It’s that reflective time of year again; last year is old news, the new one has dawned, and I look back and think, “where did I put my body that whole time and what did I even do with it?”. Once more, the answer is, “went to work and read a bunch, mostly”.
Work was better this year than in those recently gone by on account of it all being in a job and environment closer to home and conducive to good spirits. Levels of stress and responsibility are appropriately sized, and I’m allowed to wear colour at work. I had no idea that would be such a big deal to me, but it turns out Old Library’s dress code of black, white & grey was a real downer! On commencing at New Library at the end of last year, I donated much of my old funereal wardrobe and replaced it with cute dresses, colourful cardigans, and an amazing collection of brightly decorative tights. It’s always a good day at New Library when I get to use the toolbox (I really love taking things apart and putting them back together) but it was an especially propitious day when I realised I had worn an outfit that matched its colours. And so began my ‘Who wore it better?’ game of dressing to match various furnishings. Colleagues have been very supportive, most significantly my official fashion photographer, who put in great efforts every day to help me find a suitable match if I didn’t have one in mind already. She quickly learnt my most and least flattering angles, contorted herself into various positions to get the perfect shot, and would then consult on which of the 30 or so images should make it to social media. Sometimes the bookshelves looked better, but I definitely gave the bins a run for their money. #Twinning!
Amusing hobbies aside, this time last year I was banging on about how I had completed half a Masters degree, which turned out to be an hilarious prank. Having completely misjudged the course requirements, I can more accurately report that I am only now halfway through a Masters degree. It was quite a realisation to arrive at when I was simultaneously gloating about my Last. Lecture. Ever! while also freaking out inordinately about my research paper and snapping at anyone who asked me how it was going. When it hit me that I still had another year left, I burst into tears at my desk and was cared for by the most motherly hush of librarians in Sydney. After a fashion I called the university, deferred the first half of next year, and promptly booked an overseas holiday. I’ll get back to it in July and finish halfway through next year, having enjoyed revisiting my social life, sleeping in on weekends, and will have inscribed Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore on the soles of my Doc Martens.
My book tally for the year reached 147, which I’m pretty pleased with given the amount of time given over to aforementioned research paper and other academic pursuits. I give this year’s crown to Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang. I tried describing its plot and appeal characteristics to my mum, and found myself doing a woefully inadequate job. The plot did not sound like something I or she would particularly enjoy, the characters were too nuanced to do them justice without giving too much away, and the real magic of the book is far greater than the sum of its parts. Please just take my word for it and acquire a copy from your library or favourite local bookshop – it really is one of those novels where the less you know going into it, the better. You can thank me later!
Second and third go to What We Do In The Dark by Michelle Hart, and The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. The characters in both are fully formed without being predictable, and the writing styles of each sing with unpretentious lyricism. The Michelle Hart is bursting with one-liners I jotted down to revisit later, and Elif Shafak offers such a poetic sense of place that I was instantly transported. She made it into my top three last year as well, and it is my intention to dip into more of her back catalogue in the year ahead.
The trends in my reading habits this year included a greater number of graphic novels, and a smaller number of audiobooks. New Library boasts a thoughtfully curated collection of the former, and I found myself lacking the requisite concentration for audiobooks much of the time. Unless the words were in front of me, it was too easy for my mind to start turning over the finer points of Harvard Referencing. Seriously, I spent much of the year with my mind on citations and am sorry if you were unfortunate enough to receive even a single text with my thoughts on the matter. It’s been a wild ride.
On that bibliographic note, I give you what you’re actually here for! This is what I read in 2022:
1. Monkey Grip by Helen Garner
2. Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures by Stephen Fry
3. Fragile Monsters by Catherine Menon
4. Good Indian Daughter: How I Found Freedom in Being a Disappointment by Ruhi Lee
5. Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
6. Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou
7. We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza
8. China Room by Sunjeev Sahota
9. A Father’s Plea by Kamalle Dabboussy with Mic Looby
10. Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith
11. A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasm
12. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle
13. Truths from an Unreliable Witness: Finding Laughter in the Darkest of Places by Fiona O’Loughlin
14. No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
15. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
16. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
17. My Desert Kingdom: Finding a Life in Saudi Arabia by Jill Koolmees
18. The Sunny Nihilist: How a Meaningless Life can Make you Truly Happy by Wendy Syfret
19. Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo
20. The Eye of the Sheep by Sofie Laguna
21. Three Sisters by Heather Morris
22. Moth by Melody Razak
23. Baghdad Without a Map: and Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz
24. Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion by Tori Telfer
25. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
26. Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir by Ashley C. Ford
27. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
28. A Blank Canvas by Robert Hollingworth
29. Friends & Dark Shapes by Kavita Bedford
30. Ayiti by Roxane Gay
31. The Secret Lives of the Amir Sisters by Nadiya Hussain
32. Tiananmen 1989: Our Shattered Hopes by Lun Zhang
33. The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices by Casper ter Kuile
34. How We Love: Notes on a Life by Clementine Ford
35. An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine
36. I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider
37. Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko
38. Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal
39. The Labyrinth: an Existential Odyssey with Jean-Paul Sartre by Ben Argon
40. A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery
41. Memoirs of a Book Thief by A. Tota and P. Van Hove
42. The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
43. Love & Virtue by Diana Reid
44. Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke
45. The Promise by Damon Galgut
46. The End by Lemony Snicket
47. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
48. Death: The Deluxe Edition by Neil Gaiman
49. Gogo Mama: A Journey into the Lives of Twelve African Women by Sally Sara
50. Love in the Time of Bertie by Alexander McCall Smith
51. Theroux the Keyhole: Diaries of a Grounded Documentary Maker by Louis Theroux
52. Kololo Hill by Neemah Shah
53. Wahala by Nikki May
54. Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen
55. A Bunch of Poesy by Michael Leunig
56. Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owour
57. From Burma to Myanmar: On the Road to Mandalay by Lydia Laube
58. Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children’s Folklore in Australia by June Factor
59. When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
60. Reunion in Barsaloi by Corinne Hofmann
61. Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
62. The Girls in the Wild Fig Tree: How I fought to save myself, my sister, and thousands of girls worldwide by Nice Leng’ete with Elizabeth Butler-Witter
63. You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
64. Back From Africa by Corinne Hofmann
65. The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison by Kylie Moore-Gilbert
66. Gender Rebels: 50 Influential Cross-Dressers, Impersonators, Name-Changers and Game-Changers by Anneka Harry
67. Swallow the Air by Tara June Winch
68. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
69. My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women
70. Language, Madness and Desire: On Literature by Michel Foucault
71. Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup
72. Run Rose Run by Dolly Parton and James Patterson
73. Love Stories by Trent Dalton
74. Ten Steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby
75. Vann Nath: Painting the Khmer Rouge by Matteo Mastragostino & Paolo Castaldi
76. Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
77. Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz
78. The Comfort Book by Matt Haig
79. You Made a Fool of Death with your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi
80. Yerba Buena by Nina Lacour
81. Here Again Now by Okechukwu Nzelu
82. How to Have Feminist Sex by Flo Perry
83. Either/Or by Elif Batuman
84. Perfect Tunes by Emily Gould
85. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
86. Dream More: Celebrate the Dreamer in You by Dolly Parton
87. Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
88. Triptych by Krissy Kneen
89. People Person by Candice Carty-Williams
90. The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting by Evanna Lynch
91. Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down
92. Be More Chill: The Graphic Novel by Ned Vizzini, David Levithan and Nick Bertozzi (illustrator)
93. No Land to Light On by Yara Zgheib
94. Why Patti Smith Matters by Caryn Rose
95. Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata
96. Complicit by Winnie M. Li
97. Bloom by Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau
98. Out of the Box by Izzy, Emmie and Kerry Silbery
99. Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson
100. The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah
101. Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice by Vanessa Zoltan
102. The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith
103. Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
104. Desire: A Reckoning by Jessie Cole
105. The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth by Ken Krimstein
106. What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart
107. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (reread)
108. Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Golden Gelman
109. Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi
110. Cyclopedia Exotica by Aminder Dhaliwal
111. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
112. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
113. The Low, Low Woods by Carmen Maria Machado and DaNi (illustrator)
114. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling (reread)
115. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
116. Whole Notes: Life Lessons Through Music by Ed Ayres
117. I’m With Her by Victoria Midwinter Pitt
118. Runt by Craig Silvey
119. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
120. Who Owns History? Elgin’s Loot and the Case for Returning Plundered Treasure by Geoffrey Robertson
121. Sunbathing by Isobel Beech
122. The Secret River by Kate Grenville
123. When She Was Good by Michael Robotham
124. Marriage of a Thousand Lies by S. J. Sindu
125. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling (reread)
126. Diego Rivera by Francisco De La Mora and José Luis Pescador
127. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune
128. Brazen: Rebel Ladies who Rocked the World by Pénélope Bagieu
129. Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree
130. Clarke by Holly Throsby
131. This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki
132. Seeing Other People by Diana Reid
133. Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang
134. After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
135. Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie
136. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling (reread)
137. The British Museum is Falling Down by David Lodge
138. Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide by Kate Charlesworth
139. Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball by Jon Chad
140. The Secret Keeper of Jaipur by Alka Joshi
141. True Stories: Selected Non Fiction by Helen Garner
142. The Boy with a Bird in his Chest by Emme Lund
143. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
144. Finding My Place: From Cairo to Canberra – the irrepressible story of an irrepressible woman by Anne Aly
145. The Gathering by Anne Enright
146. Maximum Security: the inside story of Australia’s toughest gaols by James Morton
147. Iranian Love Stories by Jane Deuxard and Deloupy