According to my Goodreads account, I managed to read about 45 books this year. While maintaining my usual bursts in reading frequency, I still managed to get through some pages. I think what really helped me this time was having a good bunch of books I really wanted to get through, and even though I did not remain faithful to that original list, it gave me the drive to read more.

[Fig 1] All the books I read

In this year in review post, I am going to be going through the books I read this year. I will select my favourites and review them, and look into my themes and choices for the coming year.

[Fig 2] Read/tracked/finished more books than ever this year.

[Fig 3] My ratings for these books

From the above figure, we can see that half of the books I deemed worthy of five stars were related to technology in some way. The other half, excluding the War of Art, was what I thought to be deep and insightful fictional writings.

Below 5 stars, there doesn’t seem to be any consistent theme in my ratings.

I read the following number of books in these sections:

  • Sci-Fi: 4

  • Technical Books: 9

  • Non-Fiction: 16

  • Short Stories: 5

  • Other Fiction (Fantasy, Literature): 11

I generally enjoy literature/fiction more but I think this time it slipped away from me a little bit with the final ratio ending up as 20:25 for Fiction: Non-Fiction. The Idea Factory is one book in the favour of Non-Fiction which details a series of extremely interesting historical periods of technology.

I do not have a lot of GoodReads data from before but I am sure I hardly read anything besides school textbooks and random books I did not finish during those empty periods. While still uneven and inconsistent now, my reading consistency has definitely picked up from the shambles it was.

FAVOURITE BOOKS 2022

My favourite books of the year, which I’m going to be talking about in-depth are:

  • The Mind-Body Problem

  • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

  • 1984

  • The DaVinci Code

  • The Unabomber Manifesto

  • The Wind Up Bird Chronicles

I was planning on writing simple and concise reviews of each of these but I felt it wouldn’t do them enough justice so I’ll be linking my full reviews of some of them.

The Mind-Body Problem: Best Realist Fiction

The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein

[Review]

Runner Up: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

1984: Best Science Fiction

[Review]

The Idea Factory: Best Non-Fiction

This book is a treasure trove of information on the crazy inventions, technological disruptions and intelligent characters that were cultivated at the AT&T Bell Labs. Any review would not be able to capture the density of information contained in this excellent journalistic piece which took over 9 years to write by the amazing Jon Gertner. This book is one I need to keep coming back to so I can fully grasp the depth of thinking of past engineers and understand the roots of communication theory, reliability engineering, solid-state physics and all forms of modern engineering which were birthed in this wonderful environment. There are a lot of great references contained here which are worth tracking down.

The Unabomber Manifesto: Best Political

[Review]

While this book is fairly controversial, and the conclusion comes from a place of feeling stuck due to being trapped in his own arguments and advocating for anarcho-primitivism, I feel this book, along with 1984 and The Animal Farm, just unlocked another way of seeing the operations of the modern day world for me and that is something that cannot be reversed.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Sleeper Hit

I don’t know what it is about this novel, it is bizarre and illogical but still, it captivated my mind. It is not anywhere near a 5/5 ( I gave it a 3), but it contained some elements in it which drew me in.

The main one, ( and the reason why I got into it in the first place), is its serenity and calmness even with all the progressively strange events going on. The novel starts off in a very calm tone with only normal events occurring and maintains this even as it changes. This makes the novel maintain a state of dreaminess or unawareness as things get stranger.

I think reading this book reminded me of my days of reading The Trial or Metamorphosis by Kafka and seeing how these normal people reacted so normally to extremely strange situations.

It did get quite lengthy and uninspired at a point so much so I dropped it, but I am glad I finished it. I don’t think I could do a better job of explaining what it felt like to read this book than this review.

The DaVinci Code

While this was not by any stretch my best fiction book in terms of prose, or even story for that matter, I feel this book gave me some very valuable information and grounding from which to spring up further personal research.

In this book, we follow symbology and history expert Robert Langdon as he solves intricate puzzles related to the Louvre Museum and the Priory of Sion in order to find the Holy Grail. As we delve further into our journey, the book goes into the history and the roots of religion, Christianity, and the secret lives of eccentric men such as Leonardo Da Vinci.

This book talks about how Christianity becamse popularized, who Jesus Christ was, why our holidays are on certain dates, and how the books of the bible were selected, among other things. It is partly fictional though, and the fiction is not specified.

BOOKS I ALREADY REVIEWED

PLANS FOR 2023

As I do not maintain a consistent reading schedule and have undulating periods of interest in books, I still have a fair number in my backlog that I have already started. I plan on getting to those.

Also, sad realist fiction of intelligent people like The Bell Jar or The Mind-Body Problem is my favourite genre so I’m hoping to find more of that.

Finally, I want to challenge myself to read books written wholly in another language (French, German). I know this might not have any positive effects in terms of learning the language but I just want to see what I am capable of in that regard and reap the benefits if any.

I think this was a good book year for me and I hope to keep the count going and hopefully explore even more interesting books in the coming year.