Favorite Reads of 2022

 January's almost over but that doesn't mean I'm not still thinking about the books I read last year, and eager to talk about them.  I set my reading goal as 50 books, and I was down to the wire but managed to finish the 50th on New Year's Eve. Most of those were really good books, so picking my top 5 this year was rather difficult. 12 of them were rereads, and so while two of those rereads are in my favorite novels of all time list (The Return of the King and Till We Have Faces), I don't count those as options for my top reads of the year since I'm already familiar with them and already deeply love them. I read a couple children's series this year as well, namely Lloyd Alexander's Westmark Trilogy and Suzanne Collins' Gregor the Overlander series, and did really enjoy those and look forward to sharing those with my girls someday. Christine Cohen's The Winter King is a new juvenile fiction story and it was also a wonderful story that I highly recommend.  I read a few chapter books to the girls this year, including Betsy-Tacy which they really loved. All of these, while great, weren't really in the running for my top books, considering the many other great things I read.

I read quite a few classics this year that I had never read before. A few of them make my top 5 list, but some did not; Tess of the D'urbervilles, while containing a few great moody scenes, was on the whole not my cup of tea, As I Lay Dying was a wild ride and somewhat redeemed Faulkner for me from the extreme loathing I had for him previously, yet still was not good enough to make me love it. A Raisin in the Sun was good, but didn't really stick with me, 1984 was excellent, and could have made the top five if it wasn't such a hotly contested spot. Animal Farm, while good, was not as good as 1984, at least not when read back to back. There were some fun mystery novels to read this year, including a few new-to-me Agatha Christies and the latest Cormoran Strike novel.  I also read a number of non-fiction titles, some on education, some on music, some on theology, and a few collections of poetry. All in all, it was a very wide-ranging year in books, and some very difficult decisions had to be made for the top 5, but a few books really stood out as deserving of the spots, and thus here we are, in no particular order:

Laurus by Eugene Vodalazkin

4 out of my top 5 books I read along with and because of the Close Reads podcast and this is one of them. I would perhaps never have read this book without the podcast, and so I am so thankful for the podcast for introducing it to me and for all the conversations on it that opened it up. This book is a fictional saint's life story, a healer in medieval Russia, who spends most of his life trying to atone for his beloved. Now, I am not Russian Orthodox, and certainly don't believe that you must or can atone for anyone's sins, but this book had many many profound moments that have stuck with me. I especially loved considering the difference in worldview between the medievals and we moderns when it comes to medicine and health. The medieval approach of prayer being the most important thing, and all other medicines being second to that, has really made me reconsider my own weak faith in this area. There is one scene in this book in which a young boy is praying for his mother who has the plague, saying "This would be so easy for you, God" and that scene felt so true and so honest and profound that I have thought about it almost every week since. I only recommend this book with a caveat though; there is a (birth) scene in the early part of the book which is extremely difficult to read and that, depending on your tolerance levels, you may need to skim or skip over. 

Evening in the Palace of Reason by James R. Gaines

This is a biography of two men: Frederick the Great and my man Johann Sebastian Bach. It reads more like a novel, and alternates chapters between these two men who met only once, but from their meeting a great work of art came to life. They had fundamentally different views, and this book is also a very fascinating look at pre- and post-enlightenment worldviews. I knew next to nothing about Frederick the Great, and his story was compelling and sad, but the real hero of this book is of course Bach, and his story is well worth being familiar with. I especially loved the descriptions in the book of his music (music descriptions are not easy to write!) This book only increased my love for Bach and made me yearn for many aspects of the pre-enlightenment worldview, and had me pondering the things we have lost, and the great genius of the man Bach which I would wager no composer has ever rivaled since. 

My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

Like I said earlier, I am not an Russian Orthodox Christian, and I am definitely not an Orthodox Jew. I am also not a painter, so this story about a Hasidic Jew who is also a great painter doesn't at first glance seem to have much to do with me. However, this book was exquisitely written, the story was powerful and the characters were vivid, and the climax of the story, with the masterpiece paintings by Asher, was perfect. It was so well written and so well paced, painful but true, hard but beautiful. I don't share the Jewish view of art and I don't agree with a lot of the characters' opinions on art and religion, but I really loved all the questions and considerations this book tackled. I don't know much about art, but there was lots here to consider more broadly with other art forms like music, which I do spend quite a lot of time with and even spend a decent amount of time writing. I also was fascinated at the questions of what demands genius makes on a person and on their family, and the hard look at the great difficulty when there is a clash between the demands of your family and your religion. This book won't be everyone's cup of tea, and it wasn't perfect, but it had a large impact on me.

East of Eden, by John Steinbeck

I'm not that big on American authors generally, so I had absolutely no expectation that I would love this book as much as I did. It was gripping. Whenever I picked it up I did not want to put it down. I loved the mythic style, I loved the threads of biblical stories running throughout, I loved some of the characters so so dearly and I was frustrated and angry and saddened by others. The Timshel conversation, and the way it works itself out throughout the whole novel was so good. The prose was gorgeous, the novel felt tightly and well constructed, and I still think about it often. I really enjoyed reading this book without knowing anything about it, and so having the experience of being carried along on this great journey, seeing the contours of the road because of the tropes and biblical allusions, but still wondering where we would end up.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

I know now why people say this may be the greatest novel ever written. I had been daunted by the novel for years, not wanting to slog through such a long book if it was hard to read or boring. This was a mistake on my part. This book is an absolute masterpiece. I loved every single page of it, even the digressions that get made fun of. The characters in this book are so real that it is almost unbelievable. There is so much good insight into ordinary life, considering pretty much everything a person will meet in life, but especially considering the ideas of happiness, family, duty, desire, marriage, parenting, birth, death. Everything. Because of this book I'm going to be brave and read War and Peace this year. Do yourself a favor: read this book. Everyone should. 

I'm going to give a shout out to three other books I almost included in my top 5: Olives, by A. E. Stallings was the best poetry collection I read this year, and it was really really great. Short but poignant, I love her insights and intermingling of the classical world with the modern world. A Month in the Country was another Close Reads book about art and faith and modernity and loss and longing, and I really loved it, but couldn't quite squeeze it into the top 5. And finally, Norms and Nobility, by David Hicks. This book is a must read for classical education, although it's very hard to acquire because it's very expensive. However, I had to stop after almost every sentence and think about it because it laid things out in such a compelling way, with a very radical worldview, if you understand radical as a return to roots. 

And now I'm slowly but surely making my way through my 2023 reading list, eagerly awaiting the discoveries that will result in my top five reads of this year, and the great enjoyment I will have from re-reading the many old favorites I will be revisiting along the way.