Housekeeping note: this intro is longer than usual! If you want to skip my New Year’s crisis and scroll ahead to the books, I won’t be offended.
Friends, I have a confession to make: I failed to reach my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal. I finished only 69 books out of the 70 that I intended to read.
Now, I know what you’re thinking — either “lol, nice,” or “wait, that’s still a ton of books?”
Which is true! 69 is a comically huge number of books. I am very aware that most people are pleased with reading even a fraction of that in a year, and they should be! Reading any amount in a world with so many other demands and distractions fighting for our attention is an accomplishment. So why am I taking coming one book short so hard?
I’m not a good loser (ask Phillip or any member of my family), even when I’m just playing against myself. I’d been looking forward to my completed Goodreads goal being a tiny win at the end of a long, hard year of good intentions, unmet goals, and color-coded spreadsheets that saw only red highlights. So when my Kindle reported I had an hour and twelve minutes left in my 70th book at approximately 11:24 PM on New Year’s Eve, I decided—with a melodramatically heavy heart—to just go to sleep.
That hour and twelve minutes haunted me on New Year’s Day, as I thought back over the past days spent traveling and spending precious time with friends and family. Even though I hadn’t had more than 30 minutes of uninterrupted time to myself in almost two weeks, shouldn’t I have been able to carve out 72 more minutes somewhere? All I did in 2022 was read, and yet, I couldn’t even “win” at reading.
I recognize that this thinking is absurd, and also that this is getting long. Reading isn’t a competitive sport, and hitting an arbitrary goal is just…not at all the point of reading.
I read because it brings me peace and comfort, because it helps me get out of my head and into the minds of people I’ll never know, in places I’ll never see, and because it will forever be my ideal way to start and end the day. Also, my original goal was actually 50 books and I blew through that in September, so it is simply time to get over myself.
In 2022, I read a whole lot and I wrote a whole lot, and that has to be enough. In 2023, my only real goals are to do more of the same, to keep putting myself and my words out there and see what comes of it.
Thanks for indulging me in this little end-of-the-year wallow. If you enjoyed the wallow, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter on Substack and get rants like these directly to your inbox!
Usually, the blog version of this newsletter has an extra bonus tier of whatever books didn’t fit in the newsletter or other media I’m enjoying. No bonus tier this month because I’m tired, but go watch Guillermo del Toro’s new Pinnochio adaptation on Netflix. Bring tissues.
Now, let’s officially put 2022 to rest and take a look at my last books of the year.
The Foundation:
Still Life — Louise Penny
I started off December still uncomfortably full from Thanksgiving and craving a cozy mystery, so I decided it was time to introduce myself to Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. Totaling 19 books as of 2022, the series opens with Still Life, which tracks down a killer in small-town French Canada after the murder of a beloved former teacher and amateur painter. The writing definitely skewed cheesy, but the mystery had me fooled up until the very end. I’m sure this won’t be my last visit to Three Pines.
Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional — Isaac Fitzgerald
I can’t remember why I put this book on hold at the library because it’s not at all what I typically gravitate toward (non-fiction, overtly male). That said, Fitzgerald’s open honesty and wry, self-deprecating humor quickly won me over. This is an insightful and expansive memoir, covering the author’s experiences with everything from religion to porn acting as it follows his path from an abusive home to forming teenage fight clubs in rural Massachusetts, smuggling aid supplies over warzone borders in Southeast Asia, and finding a safe space tending seedy San Francisco bars. Ultimately, it’s a book about finding a sense of purpose and of home, and the journey is a wild motorcycle ride.
Nimona — ND Stevenson
Nimona is a delight, and I’m so glad I picked it up off a Brooklyn stoop even though it was missing the first few pages. This story began as an e-comic before being adapted into a full graphic novel that follows Nimona, a young shapeshifter with an unnerving penchant for violence, who offers her services as a sidekick to notorious villain Ballister Blackheart. Together, they seek revenge against the all-controlling Institution and its champion knight, Ambrosius Goldenloin, a former close friend-turned-enemy of Blackheart’s. The story’s silliness is a thin mask for its thoughtful exploration of queerness, othering, and identity, and its heartwarming found family arc is an added bonus. Soon to be a Netflix movie in 2023!
Solid Supports:
Matrix — Lauren Groff
This book was recommended to me after I gushed about loving The Marriage Portrait in my last newsletter, so if you were waiting for a sign to send me more historical fiction recs, this is it! Matrix is about the life of Marie, a twelfth-century nun who becomes a powerful religious and political figure by using mystic visions to justify expanding and fortifying her abbey until it is almost entirely self-sufficient. I loved examining how an exclusively female institution could not just function but truly prosper in a time where opportunities for female power and authority were nearly nonexistent, and thought it also offered an interesting meditation on the different kinds of love and the distinction between goodness and greatness. Lauren Groff stans, don’t miss this one.
Cain’s Jawbone — Torquemada (E. Powys Mathers)
Okay, this might be cheating because even though I’ve read it through multiple times, I have not “finished” this book per se. (Actually, I just realized I could have counted this book as “read” and therefore reached my Goodreads goal, but I’ve already made peace with my failure and written a whole newsletter about it so let’s just move right along.) Described as “the brainchild of Agatha Christie and James Joyce,” this book is actually a murder mystery puzzle, where if you could put all 100 out-of-order pages back in order to identify the six victims and their killers by December 31st, 2022, the publishing company was offering cash prizes. However, that deadline has come and gone without me solving it, so I’m officially done gatekeeping this thing! I’m still committed to working on it throughout the winter, so if anyone wants to join me in this madness purely for the fun of it, let’s chat.
THE TIPPY TOP:
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms — N.K. Jemisin
Something about the holidays always makes me crave escapist fantasy (what does that say about me?) and after looking back at my past few newsletters and realizing they were painfully white, I decided it was embarrassing that I hadn’t read any Jemisin yet. Her debut fantasy novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was the only book of hers immediately available from the library, so that’s what I took with me on my travels as my last book of the year. I’m also cheating a little here because I didn’t actually finish it in December—I finished it on a Florida beach on January 2nd—but it’s my newsletter and I make the rules!
The first book of the Inheritance trilogy, this story follows a young woman named Yeine, whose mother had been the heir of an elite ruling family of sun god worshipers—the Arameri—until she abandoned them for a man from the barbarian north. When Yeine’s mother is mysteriously killed, Yeine herself is recognized as a potential heir, and she must travel to the capital city of Sky to answer her grandfather’s summons, seek revenge for her mother, and help choose the next Arameri successor—a task she soon learns means certain death.
In Sky, Yeine discovers a magical, mazelike aerial palace where gods are held captive as prisoners of the last godly war, and socio-political status is marked by how much Arameri blood you share. When offered an alliance with the enslaved gods—including an enchantingly smoldering Nightlord—Yeine soon finds that she has a much larger role to play in the fate of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms than just as a pawn in the politics of Sky.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms has just about every trope I love in every other major fantasy: Tolkien-esque lore and mythology, political intrigue to rival any Lannister, and a whirlwind celestial romance that makes the Grishaverse’s Darkling look like a measly punk. Most of all, I loved Yeine’s bravery and strength, her determination not to be dismissed based on differences of upbringing, blood, or skin color, and her resolve to never lose the softness and ability to love that prevents her from becoming a true Arameri.
According to Goodreads reviews, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms apparently isn’t the best place to start with N.K. Jemisin because her later work in The Broken Earth trilogy and beyond is that much better, but I personally love reading a writer’s work chronologically and seeing how they progress. Also, this was a damn strong place to start as a debut, so I’m extremely excited to read more of her books in the new year and will be recommending this one to all fantasy lovers from here on out.
I know this was a long one, so thanks for reading to the end! If you have any reading goals or recommendations for 2023 that you’d like to chat about, I’d love to hear them! Feel free to drop a comment right here on this post.
Until next time, happy reading!
❤ Catherine
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Catherine Thoms 