2022 media highlights
Like 2021, 2022 was also a tough and weird year. I didn’t finish as many books as I would have liked. Maybe 2023 will be better.
Also, 2022 will be the last year that I track what I read in WorldCat. Now that it doesn’t log the date you add an item to a list, its usefulness for me is much diminished. I’m currently giving a friend’s deployment of BookWyrm a try, and I might just need to stop overthinking things and log what I read in Excel.
Previous highlights posts (also, I’ve been doing this for five years???):
The books that made me cry
Warmth (book, Daniel Sherrell) – Sherrell’s memoir of being a climate organizer and navigating his own climate emotions is the generational cry (quite literally) in the climate change wilderness I’ve been waiting for. This book was such a gift for processing my own climate rage and grief, something that I long ago accepted will never go away but that I need to handle with care and attention like an old injury.
Grapes of Wrath (book, John Steinbeck) – I somehow managed to get through my whole life without reading Grapes of Wrath or watching the movie. Last summer was finally the right time to read it since I was writing A Green New Deal for Archives and preparing for a trip to California. I knew the general contours of the novel, but I didn’t quite appreciate just how deep the environmental and labor themes ran. The structure of Grapes, with chapters that step away from the main narrative to go down a little historical side trail and back, remind me of Moby-Dick, one of my favorite books. I came down with a severe case of COVID towards the end of reading this, and sobbed my way through the final chapters while I was in the middle of a feverish insomniac spell.
Glimpses of the future
Parable of the Sower (book, Octavia Butler) – I had put off reading this for years, mostly because I was too scared it’d give me a panic attack. The ways in which the world falls apart through civil society breakdown, the election of a demagogue, and climate apocalypse was uncomfortably plausible, and now I understand why so many people consider Octavia Butler to be a prophetic voice. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t stoke my inner prepper a little bit (and I did get my ham radio license a few months after reading it). Parable definitely made me think about what I’d need to do to survive the unthinkable.
New York 2140 (book, Kim Stanley Robinson) – This is the first KSR novel I’ve ever read (I’m about halfway through his Ministry for the Future), and I found it ultimately quite optimistic. Much of New York City may be flooded, but it still exists, which is a profoundly reassuring prospect. What KSR lacks in character development, he more than makes up for in painting an incredibly vivid urban geography. And what I appreciated the most about New York 2140 was just how… whimsical it was. There is so much devastation, but people still have cranky committee meetings, they still drink wine, they still have music. Life goes on.
How we spend our time
Daily Rituals: Women at work (book, Mason Currey) – This book was a sequel (I read the first in 2021), and it made up for the lack of women in the first book. I am a very ritual and habit oriented person, and I really enjoy reading about how other people approach the same.
Four Thousand Weeks (book, Oliver Burkeman) – This was an approachable philosophical book about time and chilling out about the amount we have left. I think if you enjoy Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing you’d probably like this one too.
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