MY 2022 IN BOOKS

Once again it’s time to take stock of my reading year now that 2022 is drawing to an end: while 58 books might look like a meagre accomplishment when compared to the dizzying heights reached by some fellow bloggers, I’m quite satisfied my result, which means I managed to read a little more than one book per week. And here are my books for 2022 in all their magnificence 😀

As usual, I chose to play a little with charts to see how my reading fared in terms of statistics, and it was no surprise that Fantasy and Science Fiction earned the proverbial lion’s share in my choice of books, with crime/thriller coming second and horror gaining a more than respectable third place. 

I was quite fortunate with my picks, since 46 of those 58 books earned high ratings from 4 to 5 Reading Owls (including the half points), 9 were mid-range with 3 Reading Owls, and only 3 went lower than that, including the two DNFs of this year. All things considered, the not-my-cup-of-tea books were too few to matter, which means that my “book vibes” once again helped me greatly in choosing what to read.

This year I also want to showcase some of the books that stood above the others either because the author was new to me or because they were a notch above the expected quality from authors I had previously read.

In the first category I picked these four:

J.M. Straczynski’s novel represents something of an exception to the above rule because I was familiar with his works as the creator of the TV series Babylon 5, which I mention often as my favorite show, but his foray into mainstream narrative opened a whole new territory for me, even though I was hardly surprised at the quality of the writing, given my previous experience with the deep and often poignant dialogues which made that show my touchstone for small-screen SF.

While I approach well-known and tried authors with a certain degree of assurance that their books will be a rewarding experience, there are times when they even exceed those expectations, and here are a few examples:

These four are among the books that were so engrossing that setting them down to attend to real life required some effort, which for me means high praise indeed…

Plans for the new year? Not really: being a mood reader I usually go where fancy takes me, although I would like to make at least a little inroad in the books I have accumulated in the past and then proceeded to ignore in favor of some new titles – that’s the bane of the compulsive reader, indeed, this total lack of moral strength in the face of new books’ siren song 😉

No matter what, though, I know that the next year will open new reading adventures, and that’s what really counts after all. 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!