My Year in Books, 2022

It’s that time of year again! I set out to read twenty this year, and at the time of this writing I’ve finished nineteen. I won’t get my twentieth done before the end of today and it’s totally fine. Here’s what I did finish, by category:

6 fiction
3 nonfiction
7 personal development/spiritual formation
3 art & faith

Please enjoy a roundup of what I read this past year, complete with random superlatives that I made up arbitrarily.

Best Overall: Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle

I wrote a longer review of this in August, but I’ll say this: if you’re in the art and faith world in any capacity, Walking on Water should be required reading. Madeleine L’Engle empathizes with the unique struggles of an artist – the loneliness, the creation in seasons of belief and doubt, the pressures – but she also challenges the reader. And as much as being understood is wonderful, what we really need is a worthy call to rise up to. She delivers that call for the Christian artist.

Runner-Up: Placemaker, Christie Purifoy

I’ve followed Christie Purifoy on social media for a while, drinking in her idyllic feed of her homegrown flowers, thoughtful captions written from her 18th-century Pennsylvania farmhouse. I bought Placemaker for myself and a friend, and ended up reading the whole book within a day on a long plane ride home from a trip to the west coast. I was in the middle of making a big decision, and Placemaker was the perfect companion for the decision. It’s a memoir, essentially, of all the places she and her family lived, and what each of those places taught her. The title of Placemaker refers to the practices we learn in making a place our own, but the reverse is also true in Purifoy’s work – the places make us, too. This was a beautiful read, with many happy tears in the reading.

“I will choose to stay. I will plant my desires here, and I will not walk away. I will try to live like a forest tree. I will case my seeds and cast my seeds and cast my seeds of love again. Like the land of the proverb, I will risk wanting more. I will refuse to cry, ‘Enough!’”(44).

Best Fiction: The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver

I read a lot of good fiction this year, so this was a tough choice. I read Lila! I read Dune! I read The Picture of Dorian Gray! And all of these were so valuable, but since we’re speaking of love, I loved The Bean Trees most. It was one of my summer reads, and I became completely immersed in it. Stories about a life taking shape in spite of strange circumstances touch me every time, without fail. And Kingsolver is a fantastic writer.

Best Spiritual Formation: The Rest of God, Mark Buchanan

This was a lend from my friend Elizabeth and it was well-needed and convicting for me. Rest is one of my deepest struggles in spiritual life – since I was young I’ve always loved to multitask, be busy with many projects, and receive motivation from the thrill of a last-minute deadline. Mark Buchanan argues that this isn’t the way we were made to live, and he writes about the difficult, necessary work of realigning ourselves with the rest of God so that we don’t miss out on all that he has to offer.

Fastest Read: Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

If you know, you know.

The One I Thought I Would Love But Didn’t: Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer

This one felt like it just wasn’t my season for this book yet. Let Your Life Speak was recommended to me by *many* people, and there’s a quote from the book that permanently lives rent-free in my mind and heart for all the wisdom that it’s held for my personal life.1 But the rest of it was kind of meh, at least for this year. Lots about leadership, and about the dark night of the soul, if you need a read for either of those subjects. I’m keeping my copy because I expect I'll enjoy it more later in life.

2022’s reading life has been a good gift in cultivating discipline through small steps, and I’m excited to continue growing as a reader. This next year, I’m approaching my reading priorities with some intentionality. I hope to read classics in fiction (like The Brothers Karamazov), some lauded nonfiction writers (like Annie Dillard and Robin Wall Kimmerer), and some works that will contribute towards building a theology of art (like For the Life of the World and Art + Faith). I will be back with more reviews and thoughts in 2023. Until then – happy new year to you, dear readers!