Greetings, book and treat people! It’s that time of the year again: favorite books of the year so far time! We’re halfway through 2022 and I don’t know what that means except that we’re a little bit closer to fall so I’ll take it.
At first this list was 45 books. I reigned myself in, but it was painful. I’ve read so many amazing books this year! These are the thirty that I can’t stop thinking about. Most of them are already out, but some are upcoming books that I loved too much to leave off the list—so get your preorders on!
Titles will take you to Bookshop; linked text will take you to my review. I’ve written about most of these here, but there’s a few I haven’t gotten to yet, so consider this a preview of good things to come. Asterisks indicate books I loved on audio.
I’d love to hear about your favorites of the year so far, too! Tell me about the books that just won’t leave you alone in the comments.
The Books: 30 Books I Have Fallen in Love with in 2022
Historical & Contemporary Fiction
All of You Every Single One by Beatrice Hitchman: A messy queer family saga set in Vienna in 1910 and 1938. Impossible choices, unforgettable characters, a beautiful ending.
Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez: A Black gay man comes of age in London in the 2000s. The way Mendez writes scenes is masterful.
The Other Mother by Rachel M. Harper: Queer family sagas forever and ever amen. This one is perfect in every way.
A World Between by Emily Hashimoto: Sapphic excellence. Baby gays muddling through. Cultural messes. Romance becomes friendship becomes love becomes?
*Yerba Buena by Nina LaCour: I just. The love story. The writing. The sensory details. Exquisite.
A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt (October 4th): A brilliant work of fiction about a queer Cree man who abandons his PhD program and returns to his hometown in northern Alberta to write a novel. There is poetry in every sentence. It is academic and anti-academic. The layers go on forever. It’s astonishing.
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews (August 2nd): I wrote 1000 words about this book and didn’t even come close to capturing how much I love it.
The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela: Suburbia! Down with the American Dream! A gay Latine man wrestles with his past. The town he grew up in speaks its stories. It’s so funny and so moving.
Fiction with a Little Bit of Magic (Maybe)
Bad Girls by Camila Vilada, tr. by Kit Maude: A fierce song of trans rage and trans joy.
Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang (July 12th): A book of stories like little snacks, with teeth that bite you when you eat them. Beautiful and strange. Full of hauntings and ghosts. Not a man in sight.
The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie: Why did I wait so long to read McKenzie’s debut? It’s a perfect book, full of the interconnected messes of the world.
When the Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkheu, tr. by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse: A fable with teeth and claws that slayed me with its beauty.
Chouette by Claire Oshetsky: A woman gives birth to an owl-baby. The world is not a safe place for owl-babies. Motherhood is not safe place, either.
*Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman: Trans vampires and queer archives and fandoms and sex. A truly delightful and deliciously strange love story.
My Volcano by John Elizabeth Stintzi: WTF. How does anyone live on this planet?
*Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo: Found family, built the hard way, brick by brick by brick.
*Greenland by David Santos Donaldson: There are two novels vying for favorite of the year (even though it’s silly to pick favorites). This is one.
The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell: This book is a song, a psalm, a fierce and beautiful outpouring of love and mischief from our queer ancestors, a reminder and a reprimand, a sexy chorus of queer voices calling on us to love each other hard, hold each other close, and take our pleasure seriously. It's an absurd and irreverent dance, a praise cry, an urgent collection of hilarity and revelry and truth from those who came before, those who survived (and those who didn't), from all the queer and trans ghosts and hauntings and wisps of memory, from the glamorous queens and dyke warriors and gentle boys, from all the good queer things that blossomed despite death and despair.
Nonfiction & Poetry
General Nonfiction
*South to America by Imani Perry: An illuminating journey through Southern history, art, politics, language, geography, culture, music, ecology.
Body Work by Melissa Febos: I’m continually amazed by Febos’s openness and sureness, the fierce conviction of her prose. This is a book for writers—about craft, about the work of making memoirs, about the possibilities of narrative—but it’s also a book for humans. All of us make stories with our lives.
Essays
We Will Not Cancel Us by adrienne maree brown: Now is a good time to read this one. Always is a good time to read this one.
Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn: Writing. Tattoos. Gender. Art. Being trans. Water. Masculinity. Trauma. Fish. Philosophy. Illness. Memory. Bodies. Language.
People Change by Vivek Shraya: Change is not the enemy! Change is beautiful. Change is possibility. Change is imagination embodied. I needed this book.
The Breaks by Julietta Singh: A beautiful book-length essay, written as a letter to Singh's six-year-old daughter. It’s about raising a brown girl in the US in the face of climate change and rising fascism, about hope and protest and capitalism and joy. I was especially moved by Singh’s writing about queer family-making, and the architecture and physicality of creating queer spaces of refuge, solace, and home.
Memoir
Messy Roots by Laura Gao: A graphic memoir about growing up in Wuhan and Texas. There’s so much nuance in this coming-of-age story, especially in the way Gao uses different art styles to reflect on different times in her life.
Another Appalachia by Neema Avashia: Beautiful writing about place and home and belonging and the places where they meet.
*Know My Name by Chanel Miller: If you, like me, have been waiting to read this extraordinary memoir, I highly recommend making the time.
Poetry
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón: “Between / the ground and the feast is where I live now.” She never disappoints.
How to Not Be Afraid of Everything by Jane Wong: A gorgeous book of poems about family history, Chinese history, bodies, gardens, transformation.
*All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran: Devastating, glorious poems. Devastating and glorious, in contradiction and wholeness. I reviewed the audiobook here.
The Bake: My Favorite Cookbook of the Year (So Far)
Snacking Cakes by Yossy Arefi
I own a lot of cookbooks, and a lot of those are baking books. So it always feels like an extra special gift when I encounter a new cookbook I love enough to add to my collection. Full disclosure: I haven’t bought this one yet! I’ve checked it out three times from the library, though, and you bet I will be buying it. It is such a joyful book. Baking doesn’t have to be complicated and time-consuming! The recipes in this book are one-bowl cakes. They are cakes you can actually mix up in twenty minutes. And Arefi provides so many useful tips—like how to adapt cakes for different pans, ideas for different flavor combinations, etc. I love an ambitious baking project every now and again, but this book reminds me why I fell in love with baking in the first place: easy access to delicious treats.
I’ve made a ton of recipes from this book, and they’ve all been perfect. I’ve also shared many modified recipes from it here, including: Butter Walnut Cake with Cinnamon Glaze, Rhubarb Almond Crumb Cake, and Strawberry Rhubarb Ginger Cake.
The Bowl & The Beat
The Bowl: Ode to a Bagel
You won’t be able to recreate this recipe unless you live in Western Mass, but you can apply the same principle—piling all of your favorite things on a favorite baked good—wherever you are.
Start by toasting an everything bagel from Rise Above Bakery. Layer on some thick slices of the gooey and decadent thin red line cheese from Lazy Lady Farm. Add a few crumbled slices of bacon from Upinngil. Slice a handful of sungold cherry tomatoes from Atlas Farm and arrange them on top. Fry an egg from Everyday Farm and slide it onto all that goodness. Finish with a generous handful of chopped dill (maybe from your porch, or from one of the vendors at the Greenfield Farmers Market) and a sprinkling of chili flakes from Kitchen Garden Farm. It’s Valley bliss on a plate.
The Beat: My Favorite Audiobook of the Year (So Far)
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara, read by Edoardo Ballerini, Catherine Ho, BD Wong, Feodor Chin, and Kurt Kanazawa
I do not have uncomplicated feelings about this book. I loved it enough that I finally read A Little Life (which…meh). The things I love about this book—the three-part structure, the spaces between the stories, the way each section speaks to every other section in such complicated and surprising ways—seem to be what everyone else hates about it. But there’s a lot that’s troubling to me about the way Yanagihara engages with disability (though not about the way she engages with queerness, which seems to be most people’s problem with her). I’ve been composing an essay about it in my head since January, and maybe one day I will actually write it.
Here’s the thing, though: this audiobook is spectacular. Once-in-a-lifetime spectacular. It might be my favorite audiobook of all time. I cannot separate the book from the audio; for me, they are one and the same. Five narrators give absolutely breathtaking performances, perfect in every particular.
And then there is BD Wong. I just cannot with BD Wong’s narration of the last section of this triptych novel. I cannot. It’s the kind of good that makes me feel like I’m in the presence of the divine, except it’s better, because what I’m actually in the presence of is human greatness. His voice will live in my head and heart forever. It might be the best spoken word performance of any kind I’ve ever experienced.
The Bookshelf
A Picture
Here’s my overly ambitious July TBR!
Around the Internet
On Book Riot, I made a list of fascinating nonfiction books about ordinary things. I also rounded up some of the best under the radar queer books from the first half of 2022 (many of which are on my Best of the Year So Far list).
Now Out
Hurray! Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty is now out! Go forth and find yourself a copy.
The Boost
A shoutout to some of the amazing readers and reviewers who directly inspired me to pick up several of the books in this week’s newsletter: @miaheartsbooks, @suzyreadsbooks, @thefeministreader, @half_book_and_co, @bankrupt_bookworm, @rosamondreads, @kdwinchester, and Danika at The Lesbrary.
As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: My morning glories have started blooming!
Catch you next week, bookish friends!
Yay what a great list! I have a few of the same favourites as you, including Yerba Buena, People Change, and Dead Collections. I've also loved Like Other Girls by Britta Lundin, The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian, Beast at Every Threshold by Natalie Wee, A Pslam for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, Ma and Me by Putsata Reang (I think you would really like this one!), Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, Little Witch Hazel by Phoebe Wahl (an incredible picture book adults will love too!), Glorious Frazzled Beings by Angelique Lalonde, Cold by Mariko Tamaki, and Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters.