The Books I Read in 2022
In the last few years I have gotten into the habit of reading a lot more books. There is so much insight to be had from so many different people who are both dead and alive. It is comforting to know that many of the thoughts you have had someone else has also experienced.
It is exciting to learn about new topics or parts of history you never even knew about. When you read or learn anything in general you come to realise just how little you really know. And I see that as a good thing, there is always another stone to be turned over, another rabbit hole to jump down into. Beyond all that though, reading is just a real pleasure when you can find the right book. Reading can challenge the way you view the world but it can also just be a real comfort to get lost in a great story and experience a completely different time, place or culture.
I have read plenty of new books which were great(some not so great) and I have also revisited some favourites that I have previously read.
The list is in no particular order but I have marked the ones I found to have the greatest impact on me or the ones I enjoyed the most with an asterisk by them.
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami*
Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicolas Taleb*
The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis
Event - Slavoj Zizek
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
How Proust Can Change Your Life - Alain De Botton
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D Salinger
The Black Swan - Nassim Nicolas Taleb
The Bomber Mafia - Malcolm Gladwell
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
Oh What a Lovely War - Joan Littlewood
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes*
A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
The Obstacle Is The Way - Ryan Holiday*
My Dark Vanessa - Kate Elizabeth Russell
Fall of the Roman Republic - Plutarch
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The One Thing - Gary Keller
In The Margins - Elena Ferrante
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks
Sense and sensibility - Jane Austen
American Tabloid - James Ellroy
Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
The White Album - Joan Didion
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - Peter Biskind*
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Lost Daughter - Elena Ferrante
The City and The City - China Mieville
Steve Jobs - Walter Issacson*
The Days of Abandonment - Elena Ferrante
The Great Movies vol.2 - Roger Ebert
East West Street - Philippe Sands
A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell
Frantumaglia - Elena Ferrante
Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
Malibu Rising - Taylor Jenkins Reid
Chasing the Light - Oliver Stone
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami
Selected Poems - Langston Hughes
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
Chronicles of a Liquid Society - Umberto Eco
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin*
The Best - Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore
Alchemy - Rory Sutherland
Draft no.4 - John McPhee
Quiet - Susan Cain
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy*
"Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!" - Richard Feynman
Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer
Less Than Zero - Bret Easton Ellis
The Rules of Attraction - Bret Easton Ellis
American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis*
A Game of Thrones - George R.R Martin
Cinema Speculation - Quentin Tarantino
Tokyo Vice - Jake Adelstein
Novelist as a Vocation - Haruki Murakami
The Tempest - William Shakespeare
No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie*
The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy
Antifragile - Nassim Nicolas Taleb*
