Best Books of 2022

In the Beforetimes (ie pre-Covid), I logged the number of books I read every year on Goodreads, and then at the end of the year did a brief blog post on how many there had been, and what my favourite ones were.

In those days, I got through about 70 books a year. Much of my reading time was on the train on my daily commute to and from work.

Then Covid hit, and everything changed, including the amount of time I had to read. I was still working, but I wasn’t commuting, and although I saved time (and money) by not taking the train every day, I lost a lot of reading time.

When I finally went back to the office full time – and we went back into a new office – in September 2022, I gained back my commuting reading time.

My Best Books of 2022 post is a bit late coming, but better late than never.

In 2022 I read 56 books – not back up to pre-Covid levels, but better than the previous year. Only four I gave five stars to, which is generally my rule for listing the Best Books of the Year. They are:

Misery – Stephen King
It – Stephen King
Christine – Stephen King
The Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward

During Covid I joined a Stephen King book group, so I’ve been re-reading a lot of his stuff for that group, and being reminded of just why he is my favourite author of all time. Which is why three of these four are Stephen King books. These are all books I read and loved many, many years ago, and when I re-read them for the book group they had lost none of their impact. These three books have flaws, and I do understand why Stephen King isn’t for everyone, but re-reading them as a fifty-something, they had the same impact on me as they did when I read them as a teenager, hence the five star rating.

The Last House of Needless Street I read for my other book group, which is all horror fiction. And I have to say that in order to talk about this book I have to reveal a major spoiler, so consider yourself warned. This book I gave five stars for one simple reason – the fact that it gave me an entirely different view of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) – which used to be called Multiple Personality Syndrome. A lot of writers use DID as a plot device (especially film and TV writers). Most of them fail to understand how it actually affects people. Catriona Ward, through thorough research and a sympathetic and skillful writing style, gave me a much better understanding of what DID is and how people who are afflicted with it actually behave, and why. A book that is able to educate me in such a way deserves five stars.

As it happens, when I went to StokerCon in Scarborough last year – a convention that was originally supposed to happen in 2020 and got delayed multiple times because of Covid – I actually got to meet Catriona Ward in person (we had an encounter in the bar, as is the usual meeting place at these events) and tell her how much I enjoyed her book, and why. Which I think made her day just as much as it made mine.

I am still logging all the books I read on Goodreads, by the way. I have set a target of 65 books for this year – optimistically hoping that now my work life is more or less back to the way it was in the Beforetimes, this will be a realistic target. We are already a quarter of the way through the year and Goodreads tells me I’m on target – so far so good. And if anyone’s on Goodreads, feel free to friend me there.

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