My Best Books of 2022 Part 1

So, this year was really good, I read 76 books, 20 of which were solid 5 star reads! I actually had to trim it down, instead of years past when I was scrounging my four star reads for my favorite books. I’m so happy to say that these are all books I ionately enjoyed, and would highly recommend! The list was so long in fact, I’m splitting the list in two parts! These books have a general I enjoyed them the more as the list progresses, but those are not hard and fast rules. As an FYI I do tend to group series together as one entry, I did not include rereads, and assume that all of these books are five stars. All summaries are from goodreads!

The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri

Imprisoned by her dictator brother, Malini spends her days in isolation in the Hirana: an ancient temple that was once the source of the powerful, magical deathless waters — but is now little more than a decaying ruin. Priya is a maidservant, one among several who make the treacherous journey to the top of the Hirana every night to clean Malini’s chambers. She is happy to be an anonymous drudge, so long as it keeps anyone from guessing the dangerous secret she hides. But when Malini accidentally bears witness to Priya’s true nature, their destinies become irrevocably tangled. One is a vengeful princess seeking to depose her brother from his throne. The other is a priestess seeking to find her family. Together, they will change the fate of an empire.

What more do you want from a book, than morally gray lesbians, flower body horror, and complex world building with an epic sweeping narrative? If you like She Who Became the Sun, definitely give this one a read, they deal with similar themes and are still very unique and take the concepts in different directions!

My Heart in the Highlands by Amy Hoff

The year is 1888. Brilliant and beautiful, Lady Jane Crichton has fought the constraints of her Victorian Edinburgh upbringing to become one of the first women to attend university for medicine. Denied a degree because of her gender, she decides to marry a closeted gay man, providing him with political and social cover and herself with the time and money to pursue her scientific interests—one of which is a time machine. Jane’s machine works…but not exactly as she expected, and soon she has crash-landed in the 13th-century Scottish Highlands. There she is rescued by a wild, red-haired warrior woman, Ainslie nic Dòmhnaill, next in line to the chiefship of the great Clan Donald, the rulers of the Sea Kingdom of the Isles. Despite the constant threat of attacks from enemy clans, harsh winters and a touch of homesickness, Jane finds herself bewitched by this land, this time and this magnificent woman. The rough and warlike Ainslie also feels the magic and revels in a ion and love neither she nor Jane had ever imagined. But Jane is hiding a dangerous secret—one that threatens to tragically transform their Highland fairy tale.

An amazing book about an 18th century Scottish female doctor who invents a time machine and travels back in time to fall in love with a Scottish warrior queen from the 5th century. This book was so unexpected, funny, and sweet. Plus there are some in depth endnotes and it also works really well as a commentary on how English colonialism of Scotland, and how the Scottish past is typically portrayed/ understood, where there is much more nuance than what is typically shown. This is the only book on here that is a 4 to 4.75 star read, just because on a technical level it was rough around the edges, but I personally give it more grace as an Indie romance.

A Field Guide to Lesser Known and Seldom Seen Birds of North America

I love this completely normal bird book, filled with fascinating birds. Your friends will truly marvel at the majesty of nature. Perfect for birders and non-birders alike. I’ve bought this for three people for Christmas.

Everything I Need I Get From You by Kaitlyn Tiffany

“In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. “It’s interesting for sure,” Styles said later, adding, “a little niche, maybe.” But what seemed niche to Styles was actually a signpost for an unfathomably large, hyper-connected alternate universe: stan culture. In Everything I Need I Get from You, Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a superfan herself, guides us through the online world of fans, stans, and boybands. Along the way we meet girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate chart numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside jokes and shared memories surrounding band ' allergies, internet typos, and hairstyles. In the process, Tiffany makes a convincing, and often moving, argument that fangirls, in their ingenuity and collaboration, created the social internet we know today. “Before most people were using the internet for anything,” Tiffany writes, “fans were using it for everything.” With humor, empathy, and an insider’s eye, Everything I Need I Get from You reclaims internet history for young women, establishing fandom not as the territory of hysterical girls but as an incubator for digital innovation, art, and community. From alarming, fandom-splitting conspiracy theories about secret love and fake children, to the interplays between high and low culture and capitalism, Tiffany’s book is a riotous chronicle of the movement that changed the internet forever.”

I was not expecting a One Direction book to be on this list, but I guess it's here. This combines cultural history of fandom with memoir which is fantastic. I have never been involved in the One Direction fandom, but seeing the overlap and influences on the fandoms I’m in, was super interesting. The language of fandom, how and why people got involved in fandom, and how it shaped how people engage with fandom online. Also, learning about fandom drama is also super fun. Finally, there are just some lines that hit me like a truck in the best possible way. (I’ve seen some bad reviews of this book that seem to be in really bad faith. If you refuse to engage with the One Direction aspects of this book, or music fandom… then this book is not for you. If you read the description, where it tells you that this uses the One Direction fandom as a case study, and that the title of the book is a One Direction lyric, you are the problem. Just my opinion.)

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy

“A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life. Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income. In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club s and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants. Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.”

McCurdy is a great writer, and this book lives up to the hype for me. You don’t need to be familiar with ICarly to enjoy the humor, the stellar writing style, and McCurdy’s life story.

Cheer Up!: Love and Pom-poms

A sweet, queer teen romance perfect for fans of Fence and Check, Please! Annie is a smart, antisocial lesbian starting her senior year of high school who’s under pressure to the cheerleader squad to make friends and round out her college applications. Her former friend BeeBee is a people-pleaser—a trans girl who must keep her parents happy with her grades and social life to keep their of her transition. Through the rigors of squad training and amped up social pressures (not to mention micro aggressions and other queer youth problems), the two girls rekindle a friendship they thought they’d lost and discover there may be other, sweeter feelings springing up between them.

This was so sweet! I usually don’t enjoy ordinary contemporary YA romance, but this was the exception. It’s a super sweet romance between childhood friends on the cheer team and also highlights the treatment a lot of trans highschoolers have to face.

The Life Changing of Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

“Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles? Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you'll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room or little-by-little approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff forever. The KonMari Method, with its revolutionary category-by-category system, leads to lasting results. In fact, none of Kondo's clients have lapsed (and she still has a three-month waiting list). With detailed guidance for determining which items in your house "spark joy" (and which don't), this international best seller featuring Tokyo's newest lifestyle phenomenon will help you clear your clutter and enjoy the unique magic of a tidy home - and the calm, motivated mindset it can inspire.”

I was not expecting this book to be here, but it actually works! It’s changed my mindset about cleaning, has helped me implement things into my life, and is also a super relaxing and enjoyable book to read.

The Beadworkers by Beth Piatote

“Beth Piatote's luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world. Told with humor, subtlety, and beautiful spareness, the mixed-genre works of Beth Piatote's first collection find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return. A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings, while ruminating on a fractured relationship. An eleven-year-old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s, as her family is gradually drawn to the front lines of the conflict. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college, one French and the other Lakota, each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce/Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone. Formally inventive, witty, and generous, the works in this singular debut collection draw on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life in the Americas.”

Each story in this collection was unexpected and beautiful, and shows the different experiences of indigenous people across space, time, and genre. This collection has poetry, fiction, and play and each one managed to be unique while tying in central elements established at the beginning. This book is so good, it made me cry at the description of the color blue. I read this at the beginning of the year so it’s had time to fade, otherwise this would probably be much higher on the list.

This was so much fun to make, I would love to hear other people’s favorite books of 2022 as well! Hope you enjoyed this post!