddenly all about your kid. It is, of course it is, but really mostly the cadence in which I conducted my life shifted overnight. I didn’t lose my activities by any stretch. It’s been harder to find date nights of course, but my wife and I could still duck out for events or travel. I still played my hockey. Videogames (especially in the first few months) with him napping across my arms. I burned through shows or movies in the background, books through my headphones. Workouts absolutely lost in the wash but they happened.

The big blanket casualty was my writing. When I sit down to do this, I need a few uninterrupted hours to marshal my thoughts, get a draft down, delete most of it, rearrange, then eventually have something at the very least loosely approaching the shape of a coherent thought. And to do that I leveraged something that was wildly precious to me- my quiet weekend morning. Unmedicated I’ve never much mastered the ability to sleep past 6-6:30. Given my wife’s ability to stumble out of a bed closer to ten if left to her own devices, I had my three hours in the morning to nurse a pot of coffee, enjoy the quiet, open up a laptop, and see what happened.

My son is an absolute whirlwind. I don’t even think it’s in the same way that all babies are- we’ll hang out around other babies sometimes and they’ll make noises and roll around, sure. But the world is his drumset and no space is worth staying in for upwards of 18 seconds and dads are for kicking and silence is anathema. Any-and-all activities for myself therefore must come in bursts or in the quick moments where he’s asleep or otherwise occupied. The cadence of life and the relationship with time I’ve had fairly consistently in the 10 years since I graduated college and entered corporate America suddenly changed to favor activities I can do in sprints. Writing, it turns out for me, is not one of those activities.

I miss it, of course. That’s not to say I regret not writing this past year. Some people of course find time, and do so with five times as many kids and six times as many commitments as I have. But it just didn’t work for me in 2022. I’m hopeful I’ll get back into this page in the months to come. My son is one in a couple weeks and he changes by the day. My job has shifted back to being primarily in office, it seems like some sort of routine will be forced on me regardless of my thoughts on the matter. So maybe this year will be different. All that said I refuse to resolve to write more. I would like to. I enjoy it. The opportunities for creative creation in my life are few and far between for me (with the exception of cooking, the results of which do not last into posterity unless I forget about a Tupperware in the back of the fridge). But given the sheer number of demands placed on our time by forces over which we have little control it seems silly to place a false constraint on mine.

All of which amounts to: hi! I’m back, at least for now. I hope to continue but we’ll see what happens. And in the meanwhile, my 2022 bookish year in review:

2022 Overview

Despite the aforementioned time constraints, I read (and I use this term to include audiobooks, which is my primary method of consumption) 57 books in the calendar year 2022 in range of shapes and sizes. A handful of novellas, just a few re-reads (the first two books of the Lord of the Rings and some Discworld), middle-grade fantasy (a relatively new genre for me), a handful of different series, a bit more sci-fi than usual, and a LOT (per my M.O.) of high/urban fantasy. The full list (included in my picture) is transcribed below.

Unlike previous years where one particular series dominated my list in terms of count and/or girth, I spread the proverbial wealth a bit wider in 2022. As such, rather than focus on a specific theme or message I’ll take a scattershot approach to countdown my ball-drop of books/series from five down to one.

Five Seconds to Midnight- The Long Earth Series

Let’s begin our countdown at five. We could have done ten, or even the grossly optimistic minute to go but then everyone starts fatiguing before we actually make it, and the group starts to get off cadence. So, five it is. And five is fitting given that’s the number of books in the Long Earth series coauthored by Steven Baxter and Terry Pratchett (the final book published posthumously after the latter’s death). The Long Earth chronicles the events in the seventy or so odd years following Step Day, the name later given to the moment humanity at large gains the ability to step laterally into parallel worlds. Each parallel world differs slightly from its neighbor- one step West or East will bring you to an Earth identical to ours but without humans and the lasting impacts of our species. Another step takes you to a world every so slightly different where once chance difference millions of years ago altered down-the-road outcomes. Then another, and another. Neighboring worlds, with a few exceptions due to a cosmic role of the dice, are near twins. But these differences compound sharply as you step hundreds of worlds away, or thousands, or millions.

I’d seen this series on shelves for the better part of a decade but was wary of diving in. Not due to any particular hesitation on the subject matter, but rather I fell in love with Terry Pratchett through the Discworld and, following his death, didn’t know if I could face anything else that wouldn’t quite capture the magic. I won’t say my reluctance was entirely unwarranted- I didn’t always hear Terry’s voice in these stories, but all-in-all not a bad way to pass to the time. I didn’t know any plot details before I dove in so was surprised I read this the same year multiverse feels like the hot topic (Spiderman, Dr. Strange, Everything Everywhere All At Once). If you’re looking for a large, epic story arc that comes to a climax and conclusion in the final novel you’ll leave disappointed. But as a general exploration on the social themes behind what a Long Earth may mean- the elimination of resource scarcity, diverging communities and politics (or even human subspecies), the interactions with other forms of sapience, rapid technological expansion coupled with a return to pioneer lifestyles- it kept me thinking.

Four Seconds to Midnight- King of Scars

In a prior year (could have been last year, could have been two years ago, time has no meaning and I have no desire to look it up) I read the Shadow and Bone trilogy by Leigh Bardudo. I was disappointed. I’d enjoyed her Six of Crows duology but this series felt like nothing more than crappy romance and ‘seemingly plain girl saves the world’ tropes wielded like a cudgel. Yet after burning a proverbial hole in my Audible library for the better part of a few years I relented to try the King of Scars series. Set some years after Shadow and Bones, the series follows the titular King (nee Prince) Nikolai Lantsov, Zoya Nazyalensky, and Nina Zenik as they try to protect both the Ravkan throne and their own secrets while grappling with (once again titular) scars from the wars in the original series.

This time around won me over. I cared about the characters. Their struggles felt mature. I understood both the desire and hesitation in the romances. I’m not saying you need to give something a second chance. But hey. Nothing wrong with once in a while looking up an ex to see what they’re into these days.

Three Seconds to Midnight- A Most Remarkable Creature

As my list above indicates the vast and overwhelming majority of the books I consume are fiction (and even more specifically science fiction and fantasy). Yet one making my short list for discussion on the year was a non-fiction account by Jonathan Meiburg describing the behavior of, and his personal experiences interacting with, South American caracaras. Describing myself as a nature person doesn’t feel just- we take relatively few hikes, I know nothing about raising animals, and my interactions with wildlife are limited to watching the birds, foxes, and deer out of my window over my morning coffee/reckless infant. But evolutionary biology and geosystems held a special place for me since my school days. And it’s rare that I’ll come across a whole macro family of animals I’ve never heard of before.

Yet Meiburg let me do just that in his book documenting these wildly intelligent falcons. The full title of the book is A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey. Caracaras, in Meiburg’s description, have the intelligence of corvids and the personality ranges of parrots. Yet their relatively remote locations deep in forests or on windswept islands kept them isolated from mainstream scientific attention. This isolation, unfortunately, has not protected them from a human-induced drive toward extinction either through direct killing else drastic habitat change through the introduction grazing animals and deforestation. Meiburg’s love for his subject matter and deep understanding of the millions of years of forces shaping the caracara’s world is evident in his writing. And despite (or because of) the melancholy anyone would feel writing about a changing world, that knowledge and emotion made this my most unexpected pleasure to read on the year.

Two Seconds to Midnight- The Nevermoor Series

I wrote earlier about my changing relationship with time. I’ve never hesitated diving into the tomes that define the adult fantasy genre but a seven hundred something page book with four dozen characters with made up names, a different atlas, and callbacks to something six books ago can be a little tough when you’re reading in short bursts. Enter my first foray (in 25 or so years) into middle-grade fantasy. I had a hard time overlooking the simplicity of a few series (This isn’t a judgement. These are books written for 10 year-olds. I’m 33). But the first three books of the Nevermoor Series by Jessica Townsend had me from the beginning. The story follows Morrigan Crow, a cursed girl ignored by her family and outcast from her community on the eve of her unavoidable death. But then, of course, as the clock nears midnight she gets an unexpected reprieve and is led to the concealed world of Nevermoor. On the cusp of finding acceptance for the first time in her life, Morrigan grapples with the discovery of secrets, powerful figures with undeniable interest in her exploits, and the crushing weight of what her fate, never quite a step behind, may mean for her future.

The first book in this story feels a Harry Potter derivative yet Morrigan (and Townsend) both find their voice as the story continues. This is undeniably a book for children yet it never quite felt like a children’s book. The one downside is given their relatively brevity I tore through them quickly and felt disappointed I needed to wait a ways for the next in the series. I’m selfishly looking forward to reading these to my son when he’s a little older, especially as I continue to grapple with my emotions on the Harry Potter books given the author’s revealed feelings toward the trans community.

One Second to Midnight- The Locked Tomb Series

Earlier I’d mentioned I wrote nothing in this blog the last year. And while true I did still post the occasional book review on my associated Instagram page once in a literal blue moon. The Locked Tomb series, even before I’d read the third book, forced me out of my hibernation to post a review. I’d seen Gideon the Ninth on shelves for a year or so and been wildly intrigued by the cover. A woman, shock of red hair over a face painted in skull makeup. Black tunic exposing bare arms, saber in one hand, gauntlet on the other, with skeletons collapsing behind her as she strides toward the fourth wall. The tagline: “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space.” I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but c’mon. How can you not be intrigued?

What I wasn’t expecting when I finally picked up the book was how blown-away I’d be with Tamsyn Muir’s dialogue and language. For a book with such depressing or borderline horrific subject matter she’ll draw a laugh (amused, shocked, or otherwise) in most chapters of her stories. She tests different structures (and points of views) for each subsequent book in the series, and although Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth didn’t have the same zingers as the debut the novel, I absolutely enjoyed each in their own right. I’m looking forward to this series expanding yet again over the coming year, and watching Locked Tomb start to take over some convention costumes, tattoos, and other pockets of the fantasy/sci fi sub cultures. Should you dress up, may you channel Gideon and Harrowhark, “gorgeously gowned in their Locked Tomb vestments, painted like living skulls, looking like douchebags.”

Concluding Thoughts

And there you have it. My 2022 bookish thoughts in, for me, a somewhat tidy nutshell. And reminds me we’ve tried the baby on peanut butter so far but we still need to do tree nuts so maybe this will help me segue into that. I hope I’m here more in 2023, but if I’m not that’s okay too. I do miss you though (and I miss me a little too). Happy new year, and may you find a few lovely surprises between the covers like I did in 2022.