My Year in Books, 2022
One reading roundup to rule them all.
It’s that time of year again! Last year, my reading roundup post was my very first on Substack, and I’ve loved the writing life this year. You can read my State of the Fields 2022 for more thoughts on cultivating the creative life in the past year, but this post is about books, glorious books. I set out to read twenty this year, and at the time of this writing I’ve finished nineteen. I won’t get my twentieth done before the end of today and it’s totally fine. Here’s what I did finish, by category:
6 fiction
3 nonfiction
7 personal development/spiritual formation
3 art & faith
Please enjoy a roundup of what I read this past year, complete with random superlatives that I made up arbitrarily. <3
Best Overall: Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle
I wrote a longer review of this in August, but I’ll say this: if you’re in the art and faith world in any capacity, Walking on Water should be required reading. Madeleine L’Engle empathizes with the unique struggles of an artist – the loneliness, the creation in seasons of belief and doubt, the pressures – but she also challenges the reader. And as much as being understood is wonderful, what we really need is a worthy call to rise up to. She delivers that call for the Christian artist.
Runner-Up: Placemaker, Christie Purifoy
I’ve followed Christie Purifoy on social media for a while, drinking in her idyllic feed of her homegrown flowers, thoughtful captions written from her 18th-century Pennsylvania farmhouse. I bought Placemaker for myself and a friend, and ended up reading the whole book within a day on a long plane ride home from a trip to the west coast. I was in the middle of making a big decision, and Placemaker was the perfect companion for the decision. It’s a memoir, essentially, of all the places she and her family lived, and what each of those places taught her. The title of Placemaker refers to the practices we learn in making a place our own, but the reverse is also true in Purifoy’s work – the places make us, too. This was a beautiful read, with many happy tears in the reading.
“I will choose to stay. I will plant my desires here, and I will not walk away. I will try to live like a forest tree. I will case my seeds and cast my seeds and cast my seeds of love again. Like the land of the proverb, I will risk wanting more. I will refuse to cry, ‘Enough!’”(44).
Best Fiction: The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
I read a lot of good fiction this year, so this was a tough choice. I read Lila! I read Dune! I read The Picture of Dorian Gray! And all of these were so valuable, but since we’re speaking of love, I loved The Bean Trees most. It was one of my summer reads, and I became completely immersed in it. Stories about a life taking shape in spite of strange circumstances touch me every time, without fail. And Kingsolver is a fantastic writer.
Best Spiritual Formation: The Rest of God, Mark Buchanan
This was a lend from my friend Elizabeth and it was well-needed and convicting for me. Rest is one of my deepest struggles in spiritual life – since I was young I’ve always loved to multitask, be busy with many projects, and receive motivation from the thrill of a last-minute deadline. Mark Buchanan argues that this isn’t the way we were made to live, and he writes about the difficult, necessary work of realigning ourselves with the rest of God so that we don’t miss out on all that he has to offer.
Fastest Read: Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
If you know, you know.
The One I Thought I Would Love But Didn’t: Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer
This one felt like it just wasn’t my season for this book yet. Let Your Life Speak was recommended to me by *many* people, and there’s a quote from the book that permanently lives rent-free in my mind and heart for all the wisdom that it’s held for my personal life.1 But the rest of it was kind of meh, at least for this year. Lots about leadership, and about the dark night of the soul, if you need a read for either of those subjects. I’m keeping my copy because I expect I'll enjoy it more later in life.
2022’s reading life has been a good gift in cultivating discipline through small steps, and I’m excited to continue growing as a reader. This next year, I’m approaching my reading priorities with some intentionality. I hope to read classics in fiction (like The Brothers Karamazov), some lauded nonfiction writers (like Annie Dillard and Robin Wall Kimmerer), and some works that will contribute towards building a theology of art (like For the Life of the World and Art + Faith). I will be back with more reviews and thoughts in 2023. Until then – happy new year to you, dear readers!
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Here’s that Parker Palmer quote. “In the Upper Midwest, newcomers often receive a classic piece of wintertime advice: “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Here, people spend good money on warm clothing so they can get outdoors and avoid the “cabin fever” that comes from huddling fearfully by the fire during the long frozen months. If you live here long, you learn that a daily walk into the winter world will fortify the spirit by taking you boldly to the very heart of the season you fear. Our inward winters take many forms—failure, betrayal, depression, death. But every one of them, in my experience, yields to the same advice: “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Until we enter boldly into the fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we walk directly into them—protected from frostbite by the warm garb of friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance—we can learn what they have to teach us. Then, we discover once again that the cycle of the seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in the most dismaying season of all.”