A few years ago I started a tradition of recapping and reviewing the books I’ve read in a year on Facebook. I decided to move that year-end book review to my blog this year for a few reasons: 1) it’s getting to be too unwieldy as a really long FB or IG post, 2) I’m reading more & more books, so decided to include more titles in my year-end review, & 3) the formatting looks nicer!

I read over 100 books this year! I’m excited for myself in reaching this new milestone. But once again I want to share my usual disclaimer about comparison. I allowed my 7 year old son to join Goodreads this year because I thought it would be fun for him to start keeping track of the chapter books he’s reading now. (Don’t worry; his account has the highest privacy settings possible, monitored by me, & he has only 5 friends – me, his cousin, & 3 aunts.) However, I didn’t foresee the number of conversations I’d need to have with him about comparing his reading challenge to his cousin’s… my son read 113 books in 2022, while my niece read over 500! So I kept reminding him of this same disclaimer I’m sharing with you: reading is not a competition. I read for the pure joy of it, and if your reading habits look nothing like mine yet still bring you joy, then that’s all that matters!

Because I read so many books, I wanted to include more in my year-end review than I have in the past. I’ve kept most of my Book Awards categories the same, but instead of naming only 1 book & 1 runner-up for each category, I’m allowing myself to name up to 3 books, which will generally be listed in order of my liking.

As always, please feel free to share your favorite books from 2022 with me in the comments, either here or on social media!

Steph’s 2022 Book Awards

Top 5 favorite books I read in 2022:

• This Is How It Always Is  (Laurie Frankel)
• Six of Crows, Crooked Kingdom, and Rule of Wolves (Leigh Bardugo)
• Forging Silver Into Stars  (Brigid Kemmerer)
• Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens)
• The Poet X (Elizabeth Acevedo)
• runner-up: The Reading List  (Sara Nisha Adams)

Favorite nonfiction book:

• The Wordy Shipmates  (Sarah Vowell)
• Bittersweet  (Susan Cain)

Favorite romance:

• Book Lovers  (Emily Henry)
• Just Last Night (Mhairi McFarlane)
• Delilah Green Doesn’t Care (Ashley Herring Blake) – it’s possible this is only because it’s my most recent read, but for now I like it a lot

Most surprising:

• Project Hail Mary  (Andy Weir)
• A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking  (T. Kingfisher)
• Alloy of Law (Brandon Sanderson) – surprising in that I liked it so much more than the first 3 books in the series!

Made me laugh the most:

• The Wordy Shipmates (Vowell)
• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (Christopher Moore)
• League of Gentlewoman Witches (India Holton)

Most disappointing:

• Book of Night  (Holly Black)
• Defend the Dawn  (Brigid Kemmerer)
• To Sir Phillip, With Love (Julia Quinn)

Most Thought-Provoking:

• The Cost of Knowing  (Brittney Morris)
• The City We Became (N.K. Jemison)
• Pachinko (Min Jin Lee)

Classic I read this year:

The Joy Luck Club (Tan),  A Wrinkle in Time (L’Engle), Treasure Island (Stevenson)

Which did I like best? The Joy Luck Club

Favorite Re-Read:

• Temeraire series  (Naomi Novik)

That’s it. Can you believe I only re-read 1 thing this year?! I mean, technically it’s 9 books… but still.

“Everyone shut up, I’m reading!” award:

[made me ignore my real life the most]

• The Golden Enclaves  (Naomi Novik)
• Crooked Kingdom  (Bardugo)
• The Final Gambit (Jennifer Lynn Barnes)

5 Books that are living rent-free in my head:

[I’m adding a section this year to include 5 books I read this year that I haven’t already mentioned, but I still think of often – for better or worse]

• Sea of Tranquility (Emily St. John Mandel)
• Into the Drowning Deep (Mira Grant)
• the Bridgerton series (Julia Quinn)
• Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Taylor Jenkins Reid)
• The Lost Metal (Brandon Sanderson)
• runner-up: She Who Became the Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan)

Book I’m most excited to read in 2023:

• The Stolen Heir  (Holly Black)
• Witch King  (Martha Wells)