Books I read in 2022
I am not usually one to set myself hard, quantifiable goals and try to stick with them. Life deals us with enough KPIs and grades, I don’t want my personal time to also become dominated by chasing numbers. My statistics and development courses have also taught me to be wary of indicators in general, pithily summarized by Goodhart’s Law: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
However, in 2016, I told myself I would read at least 36 books every year. Much like societal norms, I do not remember where the 36 came from but only know that it has since become ingrained. You can find my past book lists for 2021 and 2020 here, in the only two posts Substack decided to successfully export from Medium. I did Goodhart this metric as well–the discerning reader will notice some periods where I read a succession of books under 200 pages.
It’s hard to write a year-end book list post without sounding cliché. Like all other readers, I love to read. A good book is the closest I come to experiencing flow on a semi-regular basis. When I am sad or need to remind myself of the bigness of the world, I go to a bookstore or library. The four-storey Union Square Barnes & Noble is my happy place. Reading sparks a spiritual intimacy I have encountered only a few other times in my life–both between the author and reader and between people who share the experience of reading a book together. On my note about feeling derivative in the last post, VT noted, “I actually think there's something beautiful to the idea that your thoughts have already been thought of before by someone. A human connection through space, time and words” I am inclined to agree. Is there anything more validating than seeing your thoughts and emotions reflected on a printed page (or big screen or artists’ canva) and talking about that felt experience with someone else?
I will also take the liberty to state the obvious: I find it ironic that society ascribes so much social currency to reading and posits it as the indisputably virtuous source of knowledge creation and learning. I often get asked how one can get into reading, as if its value is as self-evidently obvious as that of exercise. Though I have some advice (which I can share later), I don’t think everyone necessarily needs to be into reading. I have found tantamount joy and profundity in movies, podcasts, art, and conversations. My wish for you is that you can cultivate such spaces of reflection and learning in your life, regardless of the medium, not necessarily that you read 36 books this year.
Books I read in 2022
In roughly chronological order
Books I particularly enjoyed or recommend are bolded
Lonely City, Olivia Laing
The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli (Audiobook)
The Alignment Problem, Brian Christian (Audiobook)
Cockroaches, Scholastique Mukasonga: Incredibly powerful memoir on the Rwandan genocide. Other accounts I have read tend to focus on the 1994 violence but Mukasonga traces a much longer history of strife starting in the mid-20th century, across generations of her family.
Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future, Bartow J. Elmore: Exceptionally well-written corporate biography of Monsanto with many larger takeaways – how do wars spur innovation? Are our definitions of “anti-competitive” behavior too narrow? Is there such a thing as an ethical large corporation?
Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller: This is one of the more eclectic non-fiction books I’ve ever read. I picked it up upon a friend’s recommendation and after listening to a RadioLab episode where Miller read her related essay, which considers taxonomy, growing up, and how we “name things to know things.” Despite the name “Why Fish Don’t Exist”, only a part of this book deals with “fish'' is an incorrect taxonomic class. Much of it traces the life of David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist, Stanford president, and eugenicist. Jordan had a lifelong obsession with classifying and organizing nature, both across fish and, in more evil forms, humans. This book is a meditation on this (often Western) obsession with classification, organization, and hierarchy and how we can find meaning in a chaotic world.
Bewilderment, Richard Powers
Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson: This was a rare book that expanded my capacity to think and imagine potential futures for us. It painted the first cautiously optimistic picture of the climate crisis I could imagine. The writing style is as eclectic as the interventions described — from a new, carbon-backed currency to a swathe of geoengineering interventions and radical lifestyle shifts brought on by activities that would qualify as terrorism. The narrative jumps between characters and travels the world (I especially appreciated that America is not centered in the book). Strongly recommend
The Haunting Of Tram Car 015, P. Djèlí Clark (Audiobook)
New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson
Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner
Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction, Arundhati Roy
Feast of Vultures, Josy Joseph
Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, Sunil Amrith
The Last Queen, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence, Shrayana Bhattacharya: A book that resonates so much that I often felt like I was watching someone else articulate my thoughts. I read it twice this year and would strongly recommend it to all South Asians.
Intimacies, Katie Kitamura
Tokyo Ueno Station, Yu Miri
At Night, All Blood is Black, David Diop
Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut: This is how I felt about this book —
Supermarket, Bobby Hall
Aya of Yop City, Marguerite Abouet (graphic novel)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid: One day, I will write
a bookSubstack post about this book.Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
American Dervish, Ayad Akhtar: Rare instance of “men writing women well”
Last Among Equals: Power, Caste & Politics in Bihar’s Villages, M R Sharan
Neuromancer, Will Gibson (Audiobook)
The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan (Audiobook)
The City Inside, Samit Basu (Audiobook)
Seeing Like a State, James C Scott (Audiobook)
Annihilation of Caste, BR Ambedkar (Audiobook)
Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu, James A Robinson (Audiobook)
The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid: I grew up reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Moth Smoke so Hamid’s recent veer to magical realism-esque work hasn’t sat well with me. I can’t hold Hamid’s evolution as a writer against him, but I found more value in his earlier work. This podcast with Ezra Klein felt better than the book.
I’m Waiting For You and Other Stories, Bo-young Kim
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu
The Bastard of Istanbul, Elif Shafak
Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday
Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen: One day, I will write a post about this book as well.
Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, Charles Leerhsen
Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
American Fever, Dur e Aziz Amna
The City We Became, NK Jemisin
New Waves, Kevin Nguyen
The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin
The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen
Names of New York: Discovering the City's Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
On Photography, Susan Sontag: Extraordinary set of essays and I am so grateful this was my final read for the year. Strongly recommend for anyone who takes photos or considers themselves a voyeur or flaneur of other varieties.
PS: In progress 2023 book+ list (including other content and recommendations, to be updated intermittently)