My year in books, 2022

This year, I went through several reading slumps and read very few of the books I planned to get through this year. I learnt it’s a bad idea to try and plan 12 months’ worth of reading.

However, discounting the books I DNF’d, I read 42 books this year. Out of those 42, there were 15 I wanted to talk about.

These books are arranged in the order that I read them. I should also clarify that their inclusion does not necessarily mean they were “better” books than those that didn’t make the list. These 15 were just the ones that I had the fondest feelings towards when reviewing my year in reading.

This year, I have also highlighted my top three reads (🥉🥈🥇). These three books had the greatest impact on me in 2022. They’re also the books I’m most keen to recommend.

Favourite links I shared in 2022

This year, I was far too preoccupied with linking to other people’s content and neglected to produce much of my own. My goal is to change this going forward. I want to create things worth linking to, not just link to the cool stuff other people are making.

However, as we’re seeing 2022 out, I thought I’d do the thing a lot of people do around this time of year: look back at the past 12 months and compile a “best of” list.

So, in no particular order, here are my 22 favourite links I shared in my blog and newsletter this year…

01. Despite all the fond memories I have of Harry Potter – the books, the films, the games – this was the year all the joy the series once brought me died. J.K. Terfling and the Tweets of Transphobia certainly dug the Wizarding World’s grave, but it was realising just how horrible the politics of Harry Potter had always been that hammered the nail into the coffin. This video essay from the best skull on YouTube, Shaun, explores some of the most egregious examples of bigotry on open display in the books.

Fuck Around and Find Out

The creative process pic.twitter.com/wX4MYKFl2X

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) September 28, 2022

The more you fuck around, the more you’re going to find out – a basic concept eloquently illustrated by a man with a graph. 

Austin Kleon shared this TikTok clip a while ago and captioned it “The creative process.” It is the simplest summary of creativity. You fuck around with an idea to find out what works and what doesn’t. 

Whenever I fuck around, I find out what I already knew but insist on forgetting time and again. I rediscover that novelty is always exciting, coming up with many ideas is much more thrilling than nurturing one, structure sucks and it’s far easier to start a new project than finish an old one. 

But whether I’m lacking self-discipline or I was just born this way, the challenge stems from an insistence on fitting a mould that wasn’t made for me.

Giving yourself permission to break away from the conventional and invent your own framework is something every creative must learn. Yet despite several years of writing experience, I’m still learning to trust my creative instincts and not rely too heavily on the affirmation of others. Whether that affirmation arrives via explicit praise from my peers or more implicitly through how closely it resembles what other art has come before. 

Not even my blogging or newslettering has been safe from such doubts. Taking inspiration from a range of content writers, I have tried several times to impose semi-rigid formats on myself. The goal was to create a familiar structure, easily replicated time and again, to gain your trust as a reader. The intention: every time my name pops up on your screen, you know what you’re getting. 

Only every time I outline a template for my writing, I become quickly dissatisfied shortly after its implementation. I find far more joy in creating structure than working within it. 

With this in mind, I’m going to try and throw out all attempts at a singular repeatable format and see what comes. And so I wanted to use this post to share a bunch of random things that have interested me in the past few weeks…

Why Even Bother?

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels

Many things bemuse me, but nothing bemuses me more than those who met my younger self and found him so likeable that they remained his friend long enough to meet the man he is today. Having known the boy so well, I find it hard not to think he was deserving of at least some of the scorn he reserved for himself.

However, for all his many faults that I struggle to forgive, I must lend him credit where it’s due. He had an unshakeable belief in his own writing abilities. As much as he loathed who he was, he was utterly in love with what he could do.

In life, he was quiet and terminally gloomy. On the page, however, he was confrontational and confident. At the time, his chosen form was hip-hop lyrics, emulating the rappers he often had on loop. And like his (ill-chosen) heroes, he could brag about his verbosity in one song and then be thoughtfully introspective in the next. He could shine a light on the darkest corners of his mind, and that perpetually nervous child got to be a tragic romantic figure.

Many who read his songs said they were good, but they wanted to hear them. Only he couldn’t perform very well. His voice could not match the confidence of his pen. There was no joy in the performance, either. This wasn’t the right path for my younger self.

His inability to perform his own lyrics didn’t hold him back, though. Blissful denial played some part in this. A greater part, however, was played by his best friend at the time.

Whenever he finished typing up a song, he printed it out on cream-coloured paper and folded it to fit inside the pocket of his school blazer. Then, the following school day was spent eagerly waiting for it to end. Once the final bell rang, he and his best friend would meet under the willow tree beside the school gates. There, he would share with her his newest verses. At the time, her enthusiasm for his words was all he had needed to feel content in his craft.

Back then, his talent was about the only thing he truly believed in. Perhaps if life had been less miserable, he wouldn’t have bothered trying his hand at writing at all. He might have stuck to filling his hours with video games and television.

When did that young writer lose his stubborn belief in his abilities and become the ever-doubting perfectionist that is me?

Recent Reads, Smiling Friends, Pingu Random House and more

Issue #19 of my fortnightly newsletter went out yesterday. It’s loaded with a wealth of great content, including what I’ve been reading, watching and some of my favourite things right now.

You can read it now on Substack and get future issues like it straight into your inbox by subscribing.

READ ISSUE #19

SUBSCRIBE

Recent Reads #3: Short (but not exactly sweet)

Here are the other three recent reads I wanted to recommend, which aren’t really linked in terms of form or content. The most apparent similarity between them is that they’re short. So that’s what we’re going with.

Sum
David Eagleman

There’s no evidence that suggests there is an afterlife or what the afterlife looks like if it does exist. So, neuroscientist David Eagleman embraced the infinite potential offered by this unprovable concept and wrote 40 completely different post-death realities.

This teeny book will take you no time at all to read, but it’s full of so many ideas that I refuse to believe anyone can put this down and not feel at least a little astounded. The book also left me feeling creatively inspired, it’s great imagination fuel.

Some of these inventive tales also inspired a great deal of existential dread.

The first tale, “Sum”, presents an afterlife where you relive all your experiences, but they’re categorised, grouped together and then you live them one-by-one. To illustrate what I mean, you sleep for thirty years, read magazines on the toilet for five consecutive months, vomit for seven hours straight, and so on. It’s the kind of story that makes you question how you’re spending your time.

Meanwhile, “Circle of Friends” presents an afterlife populated exclusively by the people you remember. I look at the people I’m fortunate enough to have around me. If this were the world I discovered after my passing, it wouldn’t be so bad. However, never meeting a new person is a sad thought, which was a reminder for me how much I do genuinely like meeting new people.

Recent Reads #2: Graphic non-fiction

Continuing from the previous post, here are three more books I’ve read recently that I recommend.

All three of these books are not your typical non-fiction works. They’re closer to graphic novels, but even that’s an inadequate description. You’ll see what I mean…

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness
Kristen Radtke

Potentially the best thing I’ve read all year. Kristen Radtke’s Seek You is not your typical graphic novel. In fact, graphic novel feels like the completely wrong description. It’s akin to a documentary but recorded in comic form rather than film.

Loneliness is an epidemic not being taken seriously enough. We need connection. We are social creatures, and our natural state is to have community of people around us. But our culture has changed. Now we aspire to live alone, and it’s to the detriment of our health.

This was the book I most needed to read when I was struggling with my own mental health and loneliness back in the early days of summer. It’s also what I desperately wish I could have read in 2018 when I was studying my Master’s and was writing a play about loneliness.

Radtke inserts her own personal narrative alongside scientific research and investigative journalism. She also includes a huge section on the research of Harry Harlow, whose monkey experiments — whilst horrifically unethical — fundamentally changed how we raised young children forever. If I could go back in time and give my younger self an idea for a play, it would be to write a theatrical take on Harlow’s research and how he mistreated both his subjects and the women in his life.

I’ll come back to this book one day. In fact, I suspect I’ll return to this book many more times in the coming years. The feelings it evoked were powerful and the questions it poses to our culture are important.

Recent Reads #1: Great science-fiction

In addition to my yearly roundup of favourite reads, I’d like to write semi-regular reading posts like this one when I’ve read a handful of books I’d like to talk about.

Originally, this was an excessively long post covering 10 books. But I’ve dropped discussing The Right to Sex here because I’ve already reviewed it, and I’ve chopped up the other nine across three posts.

For the first three, I’ve decided to group all the science-fiction novels I read together…

The Martian
Andy Weir

When a book is described as “hard sci-fi”, I’m immediately put off. Stories with compelling characters are what draw me in, and a plot heavily reliant on talking about real science sounded like a snoozefest to me. But I had been assured that The Martian was a different kind of hard sci-fi, and I’m delighted to say those who recommended the book weren’t wrong. I loved this novel.

The protagonist Mark Watney is a funny, loveable guy with an infectious pragmatic optimism. When we first meet him, he’s alone and stranded on Mars. From the outset, his situation seems impossible to survive and it only gets worse. Describing something as a page-turner is such a tired cliché, but Weir does tension so well that I found myself speeding through the book because I was so eager to see how Watney survived the latest disaster.

I also loved the book from a craft perspective. We get Watney’s first-person POV via the logs that make up most of the book. But we also get a broader view of the narrative thanks to third-person perspectives from the Ares 3 crew and the people at NASA. It’s a style I’m keen to attempt in my own fiction writing.

How The Martian came to be is also an interesting story. From giving chapters away for free via his website to serialising the novel on Amazon to eventually signing a book deal and making the bestsellers list.

I’m making no commitments, but serialising a novel is on my checklist of things to do.

John’s Journal: One Year Later

A little over a year ago, I started a newsletter. At first, I sent it out the end of every month from August to December in 2021. Then starting this year, I increased the frequency to fortnightly. (Let’s just ignore July and August, though.)

I’m quite proud of how the newsletter has evolved over the past twelve months. In the early days, I emulated Austin Kleon’s weekly list of 10 things to help me get started. But I’ve since moved on and have been experimenting with a format I can call my own. And whilst I suspect the changes have not yet come to an end, I feel closer to finding a structure that works well for me than ever before.

My small community of readers have offered consistent positive feedback, which I’m very grateful for. I’ve quite often been impressed by how well certain issues were received.

As it’s been a little over a year, I thought I’d look back and highlight some of the newsletter’s best moments. I figured it would be a little celebration for first-day readers and a good introduction for new subscribers.

The Progress You Can’t See

It’s my birthday, and I have (unwisely?) been thinking about progress.

Despite appearances, I consider myself an ambitious person. Not in a monetary sense, I have no aspiration for wealth. I don’t even think people should be allowed to get rich. Power isn’t something I seek for myself, either. And fame is very much not for me, thank you.

But there is quite a lot I’d like to do with my life. There are books I want to write. Plays I’d love to see put to stage. I’d like to help others realise their own creative visions. I hope to teach in some capacity in the future, whether as a career or something on the side. And whilst I used to be certain I’d never marry or have kids, I’ve since warmed to the idea of both.

In this year’s birthday poem, I looked back at the past 12 months and found cause for pride. However, with my vision for the future clearer, it’s easy to recount the past year with a little sorrow, too.