Presenting the 2022 Commonly-Agreed-by-the-People-Who-Publish-Best-of-2022-Book-Lists-Before-December-31 top 54 books.
(This is my annual community service to book-bloggers – a list of the books that appear most frequently on the 52 lists that I listed on Best Books of 2022 – A List of Lists – enjoy!).
Books that made six lists –
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
The Man Who Could Move Clouds By Ingrid Contreras
A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney
You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi
The Last White Man by Moshin Hamid
Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet
The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn
The Revolutionary by Stacy Schiff
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson
Books that made seven lists –
Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv
In Love by Amy Bloom
Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Book Lovers by Emily Henry
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
Books that made eight lists –
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
Books that made nine lists –
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Books that made ten lists –
Either/Or by Elif Batuman
Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson
Babel by R. F. Kuang
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
Liberation Day by George Saunders
Books that made 11 lists –
Stay True by Hua Hsu
Lessons by Ian McEwan
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell
Books that made 12 or 13 lists –
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
An Immense World by Ed Yong
Books that made 14 or 15 lists –
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
The book that made 17 lists –
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The book that made 20 lists –
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
The book that made 21 lists –
Trust by Hernan Diaz
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I’ve read four (Otsuka, Chan, Jonas and Stuart); have another five in the TBR stack (Atkinson, Delany, Strout, Yanagihara and O’Farrell) and I am busting to read another three (McCracken, Beaton and Jefferson). Will I read the ‘winner’? I’m not sure… probably not! (It doesn’t appeal to me at all).
Do you agree with the critics – will any of these titles make your ‘Best of 2022’ list?