How was it for you? For me, 2022’s been another strange year. Though we haven’t experienced lockdowns, home-schooling, social distancing and all that jazz, it still feels to me like we’ve been kinda distant from reality as we once knew it. Known-knowns and certainties which we’d once thought were locked down, never to be changed, have altered inexorably. The Queen died – not many of us have known the UK with any other monarch. We’ve had about 13 Prime Ministers. The World Cup was fixed in winter. It’s seemed – just as the previous two years – to have been written by some sci-fi writer or satirist. Like an extended version of Black Mirror, or like we’re all living in Big Brother.
But onwards and upwards, my friends, and after that inauspicious start I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and all the very best for the new year, for the very sci-fi-sounding 2023. And as it’s that time of year, as the one-time Big Brother contestant Craig Phillips once sung, I’m pleased to introduce my weird virtual ‘diary’ of the year which is my chart of all the books I’ve read across 2022. Yeah, I hear you, it’s little to late to get some of these suggestions onto your letters to the North Pole – even Santa don’t move that fast – but maybe if you get vouchers or book tokens (are they still a thing?) and you’re looking to maybe read something a little less ordinary as we move into 2023(!) then this chart could be of help to you. If not, then feel free to cancel me or vote me out or whatevs.
Where I talk about how weird I am…
For those of you who don’t know I follow in a long line of Kirbys (and Worthingtons) who are addicted to writing lists. The precocious (and probably intensely annoying) me of eight, nine, and ten produced early versions of this chart and I used to read it out to my parents around Christmas tme in a Bruno Brookes voice. Most of my winners and runners-up were very virtue-signally. I don’t think they were my actual favourites. I also spoilt many a family holiday in sunny Wales by obsessively charting our daily ice cream selections. The Cornetto ‘Big One’, Magnifico, was a perennial winner by virtue of it being massive.
More recently when I became a reviewer for The Short Review, a role which necessitated reading shed loads of short story collections to try and give them a bit of publicity – they’re always the poor relations of the fiction world – I put together charts of the best short stories I’d read that year. And that quickly grew arms and legs when I also started reviewing all kinds of books for the New York Journal of Books (amongst others). So my chart kept growing and growing, as did my reading list. What changed from when I were a lad, only knee-high to a grasshopper, was the virtue-signalling. See I wanted to be honest, and I no longer had to show off to my parents.
Before I reveal my chart, a bit more waffle from me, though. Because these obsessively curated charts which probably only get looked at by about three people are an act of extreme navel-gazing, perhaps even solipsism, let me indulge myself still further and reveal a little more of my madness. See, despite the fact I’m a creative type, I’m also a little bit obsessed with numbers, with data, with statistics.
Let’s break it down
In 2021, I read a frankly astonishing (until you remember we were locked down and had little else to do) 93 books. That’s nearly two a week, maths fans. The previous year, I read a total of 77 books (again during various lockdowns, national crises, and the like). In 2017 I read 75; in 2018, 61; and in 2019, 57. That’s a shed-load of books.
And here’s where you can see those charts, if you want to get sucked down a rabbit hole. Here’s last year’s chart (my winner was – at last – Stephen King for – miraculously – one of his shortest books, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption). Here’s the 2020 chart (won by William Landay, for his book The Strangler). Here’s the 2019 chart: Dennis Lehane was my winning novelist. Here’s the 2018 chart: Paul Tremblay topped it, and you may – spoiler alert – be hearing more from him later in this blog. And here’s the 2017 chart: Dave Eggers won out here, and the same goes for him as goes for Tremblay. I’m nothing if I’m not an avid reader of works by authors I’ve previously enjoyed, and you’ll see lots of the same names popping up across these charts… but you’ll also see all kinds of new names too. I like to take a chance on writers who are new to me, and again some of the ‘randoms’ on my reading list this year have come from (an increasing number of) friends and family, from the Little Free Libraries which have popped up on several street corners round my way (like characters from The Wire) and from, well, at times judging books by their covers and not by the names which grace them.
This year I’ve read a grand total of 84 books. Which though not as many as last year is still a feck of a lot. And it wasn’t just quantity. There was a huge amount of real quality there too (but more on that later).
The above graph shows my most avid reading months. Relatively fallow periods tend to correspond with busy times at work or in my personal life. December, for example, wasn’t exactly heavy on the reading front. All those Christmas parties and – yes, despite my suggestion that I may boycott it – the World Cup. And it might look as though I didn’t read much in September, too, but I have to note that this was my Fat Book month. I read Robert Galbraith’s The Ink Black Heart (which weighs in at over 1000 pages) and the latest Stephen King (over 700 pages) in September…
For the third year running I read 10 books in January. Which is a pattern which probably says a lot about New Year’s Resolutions and about staying in a lot more after all those Christmas parties in December.
But enough already.
So I’ve kept you hanging long enough, haven’t I?
Well, without further ado, here’s my top twenty, and the best of the rest…
The Andy Chart 2022
- The Every by Dave Eggers
- The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay
- The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
- Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
- Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
- The World According to Garp by John Irving
- The Promise by Damon Galgut
- Drood by Dan Simmons
- The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux
- Misery by Stephen King
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine
- The Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan
- The Lost Man by Jane Harper
- The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
- The Searcher by Tana French
- The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
- Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
- Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick
- A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks
That’s a pretty nice cover there, yeah. Feel free to judge my winning book by it…
Anyway, here’s my best of the rest:
Midnight Sun by Jo Nesbo; The Furies by John Connolly; The Salt Path by Raynor Winn; Fairy Tale by Stephen King; The Quiet Game by Greg Iles; The House of Fame by Oliver Harris; Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt; The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith; The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker; Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland; The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson; The Coffin Maker’s Garden by Stuart Macbride; Playing for Pizza by John Grisham; The Night Gate by Peter May; My Name is Yip by Paddy Crewe; The Nameless Ones by John Connolly; Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan; A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins; Camino Island by John Grisham; Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda; Lambda by David Musgrave; Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield; Their Little Secret by Mark Billingham; The Blood Divide by A.A. Dhand; Run Away by Harlan Coben; Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives by David Eagleman; The Night Fire by Michael Connelly; Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult; Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler; Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell; Pleading Guilty by Scott Turow; Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain; Shatter the Bones by Stuart Macbride; How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie; The Jealousy Man by Jo Nesbo; The Nature of the Beast by Frances Fyfield; A Darker Domain by Val McDermid; After the Crash by Michel Bussi; Love you Dead by Peter James; Hear no Evil by Sarah Smith; The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton; A Time for Mercy by John Grisham; Gone by Mo Hayder; Cold as Hell by Lilja Sigurdardottir; Stasi Child by David Young; Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain; Innocent Graves by Peter Robinson; Burnout: Solve your Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski; The Lifters by Dave Eggers; Trying to Save Piggy Sneed by John Irving; Gone for Good by Harlan Coben; The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse; One: My Autobiography by Peter Schmeichel with Jonathan Northcroft; The Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson; The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent; Asking for It by Louise O’ Neill; The Cabin by WM Paul Young; The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodniow; The Couple on Maple Drive by Sam Carrington; Beyond the Bailey by Alan Devey; Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead by Brene Brown; The Dinner Guest by B P Walter; Simple Genius by David Baldacci; Ash by James Herbert.
Some notes and observations
Dave Eggers magnifico of a novel – both in size and subject matter – justifiably carries off this year’s prize. It’s the companion book to The Circle, which topped the chart five years ago. Eggers also charts highly with his fantastic true-life story of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina and with a young adult book The Lifters. Paul Tremblay is another repeat offender – my 2018 winner rocks up in second place this time around. Completing my top three is Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy. This is the second book in her Greek trilogy: the first, The Silence of the Girls, was runner-up in 2019.
It’s not only new books which do well in my chart. There are four old stagers in my top ten too: The World According to Garp by John Irving, Drood by Dan Simmons, The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux and Misery by Stephen King. Modern classics, all.
It only remains for me to say have a wonderful Christmas and a great 2023. Here’s hoping for a little less madness.
paintthistownred 