Volume 2, No 48: My Favorite Reads of 2022, Fiction Edition

Welcome to December, book and treat people! It is my favorite month. It is the Season of Light. Cookie Extravaganza starts soon. My house is full of winterberry. My joy is blazing. I’m be taking three weeks off from newsletter writing at the end of the year, to fully revel in the season, so this is the first of three special December newsletters. Today: my favorite fiction of 2022!

This was not an easy list to make. After I’d picked out all the books, I kept remembering others and feeling sad that they weren’t on the list, too. I read so many amazing books this year! Some quick, fun math: of the 40 books here, 33 are queer—82%! That’s about on par with my overall reading (77% of the fiction I read this year had a queer protagonist), and it deserves a moment of celebration. The Golden Age of Queer Lit is real, and queer authors aren’t fooling around.

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My Favorite Reads of 2022: Fiction

Some notes on the list:

• It includes the best books I read in 2022, not just books published in 2022.

• It’s organized by moods and themes instead of genres.

• It includes 40 books. I make the rules; I can make a Best Of list that includes 40 books if I want to!

• You can browse through all these books via this handy list on Bookshop.

• Clicking on a title will bring you to Bookshop. Clicking on linked text in the description will bring you to my review.

• Books marked with an asterisk are ones I loved on audio.

• It’s only December 2nd, so this list is not definitive! If I read any more favorites in the next month, I’ll be sure to tell you about them in January.

Enjoy!

The Best of the Best

Edinbrugh by Alexander Chee: This book is a note that bursts out of a throat, as if out of thin air, all the the work of it not invisible, not even hidden, but contained in the ringing, in the shape of the music as it hits the air. The process entirely consumed by what the process creates. It’s extraordinary. Don’t wait on it.

*The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela: This is a novel about America, about the suburbs, about being brown and queer in America, about first love and memory and immigration and home. What does it mean to come home? Where does the past go? I read it twice and loved it even more the second time.

The Other Mother by Rachel M. Harper: The intergenerational queer family saga of my dreams. All the work that goes into: parenting, making art, being someone’s kid, romantic relationships, friendships. So many mistakes made. So much wading through silence and shame and heartbreak. So much healing hammered out the hard way.

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews: Friends, it’s perfect. 11/10. No notes. Picking a favorite out of these eight extraordinary novels is impossible, but. This book is everything.

A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt: This is an anti-academic academic novel, a novel that understands the futility of novel writing even as it celebrates novel writing, a portal into queer Indigenous futures, a marvel.

*Greenland by David Santos Donaldson: A conversation between the queer present and the queer past. An endless, breathtaking conversation. I will never come to the end of this novel.

Lote by Shola von Reinhold: A genre-defying wonder of a novel, full of questions. Mysterious and funny and smart and sharp. An excavation of longing and luxury and excess and what it means to love, write, exist as a Black queer person in the world. Reinhold invents a Black queer archive on the page. It is extraordinary.

The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie: Easily the best novel about intergenerational queerness I’ve ever read. Raw and strange and ravenous. It came out ten years ago and I don’t know why everyone hasn’t read it. A masterpiece. Flawless.

Queer Pasts, Queer Futures

Grievers by adrienne maree brown: What would happen if we stopped moving, if we slowed down enough to let ourselves grieve? This book is a question that answers that question, and a love letter to Black Detroit.

*The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller: Snow! Glaciers! Dogs! Radicals and exiles and revolutionaries! Queer family! A young man discovers himself, his people, and his place while living on a remote Svalbard fjord in the 1920s.

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell: Queer ancestral healing.

*Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen: A murder mystery set in 1950s San Francisco! In a house owned by a wealthy queer family! Everybody’s gay! Queer people are petty and flawed. Queer people need each other to survive. Silence is destructive and so is being forced to hide yourself. This is an absolute knockout of a character study and a nuanced exploration of queer utopias. Plus, murder.

All of You Every Single One by Beatrice Hitchman: A portrait of the making of a queer family in Vienna in the 1910s and 1940s. A book about impossible choices. A testament to queer love and resistance through war and heartbreak and betrayal.

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane: Mark your calendars for January 17th! This is a banger of a novel about queer motherhood, state surveillance, community accountability, shame, regret, and living through impossible times. I read it in a day.

What Is Reality?

My Volcano by John Elizabeth Stintzi: WTF. Living on this planet is impossible. Living on this planet is beautiful. Living on this planet is disorienting. Volcanoes, bees, time travel, other galaxies, alienation, magic, queer love, mythology.

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara: An alternate history and imagined future of the internet.

Temporary by Hilary Leichter: A strange and mysterious odyssey through the ravages of capitalism—funny and true and sad and delightful.

Get Out of the U.S.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, tr. by Thomas Teal: A grandmother and her granddaughter spend the summer on an island in the Gulf of Finland: rocks and bugs and waves and work, change and sorrow and death and quiet.

Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde: Lagos, alive and humming.

When the Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkheu, tr. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse: A song of a creation myth, a fable with teeth and claws, a love story about whales, a warning, a witness. Plus: some of the most beautiful nature writing I’ve ever encountered.

Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro: A life-changing summer; a strained father-son relationship. Time and memory and the places that lodge themselves in our hearts. Queerness and home and what happens when they clash. The cost of looking away from yourself. A gauzy dream of a book.

Bad Girls by Camila Villada, tr. Kit Maude: A fierce and brutal trans rage song of a book, with soft edges and a soft heart.

La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono, tr. Lawrence Schimel: A queer coming-of-age novel set in Equatorial Guinea. Forest as free space, forest as queer space, forest as healing space. Short, straightforward, magic.

Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez: A masterclass in scenes. Plus: a messy queer coming-of-age, sex work and race and diaspora and muddling through. The scenes, though: long and detailed and breathless, like life.

A Little Bit of Magic

Chouette by Claire Oshetsky: A woman gives birth to an owl-baby and the world wants to turn that owl-baby into a girl, but this mother, Tiny, isn’t having it. It’s not nice and it’s not pretty. It works on so many levels.

Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang: These stories about queer Asian American women have teeth and claws; they bite and dazzle. They’re more like prose poems than stories—all language, all magic, all feeling, no plot.

Spear by Nicola Griffith: The queer Arthurian retelling you didn’t know you needed. A journey into self, but not away from home. Soft nature magic, sapphic love, found family, women with swords.

Broke My Brain (In the Best Way)

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai: A collection of haunting, beautiful, intertwined stories about Afghans and Afghan Americans. Kochai messes with form and structure in ways I’ll never stop thinking about. The first story in this collection is possibly the best short story I’ve ever read.

Noopiming by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: What is storytelling and who is it for? I’ve never read a novel that plays with white space the way this one does.

Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej: This isn’t a book about a woman who has an affair with an older man. It’s a book about the places language cannot take us, the places words cannot touch.

In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand: A journey to wholeness outside of linear time. Black queer love between two Caribbean women. Prose I wanted to wrap myself up in.

Couldn’t Stop Smiling

*The Holiday Trap by Roan Parrish: Two unhappy queer twenty-somethings swap houses for the holidays and guess what! They both find happiness! Fall in love! Learn about setting boundaries and stating their needs! It’s awesome.

*The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes: Queer sibling stories forever and ever amen.

Something Fabulous by Alexis Hall: The gayest, fluffiest historical road trip romance that ever romanced or road tripped.

A Masterclass in Setting

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty: Interconnected stories about a Penobscot man and the Maine reservation where he lives. Nature, ceremony, heartbreak, family, addiction, stories, winter. It’s quiet, but it builds.

True Biz by Sara Nović: A tumultuous year in the lives of three characters at a fictional school for the Deaf in a struggling post-industrial Ohio town. Also: a love letter to Deaf culture.

Stray City by Chelsey Johnson: Sometimes lesbians sleep with men and get pregnant and have the baby and things get messy with their queer family and everyone does a lot of growing up.

Life Is Really Hard & We’re Trying

A World Between by Emily Hashimoto: Just, so gay. So much gay pining. So much baby gay angst. So much gay discovery. A perfect gay ending.

*Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo: A queer ghost story about hiding and being found, seeing and letting yourself be seen, learning to grieve out loud, the work of healing and the work of family-making.

*Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman: This book is as prickly and tender as Sol, the trans protagonist, who is also an archivist and a vampire. A++ sex scenes. A++ dialogue. Everything about it is so honest.

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My favorite nonfiction of the year will be coming to you next Friday. In the meantime, come talk to me in the comments about the best fiction you’ve read this year!