Annual Top Ten Favorites
Top Ten Favorite Books of 2022
These are my favorite reads since January 1, 2022. They include an extensive variety of reading: from the Classics to contemporary literary fiction; from the very long to quite compact works; and from fiction, non-fiction, history, and music. It was a very rich year for reading and there were other books that could have made my list if I were to expand it. While those others were very good books these are the ten that I felt will stay with me over the years; in fact a couple of them were rereads.
The list is in no particular order, but if I had to pick my favorite of the year it would be Anna Karenina for Tolstoy's narrative genius that portrays great characters and important ideas in a way that instills the reader with deeply held emotions and ideas that all humans share. This is one of the greatest novels ever written. There were nine more books that I enjoyed that did not make the top ten - each of which could easily be considered the number eleven on the list. These included The Chosen by Chaim Potok (a book I had first read more than fifty years ago), classics including The Annals of Tacitus and The Odes of Horace; Civil War narratives including: On the Altar of Freedom by James Henry Goode, The Unvanquished by William Faulkner, and Ambrose Bierce Alone in Bad Company by Roy Morris, Jr.; The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler's 11 Symphonies by Dr. David Vernon, and also a book I reread for the second year in a row, Cervantes' Don Quixote.
Anna Karenina
Madame Bovary
The War With Hannibal
Absalom, Absalom
The Committed
There There
Interior Chinatown
Klara and the Sun
The Education of Corporal John Musgrave
Voices from Chernobyl
4 comments:
Looks like a great reading year! Glad you enjoyed Interior Chinatown, and I've only heard good things about Anna Karenina. Right now I'm reading Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War and very impressed. If I can work up the emotional courage, I will probably read Chernobyl someday.
Marian,
Thanks for your comment. I also want to read more of the fascinating and powerful books by Svetlana Alexievich. I understand your reference to "emotional courage" and agree that her work takes that and more. It is powerful and often devastating in its portrayal of human suffering.
I envy your ability to tackle Faulkner!
Stephen,
Im a huge fan of Faulkner and have read most of his novels and many short stories. If you find him daunting I would suggest the following three novels as a good ones to enter into his world: Intruder in the Dust, The Reivers, and Go Down, Moses. In fact I'm a fan of southern fiction and would recommend all the novels of Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers.
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