2022: another year working mostly from home, another year of finding time to read in places\/times other than my commute\u2014although I probably did travel more by subway in 2022 for work and non-work reasons than I did in 2020 or 2021. <\/p>\n
I read 42 books in 2022, with the genre breakdown as follows:<\/p>\n
Middle-grade and YA: 9 books. Highlights included the humor and excitement of Nightbirds on Nantucket<\/i> by Joan Aiken, the sweetness of The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street<\/i> by Karina Yan Glaser, and the atmosphere and emotion of Last Night at the Telegraph Club<\/i> by Malinda Lo. I also appreciated reading Marguerite Henry’s King of the Wind<\/i> as an adult\/having been to Wandlebury Country Park, where the Godolphin Arabian’s grave is. <\/p>\n
Non-fiction: 10 books. I often love books with a travelogue element that also are doing something else\/have a bigger scope, so it is not surprising that I loved The Old Ways<\/i> by Robert Macfarlane and Underground<\/i> by Will Hunt. James Baldwin’s writing is precise and powerful and I loved The Fire Next Time<\/i>. And while I was not totally smitten by the style or structure of Nineteen Reservoirs<\/i> by Lucy Sante, I am still very glad I read it because I learned a bunch from it, and because it prompted me to learn some family history as well. (I’m pretty sure my great grandpa worked on the Ashokan Reservoir.)<\/p>\n
Fiction for grown-ups: 23 books. Of course I loved Ali Smith’s Companion Piece<\/i>, because I generally love Ali Smith. Other highlights included The Invention of Morel<\/i> by Adolfo Bioy Casares (which made me fondly remember reading Piranesi<\/i> by Susanna Clarke in 2020), Scattered All Over the Earth<\/i> by Y\u014dko Tawada (which has a very fun and twisty plot and lots of interesting things to say about language and culture and identity) and An I-Novel<\/i> by Minae Mizumura (which touches on similar themes, actually, though the structure and style are very different). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
2022: another year working mostly from home, another year of finding time to read in places\/times other than my commute\u2014although I probably did travel more by subway in 2022 for work and non-work reasons than I did in 2020 or 2021. I read 42 books in 2022, with the genre breakdown as follows: Middle-grade and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalmeta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}