Wow, I’ve only written one post since I wrote my 2022 in books. Sorry! I know nobody on the Internet has anything better to do than wait around to hear what I have to say about cooking or the decline of public discourse. I’ve been too busy working on my novel and ghostwriting op-eds in niche publications for CEOs of minor companies to bother detangling my thoughts on exiting the workforce or realizing that I’m actually very woo-woo. Maybe next year.
Also, I meant to publish this in January, but here we are halfway through February. I spent January meticulously crafting query letters for literary agents to ignore in the hopes that one day, some gadfly with an obscure blog can write about how she hated MY book.
In the meantime, without further ado, here are some books I read last year and why I mostly hated them.
(But don’t let me yuck your yum. No book is for everybody and now that I’m trying to become a published author myself, I have even more respect for anyone who survives the publishing process and puts their work out there to be judged by clowns like me!)
Books I loved but it’s okay, you don’t have to read them (highbrow edition)
- Yoga (Emmanuel Carrère): I don’t have any particular love for French literature, but boy, do I LOVE reading about the French literary scene! As an added bonus, it inspired me to meditate without being 700 pages long, like the other book about meditation that I read this year. If you still don’t understand what this book is about, know that it’s also about… terrorism!
- There Will Be Fire (Rory Carroll): Speaking of terrorism, I’m still on my years-long deep dive into Northern Ireland. Which is definitely the kind of thing that all my friends want to hear more about.
- Cuba: An American History (Ada Ferrer): I would recommend this to all my friends who are low-key flirting with communism, but it’s longer than a TikTok video, so I’m not sure it would fly.
Books I loved but it’s okay, you don’t have to read them (lowbrow edition)
- Golden Girl and The Hotel Nantucket (Elin Hilderbrand): I regret coming to this party so late.
- George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy (Sally Bedell Smith): Not sure which category this falls into, but I don’t think it’s especially flattering to my intellect that I 1) voluntarily read and 2) enjoyed a 736-page book about the royal family.
Books I loved and am not embarrassed to say so
- Tom Lake (Ann Patchett): Actors! Fruit! Sisters! Ann Patchett!
- The Great Reclamation (Rachel Heng): I only realized in the last few pages that I wasn’t supposed to be sympathizing with the main character as he got more and more in bed with the government, but that one’s on me.
- Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion (Bushra Rehman): Just TRY to read this Corona coming-of-age story. without “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” running through your head on repeat for the rest of time.
- The Latecomer (Jean Hanff Korelitz): It was a year for big, cheesy family sagas. What can I say? (It’s always a year for big, cheesy family sagas. Don’t remind me how much I loved “Crossroads.” I’m still upset about having to admit that I appreciated Franzen.)
- Yolk (Mary H.K. Choi): The plot was so specific and borderline outlandish that if someone had described the book to me before I read it, I wouldn’t have believed that it would work. But it was just impeccably executed; I couldn’t help but believe every detail.
A for effort, B- for execution
- The Answers AND Biography of X (Catherine Lacey): I will probably keep reading her books because the premises are so bonkers that the fact that they’re never as good as they start out doesn’t really matter.
- Battle of Ink and Ice (Darrell Hartman): This book made such a valiant effort to tie together two disparate topics, Erik Larson-style, but it was just too unwieldy to work as well as Devil in the White City.
Everyone else loved it, so naturally, I didn’t
- We All Want Impossible Things (Catherine Newman): Having read A Summer To Die 25 years ago, I no longer need to entertain future contenders for the crown of “best shlocky book about women dying of cancer.”
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin): I mean, I tore through it and had FEELINGS, but talk about jumping the shark.
- I Have Some Questions For You (Rebecca Makkai): For all the press this book got about being a critique of true crime, it was really just… fictional crime.
Everyone else loved it, and TWIST! So did I
- Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr): I hated All The Light We Cannot See with such a burning passion that I didn’t even entertain reading this, but a friend whose taste I trust recommended it. And wow! He’s way better when he’s not fictionalizing
Top Goodreads comments
- Lay Your Body Down (Amy Suiter Clarke): “[The protagonist] stomps around town, interrogating people with the discretion of a nude beach.”
- Sacrificio (Ernesto Mestre-Reed): “Also just in general what the fuck?”
Peter Thiel would NEVER
- Going Zero (Anthony McCarten): My only regret about spending 9 years working at Peter Thiel’s “shadowy” government contractor is that I can never manage to read a thriller about government surveillance with a straight face.
Oh, no, Peter Thiel totally would
- Birnam Wood (Eleanor Catton): This one was more about kooky billionaires being kooky, though, and boy howdy, was it spot on in that regard.
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