I read some great books last year. Looking through my stats on Storygraph, I read 74 books, and gave 16 of them 4.5 stars or higher (out of 5). That’s pretty good going.

I read 17 books classified as LGBTQIA+, 9 sci-fi, 15 non-fiction (including 8 memoirs) and 12.5 books translated from another language into English (there was one short story collection in which about half were translations).

My top 10 books reflect those stats pretty well, except that no translations quite made it into the list (there were two that were very close contenders). I didn’t write full-length reviews of all of them, as that’s a habit I only got back into in the second half of the year, but I did enthuse about them all in my monthly reading round-ups. As well as to Tim at the time of reading (Tim helped me narrow down my longlist to 10 by commenting on which ones he remembers me talking about!).

Top 10 reads of 2022

Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
A fantastic, intelligent YA novel. Darius is a half-Persian (half-white American) teenager who struggles with depression and is bullied at school. He’s also generally geeky, which I loved. The book centres around a family trip to Iran to visit his grandparents. Darius must face insecurities about his identity, his relationships with his father and grandparents, and his ability to form a true friendship.

The Book of Dust book 1: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
In this prequel to His Dark Materials, 11-year-old Malcolm works in his parents’ pub near Oxford. He accidentally sees a spy being abducted by the Magisterium, discovers that the local convent has secretly taken in a six-month-old baby, and tries not to raise the suspicions of the League of St Alexander, the new youth organization that encourages children to report anybody who contradicts the Magisterium’s religious views. It’s a romp of an adventure, set against the dark backdrop of creeping totalitarianism.

How We Disappeared by Jing Jing Lee
This novel is set in Singapore, where two people in the year 2000 are trying to uncover secrets from the Japanese occupation during the Second World War. One is an old woman who has her own terrible memories of that time. The other is a 12-year-old boy desperate to help his father by following up on his grandmother’s deathbed confession. It’s sad, amazing, harrowing and wonderful.

All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes
This is an excellent account of a fictional voyage to Antarctica in 1920 in which everything goes wrong – but is there a supernatural reason for the continual disasters? The narrator is the most junior member of the expedition, an outsider who doesn’t know all the internal politics and secrets of the crew. It’s thrilling, unnerving and I will write a longer review of it soon.

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
I don’t always love hard SF, but I absolutely adored this. It’s a novel about a tidally locked planet that was settled by humans hundreds of years earlier, long enough for its own various histories, societies, myths and politics to develop. There are some very alien aliens and some interesting geoengineering. But it’s also a story about some fantastically interesting and varied characters, who each have their own journeys to make – physically and emotionally.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr
How to describe this weird, wonderful book? John, our narrator, had set out to write a biography of deceased atomic scientist Dr Felix Hoenikker but along the way discovers Hoenikker’s secret final invention that could destroy the world; a Caribbean island with an eccentric dictator; and the strange religion of Bokononism, which he has clearly ascribed to by the time of narrating this book. It’s playful, gripping, funny and bitingly satirical.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince
Every so often I review books for Physics World, popular-science titles that are a bit different from the majority of my reading material. Sometimes it feels like work (which, well, it is) and sometimes it is a true pleasure. As in this case. Vince describes how the climate catastrophe will unfold under the different scenarios of where we manage to limit warming. Which is incredibly depressing. But she then explains what we all can – and must – do to manage both the human migration and the necessary switch to a green economy. I was truly inspired and energised by the end.

Austral by Paul McAuley
A sci-fi adventure about Austral, who works as a prison guard at a penal colony in Antarctica – a continent that since the climate catastrophe has become home to huge mining operations and corrupt politics. As a husky – a human with edited genes – Austral is physically well adapted to the Antarctic climate but discriminated against wherever she goes. When her prisoner boyfriend asks for a favour that goes wrong, she finds herself on the run, trying to survive everything people and nature throw at her. It’s a thrilling adventure and a terrifying depiction of how one of Earth’s most beautiful places might end up if we fail to combat the climate crisis but continue to put selfish immediate needs first.

One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake
This is the first of Cloake’s food-and-travel memoirs, based on her 2018 journey around France by bike and train. Her aim was to sample the best versions of her 21 favourite French foods, while keeping to a fairly tight schedule. I love Cloake’s sense of humour and her very relatable foibles. Her writing might not be quite as good as Maya Angelou (two of whose books were close contenders for this top 10) but Cloake edged her way over the legendary poet by having a huge effect on me. After reading this, I started building up my cycling stamina in the hope that one day I might manage a similar adventure.

The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe
A series of sci-fi short stories set in a future where memories can be monitored; where anyone who defies the strict rules (for example by being gay or trans) is labelled a “dirty computer” and has their memories erased. Every story was co-written by a Black woman or non-binary person and they all have lead characters who are Black, queer or non-binary. It’s a dystopia and the book starts with perhaps the darkest vision of this world, but it manages to end on a note of hope.

Reading goals for 2023

In Storygraph I have set myself an ambitious target of 80 books. I don’t really mind whether or not I achieve that, it just requires you to put in a number so that at the end of the year it generates lots of pretty graphs about what you’ve read.

Tim points out that four of my top 10 were SF so I should maybe read more SF. It’s a sound suggestion, and we do have a lot of SF in this house that I haven’t yet read.

Towards the end of last year I did a book swap with a friend, and have so far read three of the nine books I borrowed. So those are a priority. And I’d quite like to do the same with a couple of other friends whose bookshelves I eye greedily every time I visit. But I should probably make sure I read some of my own books in between as I still have 107 books on my TBR.

Other than that, I want to make sure I continue to read books from all over the world, including plenty in translation. But I also won’t berate myself for choosing “easy” reads when I need them, which for me tends to mean graphic novels and, increasingly, YA. And I’ll try to keep up with my book club. I already have their first choice for 2023 on my January reading pile.

Happy New Year, and may your 2023 be filled with wonderful books.