I’m such a slow reader. (And you should see me texting; my kid acted like I was torturing her when she witnessed me one-finger plucking at my phone screen.) Every year I try to read 2 books a month. (Aim high!) In 2022 I read the exact same number of books that I did in 2021: 27, or 1 every 13.5 days. Pitiful, I know, but enough to draw a top ten list from. Here are the best books I read in 2022:

1. The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage, Drew Magary. I actually own this book because I checked it out of the library and took it in a backpack somewhere; my lovely wife Jen finished almost all of a smoothie and stuck it in the backpack. When we got home, the whole book was purple from the smoothie leftovers. “Why would you put it in with the book?!?” I asked. She said, “I thought the lid was secure.” So I had to reimburse the library for the book, and I got to keep it. Good thing I liked it! Magary tells the harrowing story of how, one night out singing karaoke with co-workers, something happens that leaves him hospitalized; not only does he describe his recovery from a traumatic brain injury, but he also goes back to try to piece together the mystery of what happened to him. (It’s Rashomon-like; no one witnessed his fall but many people were present that night.) What might surprise you is that this is a very funny book, and Magary is able to find the humor in even the darkest moments of his life.

2. Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Kevin Wilson. “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” Frankie Budge, settled into her adult life, receives a call from a reporter asking if those words mean anything to her. For years, Budge has hidden the truth behind her role in causing a mass panic in her small hometown of Coalfield, Tennessee, that spread around the world. This funny and introspective novel toggles between present-day Frankie and her 1996 self, an awkward teen who makes a connection with a new boy in her town one summer, and how what they created sent them down different paths.

3. This Time Tomorrow, Emma Straub. I’m not a fan of time-travel stories. And yet here I am, recommending Straub’s “what if we can go back” novel. About to celebrate her 40th birthday, Alice wakes up in her childhood home, on her 16th birthday, in 1996. Startled by how different her life has turned out from what she imagined when she was young, Alice seeks to “fix” things in hopes of ending up in a different place at age 40. It asks the question, “What would you change if you could go back?” It’s also an examination of the father-daughter bond, and a heartbreaker in exploring how far we would go to get our parents back to who we need them to be for us.

4. Mika in Real Life, Emiko Jean. There’s a theme in these last three books: grown-up characters confronting their teenage years and asking if they are who they thought they could become when they were young. In this romantic novel, thirtysomething Mika, her life a shambles, receives an out-of-the-blue call from Penny, the girl she gave up for adoption while in college. Attempting to impress Penny, Mika embellishes her work and relationship situations. When Penny decides to visit with her adoptive father, Thomas, Mika has to choose which part of her to expose to them. This novel explores cultural challenges with adoption, dreams gone haywire, and what it means to truly face our own inadequacies.

5. The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham. Reading Joyce’s Ulysses was a rite of passage and a long, hard slog for college English majors like me. Some passages are pure poetry; some are like deciphering hieroglyphics; and the most controversial parts, the ones addressed in this book, are, let’s face it, raunchy. Joyce and his publishers spent decades trying to get his book published in various countries, it was banned in the UK, the United States, and most of Europe for obscenity. This book opens up the legal proceedings, the unlikely patrons on both sides of the Atlantic to supported Joyce financially (and illegally printed and distributed his book), and the ramifications of the landmark 1933 federal obscenity trial. Ultimately, Joyce’s backers argued, if we censor a book because someone, somewhere, of some young age, might be offended by it, then the only things that would ever get published would be G-rated. Also enlightening were the letters between Joyce and his wife/muse, Nora Barnacle, although they were even raunchier than what got his book banned!

6. Architects of An American Landscape, Hugh Howard. The subtitle of this dual biography is “Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces.” Whew! Was Howard paid by the word for that title? This book delves into the friendship and collaboration between Olmsted, regarded as the world’s first and foremost landscape designer (New York’s Central Park, the Biltmore Estate, many other naturescapes throughout the world) and Richardson, the most influential architect of his time who has largely been forgotten, even though his influence endures. They could not have been more different: Olmstead was thin, reserved, and lived to be 81, while Richardson was obese, had a lust for life and celebrating it, and died at age 47. Howard proposes that, in a way, the greatness of Olmsted can only be viewed as an outcome of his working with Richardson.

7. Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, Bob Odenkirk. You might know Odenkirk for his role as Saul Goodman from “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” It surprises many to know that his long career before those dark dramas was all comedic. Hence the book’s title, which is one of my youngest child’s favorites; if she hears the word “comedy,” she yells out, “comedy comedy comedy drama!” Odenkirk writes of his tough upbringing in the Chicago area and his difficult relationship with his dad, his friendship with the legendary Second City founder Del Close, and his baffled bemusement at becoming better known for serious roles than for his turns as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” and writing and acting on “The Ben Stiller Show” and “Mr. Show with Bob and David.”

8. The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family, Ron and Clint Howard. The Howard brothers alternate chapters in this story of their childhoods and diverging paths into adulthood, Ron as the award-winning director and Clint as a character actor (who appears in all of Ron’s films). “The boys” in the title refers to what their mother called not just the brothers but also their father Rance, himself an actor of varying success. Ron and Clint aren’t afraid to address their own shortcomings (including Clint’s struggles with drugs and alcohol and living in his more successful brother’s shadow). On the heels of their father passing away, Ron and Clint wrote what amounts to a love letter to their parents and a way to tell them that all of their sacrifices for their children were worthwhile.

9. Slow Horses, Mick Herron. Herron’s Slough House novels are now a TV series on Apple TV+, taking its title from this first book in the series. “Slow horses” are what disgraced MI5 spies are referred to, as they are sent to work out of Slough House and attempt to rehabilitate their careers under the command of Jackson Lamb. River Cartwright, whose career got derailed before it even began by a botched training session, sees an opportunity to change his image when a terrorist cell threatens to air a kidnapped man’s beheading on live television. But all is not what it seems, and Slough House might be hiding secrets of its own. A true page turner and also full of humor.

10. The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, Mark Kurlansky. I came across this history book when someone on a podcast mentioned it in discussing the famed New York-New Jersey Harbor estuary, and that when Europeans first arrived in America, the waters of the rivers surrounding Manhattan were so thick with sea life that you could reach your hand in the water and pull out fish after fish. I had to read this book. The oysters alone drove commerce in New York; from the seventeenth century until well into the twentieth, New York’s oysters fed the world and drove the development of both the riverside slums and the Gilded Age mansions of Manhattan. The oysters’ filtration system kept the water in the harbor clean until the oyster beds’ eventual, inevitable overfishing and collapse. A cautionary tale for sure.

Books that just missed the top ten: Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, Nick Offerman; Into the Rip, Damien Cave; Mean Baby, Selma Blair; You Can’t Be Serious, Kal Penn.

When I was a grade schooler in the (ahem) late 1970s, I loved going to the school library at the center of the school building’s top floor. The library room was a pass-through: on one side was a door that led to the 3rd and 4th grade rooms, and on the other side was the door to the 5th and 6th grade rooms. Weirdly, each grade’s two classes were in one big room separated by either an accordion wall or just moveable bulletin boards, and for example, to get to the 5th grade rooms, you had to traipse through the back of the 6th grade rooms. So it was a constant stream of interruptions, with children or teachers or whole classes of children and teachers opening the main door and walking behind the desks of all the other classes; no wonder I have attention-span issues.

Anyway, back to the library: I fell in love with a certain type of book: realistic stories of kids leading normal lives. I didn’t want to read science fiction or horror or fantasy or anything that was too far out of the real world. The books that got all the attention were the Judy Blume books, specifically Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Otherwise Known As Sheila the Great, and Superfudge. So funny and relatable for kids trying to figure out how to navigate the world. Those led me to books by another author, Constance C. Greene, and her five “Al” books:  A Girl Called Al; I Know You, Al; Your Old Pal, Al; Alexandra the Great; Just Plain Al; and Al’s Blind Date. There was something about the way she wrote with heart and warmth about characters my age who weren’t idiots that appealed to me, even though I didn’t have divorced parents or live in an apartment building in a big city like they did. I bring this up because Greene, who published 25 books, passed away in 2021, at the age of 96. If you have a grade schooler or know a grade schooler (or are a grade schooler, or act like a grade schooler), track her books down.

I managed to reach my annual “24 books by New Year’s Eve” goal: I read 27 books, or 1 every 13.5 days. These are my top ten:

1. This Will All Be Over Soon, Cecily Strong. You might know Strong, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, from Saturday Night Live, but this book is not a typical memoir and isn’t a book of funny stories or “how I got famous.” It deals with some heavy topics: the death of Strong’s close cousin at age 30, some painful events from her youth, and a fledgling relationship during the pandemic. I was avoiding reading “pandemic” books, but this one was worth it. Very honest, raw, and unexpected.

2. Bewilderment, Richard Powers. The multiple-award-winning author (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize) who grew up in the Chicago suburbs (is this a pattern on this list?), Powers’ latest novel had a few things going on. This is a story about a father and son dealing with grief; a science-fiction story about searching for life on other planets; and a comment on topics as diverse as climate change and the overmedication of our youth. It took me about a third of the book to figure out what was going on; that’s a sign that a book has my attention.

3. No Cure for Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear), Kate Bowler. Another searing memoir, this time from a professor of religion who, at the age of 35, receives a cancer diagnosis that puts her life on hold. She walks us through the frustration and absurdity of dealing with her illness; the often misguided suggestions of the “live your best life now” self-help movement; and how to balance hope and despair while facing death.

4. Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney. It seems as if I have an Irish writer on my list every year. Rooney, tagged with the “voice of her generation” label, has already had one novel turned into a BBC series (Normal People). This novel follows four characters: an Irish novelist living in a small coastal Ireland town; her Tinder date/new friend, a warehouse worker; and her two best friends from Dublin, a man and woman who may or may not have a thing for each other. Filled with Rooney’s droll humor, frank sex scenes, class issues, and ruminations on art, aesthetics, and history, it also mirrors Richard Powers’ book (described above) in addressing a generation that feels that the world as we know it is beyond repair.

5. Stories to Tell, Richard Marx. Memoir from another Chicagoland native (it is a trend!). You might know Marx from his massively successful pop ballads from the late 1980s-early 1990s (“Don’t Mean Nothing,” “Right Here Waiting,” “Hold On to the Nights”) or from his massively poufed hair. You should know him for his ability to speak his mind on social media. This book is the best type of memoir: a rise/fall/rise again story with tons of name dropping (Lionel Richie, Whitney Houston, Madonna, Kenny Rogers, Barbra Streisand, Kenny Loggins, and a cast of dozens more) and wild stories you don’t see coming, like his dealing with a Covid-like illness starting in 2019, or his band fleeing a Taiwanese gangster on a race to the airport. Good read.

6. How to Live, or A  Life of Montaigne, Sarah Bakewell. This biography examines the life and writing of Michel de Montaigne, whose essays in the 1500s in France arguably were the first time someone wrote honestly about their innermost thoughts and published them for the world to see. There’s a through-line from his writing to the personal blogs and Instagram of today. You have the sense when reading Montaigne all these centuries later of, “how did he spell out what has been in my brain?” Some 250 years after Montaigne’s death, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life.” Bakewell puts Montaigne’s writing in the context of the constant wars raging around his hometown his whole life.

7. Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory, Deena Kastor. Kastor, the great American marathoner, writes the story of how strengthening her mind did more for her running career than logging miles ever did. Not just for runners, her backstory is amazing enough (adopted at birth, no one in her family had any running experience, and it was a total shock to them and her when she immediately had success in grade school), but the mind games she lays out would work for anyone struggling with goal setting.

8. Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches, John Hodgman. A great summer read, humorist Hodgman is recognizable as the PC in the old Apple commercials (vs. Justin Long as the Mac) and as a former Comedy Central The Daily Show correspondent. His earlier books were satirical almanacs with made-up facts; this is an actual memoir of Hodgman’s life, focusing on his family’s vacation homes in Massachusetts and Maine. Very funny.

9. Brat: An ’80s Story, Andrew McCarthy. Best known as a member of the “Brat Pack,” young actors labeled Hollywood’s next big thing; even though McCarthy was in some of what we consider the “Brat Pack” films (“Pretty in Pink,” “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Less Than Zero”), he was a New Yorker who wasn’t actually close with any of the other actors he was lumped with. McCarthy, now a travel writer and director, focuses on the early, years-of-struggling part of his career and his difficult relationship with his father.

10. Yearbook, Seth Rogen. The funniest book I read all year. This memoir is pretty much what you would expect and more from Rogen, an actor/writer/producer: stories from when he was a child, including starting his standup career in middle school; lots of weed smoking; and great vignettes about famous people (his description of two very uncomfortable encounters with Nicolas Cage is a standout, and I’m guessing they will never work together if Cage read this book.)

Books that just missed the top ten: I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy, Erin Carlson; Before the Ruins, Victoria Gosling; Good Company, Cynthia D’Aprix; Live Your Life, Amanda Kloots; Paul Simon: A Life, Robert Hilburn.

Can somebody poke a stick in 2020 and see if it’s really dead? I’ve procrastinated on doing my year-end book and movie lists because I can’t shake the feeling that we’re still slogging through last year. For the second year in a row, I got bogged down in a book that took me a ridiculous amount of time to read. Plus, it didn’t even make the list! (It was a feel-bad-about-what-we’ve-done-to-the-world New York Times bestseller with the subtitle A Brief History of Humankind. It was not brief, and it was not kind to humans.) I spent a lot of time reading up on the global pandemic and not enough on reading books for enjoyment; I read 23 books, or one every 15.9 days. Anyway, here are the ten best books I read last year:

1. Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu. This novel is either (a) the story of Willis Wu, an actor who can only get certain “Generic Asian Man” jobs in film (and never the leads) because he is of Asian descent, or (b) the screenplay for a kung fu movie in which Willis acts, filmed in his Chinatown neighborhood, or (c) the inner thoughts of an actor on the set of a buddy-cop TV show, or…There’s a reason this book won the National Book Award for Fiction last year. Funny, imaginative, deals with deeper issues like immigration, racism in Hollywood and the wider world, and how assimilation affects different generations of a family. I kept thinking, “Ah, now I know what’s happening,” and then things would change again.

2. Horror Stories: A Memoir, Liz Phair. Phair is a Chicago-raised musician who came to fame with her 1993 Exile in Guyville album, and anyone familiar with her stuff would not be surprised to know that this is not a typical celebrity name-dropper memoir. It’s a nonlinear recounting of dark moments in Phair’s life (there’s a reason the title is not Happy Stories), and she’s never more clear-eyed than when she examines her own failings. (In recalling an affair that ended two marriages, she says of herself and the other guy: “We both wholly and totally suck as human beings and we know it.”) She doesn’t talk much about her songs, which is fine; she speaks especially to young women who need to hear how to navigate a world (specifically, the music industry) that doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for them to show their talents.

3. Sweet Sorrow, David Nicholls. I can tell how much I’m enjoying a book by how frequently I want to interrupt my lovely wife Jen and read her the funny parts from it. I did that a lot with this one; I kept saying, “You should read this book, but let me tell you about this one section.” Eventually, I told her the whole plot and the ending. (Ruining books and movies for my wife; that’s part of my rascally charm.) In Nicholls’ book, Charlie Lewis is about to get married in London, but he gets invited to the 20-year reunion of a theater troupe that he belonged to one summer when he was 16 years old. In flashbacks, we hear the story of how this directionless kid with a falling-apart family follows a girl into a building and gets talked into acting in a local production of “Romeo and Juliet.” There are really four or five stories going on here, and Nicholls jumps back and forth, leaving us wondering what happened in his relationships with his father, his friends, and his teen crush, and what’s going to happen to him at the reunion and with his fiancee.

4. When All Is Said: A Novel, Anne Griffin. 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan sits down at a hotel bar in his small Irish town and, throughout the course of an afternoon and evening, offers five silent whiskey toasts to the people who have meant the most to him in his lifetime. We hear the story of his life, his loves, his regrets, and one secret that he has kept since his teen years that changed the course of two families for generations. Hard to believe that this is a debut novel.

5. What Makes Olga Run?, Bruce Grierson. My neighbor loaned me this book because she knew I’m a runner and would like it. The hilariously long subtitle says it all: The Mystery of the 90-Something Track Star and What She Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Happier Lives. Grierson is a reporter who had heard about this nonagenarian track star, Olga Kotelko, and how she kept getting faster and stronger as she aged. He convinced her to allow him to put her through a battery of tests (physical, DNA, mental) to see if he could find the keys to her astonishing accolades and longevity. (At the time of the book, Olga held 23 age-group world records in track and field events.) Was it her genes? Her exercise? Her diet? Where she lived? A fascinating story of one woman’s life and how her resilience shaped her success.

6. Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt, Steven Johnson. I love reading good pirate stories, and this one’s about the seventeenth century’s most notorious pirate, who has somehow been all but forgotten. Henry Every commandeered a ship on which he served, aimed it toward India, and led a ruthless assault on an Indian royal convoy that led to one of the most lucrative robberies in seafaring history. The worldwide manhunt and bounty that the British government placed on his head led to the first global effort to stop piracy, and in the process, the British and Indian governments’ and the British East India Company’s roles in the outcome changed the course of world history and led to the rise of multinational capitalism. Think I’m exaggerating? Then read the book!

7. True Grit, Charles Portis. I had watched the original movie version of this 1968 book, with John Wayne as one-eyed US Marshall Rooster Cogburn, helping a 14-year-old Mattie Ross avenge her father’s death at the hands of his farmhand, Tom Chaney. The John Wayne version had a lighter tone than the Joel and Ethan Coen-produced remake; I heard that the book had way more humor than one might expect after watching the films. Portis’ only western novel tells the story of an elderly Mattie Ross recounting what happened in her childhood in Arkansas in the 1870s. After Chaney kills her father, young Mattie seeks out the toughest lawman she can find, and matches up with Cogburn. A Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf, who has been tracking Chaney, comes along, and they end up taking on the notorious Ned Pepper gang. A dryly funny page turner.

8. Less, Andrew Sean Greer. This Pulitzer Prize winner tells the story of Arthur Less, a (mostly failing) novelist about to turn 50, who gets an invitation to his ex-boyfriend’s wedding. Seeking an excuse to avoid it, he decides to say yes to an unusual series of adventures that take him around the world, from Paris to Morocco to Berlin to India. A picaresque novel that was a great summer read during my travel-free quarantine summer.

9. Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard, Douglas W. Tallamy. Did the subtitle already put you to sleep? Well, wake up, America! Because Tallamy proposes a new national park, one that stretches from sea to sea and runs through every homeowner’s backyard. Dubbed Homegrown National Park, it would create conservation corridors that would help stave off the extinction of animal life that is crucial to keeping our ecosystem thriving. He connects the reader to an online database that will tell you which native plants that you can plant in your backyard that will support the most diverse and abundant wildlife (hint: in almost every region of the country, it’s the oak tree). An engaging read that has me rethinking some of the plants I have in my yard. (The evil ornamental pear tree in my front yard is on his no-no list.)

10. Star Wars From a Certain Point of View, various authors. This collection of stories was written to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Star Wars saga and contains 40 different stories from (mostly) minor or as-yet-unexplored characters from the Star Wars universe. This is really for Star Wars fans who would like to hear what was going on in the mind of, for example, a Jawa on the sand crawler that found C-3PO and R2-D2 in the desert on Tatooine and sold them to the Skywalkers. The stories range from humorous to eerie to surprisingly heart-wrenching. A great tapestry of scenes that weave together all of the main Star Wars stories, and there are a few sections that provide new information that will enter the Star Wars canon.

Books that just missed the top ten: New Waves, Kevin Nguyen; The $64 Tomato, William Alexander; On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Emily Guendelsberger; What Are You Going Through, Sigrid Nunez; A Very Punchable Face, Colin Jost.