Best reads of the year: 2022

It's become something of a tradition - and one of which I'm quite proud - that I post a round-up of the books I've particularly enjoyed each year. (Last year's is here if you're interested). By far the most wonderful result of doing so has been some truly wonderful conversations with (and reading recommendations from) people with whom I've never discussed books before.

Some of you may remember that this stemmed from my disappointment at having read so few (by my standards) books in 2019, and then setting myself reading targets for 2020, 2021 and 2022. The act of tracking and measuring my reading has helped me to prioritise it amongst life's other competing demands, and I'm overjoyed that I met my goal of reading 85 books this year (actually, just slightly passed it and read 87). That equates to 27,269 pages, across a wide-range of fiction and non-fiction.

I'm going to run through my top non-fiction reads here, but you can see everything I've read (including my highly trashy taste in fiction -- Bridgerton, anyone?!) here . Please do 'friend' me on Goodreads - I love seeing what other people are reading

Here are my top non-fiction reads of the year:

The Coddling of the American Mind , Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

My book of the year, and the most important thing I read this year. Addresses "how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure". First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how a new set of problems on American (and, increasingly, UK) university campuses have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education:?"What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker";?"Always trust your feelings"; and?"Life is a battle between good people and evil people". These three Great Untruths, as they frame them, contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures.?Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development.

For anyone concerned about society's growing inability to live, work, and cooperate across lines of difference, this is a must-read.

“A culture that allows the concept of “safety” to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”

Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships , David Bradford and Carole Robin

This first-rate guide to building more fulfilling relationships with colleagues, friends, partners, and family is based on the landmark Interpersonal Dynamics course at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (known fondly by generations of students as “Touchy-Feely”) which espouses that "soft skills require a lot of hard work.” The section on giving feedback was truly transformative for me -- and I'm someone who has spent a lot of time over the last twenty years thinking about giving and receiving feedback. I'll write more in the coming weeks about Bradford and Robin's method for behaviourally-specific feedback which focusses on discerning the elements that perpetuate certain behaviour patterns, without jumping to any conclusion that a certain set of behaviours defines a person. Everything I have done wrong in the giving of feedback historically -- and there's a lot -- would have been helped by reading this chapter first.

Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times , Katherine May

Sometimes a book comes along which is exactly what we need at the precise moment we need it. "Wintering" was that for me, in a period of self-reflection and introspection after leaving SoftBank this year, and it was profoundly beautiful. Combining her own personal narrative with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May highlights the transformative power of rest and retreat and invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear.

“If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”

Good Inside , Dr Becky Kennedy

If you're a parent and we've talked about parenting this year, you'll be smiling now because there's no chance I haven't recommended Dr Becky's life-changing podcast and instagram page (@drbeckyatgoodinside). Dr Becky is a clinical psychologist who has taken a lifetime's work on attachment, mindfulness, emotion regulation, and internal family systems theory, and translated those ideas into a new method for working with parents. It's hard to explain how insightful her podcasts (and now, this fabulous book) have been for my generation of parents, many of whom are trying to break the cycle of retrograde parenting philosophy of previous generations. If you've heard me say, "two things are true" this year, know that I'm channelling Dr Becky (and expect to hear it more in 2023!).

The Splendid and the Vile , Erik Larson

In?The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson gives an extraordinarily cinematic account of how Churchill set about unifying the nation at its most vulnerable moment. The book reads like a thriller but every single word is painstakingly sourced from fact, drawing on once-secret intelligence reports, diaries and witness interviews. It's an absolute vivid portrait of a Britain's most iconic leader and of a moment in history, and as I raced from one dramatic moment to the next, I often forget that I was reading a work of non-fiction.

The Year of Magical Thinking , Joan Didion

Like many people, I'm embarrassed to admit that I read my first Joan Didion after her death in 2022, and immediately wondered how I hadn't read this yet. This is probably the classic work of mourning, and it was both a profoundly beautiful read, but also not an easy one, following Didion's reliving and reanalysis of her husband's death throughout the year following it, at the same time as caring for her gravely ill daughter. The elegance of her prose took my breath away time and time again; this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

Working Identity , Herminia Ibarra

This was a recommendation from a trusted advisor in the immediate weeks after leaving SoftBank as I grappled with what was next for me professionally; and it was an extremely impactful and instructive read. In it, Professor Ibarra presents a new model for career reinvention. While common wisdom holds that we must first know what we want to do before we can act, Ibarra argues that this advice is backward. Knowing, she says, is the result of doing and experimenting. Career transition is not a straight path toward some predetermined identity, but a crooked journey along which we try on a host of "possible selves" we might become. Based on her in-depth research on professionals and managers in transition, Ibarra outlines an active process of career reinvention that leverages three ways of "working identity": experimenting with new professional activities, interacting in new networks of people, and making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities. I'm doing my best to follow her advice during my own transition!

“If you don’t create new opportunities within the confines of your “day job,” they may never come your way.”

Partition Voices , Kavita Puri

I've become a huge fan of the "Empire " Podcast with William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, and inspired by two amazing visits to India in 2022, I've spent time exploring the twentieth-century colonial society into which my grandfather was born. It's astonishing to think how little we understand of what happened in India during my grandfather's lifetime and just a few decades before I was born, and how the shocking stories of Partition -- 15 million people permanently displaced, 1 million dead, 100,000 women victims of sexual violence -- are only just now beginning to be told. These narratives are beautifully and respectfully recounted in this wonderful book by Kavita Puri.

Prisoners of Geography , Tim Marshall

All leaders of nations are constrained by geography. This fascinating book examines Russia, China, the US, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Greenland and the Arctic—their weather, seas, mountains, rivers, deserts, and borders—to provide a context we often can't see for looking: how the physical characteristics of these countries affect their strengths and vulnerabilities and the decisions made by their leaders. I read this around the time of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and that chapter in particular was enormously enlightening in explaining why the region is shaped by its geography.

It's been a wonderful year of reading. For anyone wondering how I hit 87 books, check out my Goodreads to see that the first-rate works above have very much been supplemented by huge numbers of easy-reads which I'm not profiling here! (I'm truly unashamed about enjoying a trashy fiction quick-read in the same way as I'd enjoy a Netflix episode).

I'm aiming to hit 90 books in 2023; please do share your recommendations to help me on my way.