The 9 Best Books I Read in 2022

Unlike recent years, I didn’t get to read as much this year as going back into full-time work and some other major life milestones kept me pretty busy. I still got through 28 books in 2022, roughly 50-50 fiction and nonfiction. So, for the sixth year in a row, here’s my list of best books of the year, this time organized by genre.

Fiction

1. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

This was hands-down my favorite book of the year. An epic novel about a mysterious aviatrix who disappears in Antarctica while attempting to circumnavigate the world after World War II, and whose last remaining notebook is used to make a Hollywood biopic, starring a 21st century movie star whose own life has eerie parallels with the adventurer. It’s a great story, beautifully written.

2. Rosewater by Tade Thomson (h/t Meeghan Paul )

The first book in a sci-fi trilogy set in Nigeria. As with the Daevabad trilogy I wrote about in 2020, it’s just refreshing to read science-fiction or fantasy that’s not mostly Western characters.

3. The Anomaly by Herve le Tellier

Impossible to describe without giving too much away, but think of it as a TV show with a dizzying range of characters whose stories are all connected through being on an Air France flight from Paris to New York, where something strange happens that puts them in the cross-hairs of the FBI. However, even the FBI and the President aren’t quite sure what to do with them given that what happened has never happened before.

General Non-fiction

4. This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth (h/t Pepijn van Dijk )

My second favorite book of the year, and one I’ve posted about before. Every major government on the planet today engages in hacking your devices to keep tabs on you, on a shocking scale. The big tech companies do their best to prevent it but are constantly playing defense, so make sure to keep your software updated and use two-factor authentication whenever given the option. As I wrote in my post, it should be required reading for every leader, if not every person who regularly uses a smartphone or a computer (i.e. everyone reading this).

5. The Almanac of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgensen

In a majority of my talks and presentations this year, I’ve quoted a line from this book. As Ravikant says, “It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand-new field in nine months than to have studied the ‘right’ thing a long time ago.” That’s just one of about twenty or so of Navikant’s insights that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this year. If you can get past the tech-bro vibe of the overall tone, there’s much to provoke your thinking here.

6.?Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

The extraordinary life of perhaps the most extraordinary human in history, presented by the most famous biographer of our times, together with illustrations of inventions and reproductions of paintings, all of which help in explaining just why da Vinci’s name is synonymous with genius and creativity and nonconformism.

Climate Change

I made a concerted effort to educate myself on climate change this year, reading more than half-dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction, on the topic. Here are three of the best:

7. Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katharine Hayhoe (h/t Michael E. Webber )

A persuasive case that the most important thing any of us can do to about climate change is to start talking about it. Shaming people for flying or eating beef or having children does not work – it only makes them dig in their heels even more. Far more important is to begin normalizing climate-friendly personal choices and build the groundswell of voices calling for action in more effective ways.

8. Speed and Scale: An Action Plan for Solving our Climate Crisis Now by John Doerr (h/t Jennifer Kurz )

If you’re looking for a quick and easy-to-read primer on what needs to be done to reduce warming to the 1.5 degree goal, you can’t go wrong with this. Doerr breaks it down, industry by industry, showing us just what we need to do to reduce carbon emissions. Although the book skews American and is biased toward technocratic solutions rather than political ones, it’s a great education for those seeking it, as I was at the start of the year.

9. Race for Tomorrow: Survival, Innovation and Profit on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis by Simon Mundy (h/t Ben Keene )

By now, nearly everyone understands that the impact of climate change isn’t in the distant future, but already around us. Mundy brings this home by travelling around the world to chronicle where the land is already being submerged, where ice is thawing fast enough to cause calamities, where there is no longer any rain, and more. And while he shies away from summing it all up into a cogent argument, the individual stories from every corner of the planet will stay with you for a while.

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Want more book recommendations? Here are my 'best books' reviews from?2017,?2018,?2019,?2020 and 2021.

And I'm always looking for new book recommendations, so do suggest them in the Comments, and shape my reading in 2023!