Everything I Read in 2022 (gasp! she lives!)
A new monthly dispatch from me all about my restaurant spreadsheet, the new Barnes & Noble store designs, all the books I read in 2022, and more
2023 is off to a busy start, but here I am! I’ve been nurturing my first love, my Master NYC Restaurant List & Map, through post-holiday catch-ups with friends. Standouts have included an Alpine farewell feast at Niche Niche (which will close at the end of the month, with an outpost of Rome’s fabulous spot Roscioli opening in its place); the grilled octopus and fried zucchini chips at Kiki’s, visited for an off-hour late lunch; and Long Island Bar’s refreshingly briny paccheri pasta, which has no business being as good as it is. I’ve missed dining out over the past few years, and I’m glad to be spending more time on Resy.
With a full calendar and a relentless flood of (mostly Aquarian) birthday celebrations on the horizon, my newsletter dispatches will become monthly with an occasional double-up as needed. 2023 is shaping up to be a year of new beginnings, and I’m following suit here with a new schedule. I hope you’ll join me for another great year of reading!
Bookstore News
After my beloved Sweet Pickle Books went viral on TikTok earlier this month, they had to pause their “donate a book in exchange for some pickles” regime due to overwhelming demand. The pickles have been restocked (including the spicy ones, which are my fav), but check their Instagram before you show up with donations.
Pour one out for the Barnes & Noble in Downtown Brooklyn, which closed this month after 20 years in business and relocated a few blocks away. The old store was so gross it was nostalgic, complete with colorless stained carpeting and a Manga aisle perpetually populated by teens sucking face after school. The new store, designed in line with B&N's new corporate refresh strategy, features ugly fluorescent track lights and fake wood tiling that screams of an HGTV house-flipping show. The only boon is that the booksellers from the old location have mostly kept their jobs, and they are some of the nicest people to chat with at checkout. (I will always be fond of the staff that blasted a giving-no-fucks playlist of Kpop girl groups during the store closing supersale.)
The tiny and brand new Court Street Coffee & Books has a sweet list of “Book Rules” for you to learn. If you buy nine drinks, you can get a 10th free or take any book off their shelves; you can buy a book for a few bucks and, once you're done reading, you can bring it back to exchange for a new one from their shelves; and they accept book donations. A good system for cultivating regulars, if you ask me.
Book News
As a result of my recent activities, reading has primarily been sequestered to early mornings. Martin and I rejiggered our bar cart to have a coffee station on top and cocktail materials (and room for Cardamaro) below, so I have been brewing up D’Amico’s coffee beans in the early hours while I tuck into a book. Right now, that’s Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which I have been bullied to read for most of my young life. But I did manage to get three other books done before the end of January, outlined below.
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Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots (via Kindle Unlimited). I stumbled upon a cross-over parody of workplace advice column Ask A Manager, which playfully addressed concerns of people working for supervillains—called “henches” in Walschots’s book—like “my wife doesn’t know I hench, the evil sex ray made my employees do it, and more.” As an AAM anaficionado, I ate it up and immediately had to read Hench. Anna Tromedlov works clerical temp jobs for supervillains, making her a “hench” for villains in short-term need of her data analysis and spreadsheetery. After Anna gets injured by a superhero “saving” the day, she starts a blog analyzing how much collateral damage superheroes cause. (Spoiler: it is a lot.) The book, which until this point is a lighthearted sci-fi take on the miseries of the gig economy, takes a sharp, dark turn. As Anna’s need for vengeance grows and her trajectory shifts, and it’s clear she’s no longer content acting as a mid-level hench. She becomes “the rage of collateral damage and its revenge; she's sympathetic and horrible.” While I enjoyed the plethora of puns, jokes about workplace woes, and friendly banter between Anna and her fellow henches in the first section, the book’s tonal shift is what made me speed-read it in a quick 24 hours. Hench considers the moral weight of collateral damage and “moves between devastating and witty with a fluid elegance.” It was a delightful first read of 2023, and it comes co-recommended by my personal book influencers, Emily and Ross.
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Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood (via Libby). I was bound to enjoy a memoir described as “brilliantly silly, with much comedy squeezed out of [a] Catholic upbringing.” After going broke, Lockwood moves back in with her parents and manages to “transform the return into a richly textured story of an unconventional family and life” in Priestdaddy. Lockwood’s sentences are equally packed with hilarity and absurdity as she describes her zany, flawed family, the weirdness of living in a rectory, and her early experiences in love and on the internet, where she met her husband in a poetry forum. She also “hints, in between these wackily affectionate sections, at a darker undescribed history… [her] descriptions of trauma, a rape and a suicide attempt, for instance, are mere paragraphs, and then we return once more to the wheeling, dancing circus.” I could only read bits of Priestdaddy at a time, between Lockwood’s poetic prose and the heaviness of her subjects. (I moved much faster through her debut novel, No One Is Talking About This.) But that might be because it is hard to read about religious trauma and life in America’s most poisonous cities, no matter how well-formed each sentence might be. It also might be because Lockwood’s descriptions of moving in with her parents brought me back to early COVID lockdown days I spent in my own childhood home. I will not soon forget the commandments Lockwood came up with while sequestered away, writing her own book, long before I started working remotely in 2020:
“Drink water. I am not Lawrence of Arabia’s camel,” I recite. “One hundred pretzels is not a meal. If I start thinking about penguins, I’m too cold. If I start thinking about hell, I’m too hot. Too much coffee has made lab rabbits explode. If I find myself reading the Wikipedia entry for ‘Death,’ step away from the internet.”
“And?”
“And I am the only zoo animal currently living who has the key to open my own cage. Open it and go outside.”
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A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers (physical copy via Brooklyn Public Library). What a wholesome breath of fresh air. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is the second installment of Chambers’s Monk & Robot series, which follows tea monk Dex and robot Splendid Speckled Mosscap through “something close to a post-apocalyptic paradise.” The duo travel through human lands to ask Mosscap’s core question, stemming from the robots’ concern about humanity’s survival: what do humans need? The theme of the book, predictably, assesses what it is people need in order to survive and thrive. It’s lovely, thoughtful, and short.
Beyond The Bookshelf
Elsewhere in life since last we spoke, I saw and adored A Strange Loop and Into The Woods before their Broadway runs concluded; received my very first Penguin Clothbound Classics (for those curious, my dad selected Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obsure, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield); judged frequenters of Cobble Hill Park on which coffee shop their beverages came from while relishing the scent of discarded Christmas trees; devoured Regina’s chicken and dumplings on New Year’s Day in beautiful Bridgehampton; watched Moonstruck for the umpteenth time; bought Elisa Shua Dusapin’s The Pachinko Parlor from Three Lives & Company and Mark Haber’s Saint Sebastian’s Abyss from 192 Books, a well-curated shop stupidly close to my old apartment that I had never visited; clinked glasses at generously-hosted dinner parties; started up rehearsals with the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus again; eavesdropped on an author at Sag Harbor Books, which you can tell is a place for rich people because the gigantic coffee table books are front-and-center; refreshed my knowledge of alternate side parking rules, now that Martin has a car from my mom(!!!!!); and more, which is just as bonkers to me as it is to you.
Anna, You’re Forgetting Something
Ugh, fine. I had originally planned to follow up my post about the best and worst books you read last year with my own 2022 book-y awards (you can read the 2020 and 2021 editions, which I think hold up). But in looking at the 72 books I read in 2022, I really only felt strongly about a handful of them. Reading carried me through some genuinely shitty times last year, but I can’t say that the majority of my reading was as purposeful or impactful as I would like.
With that in mind, I’ve taken a page out of Roxane Gay’s book and have provided an annotated list of all the books I read last year for your perusal. And in 2023, my goal is to read slower, select books more purposefully, and fully engage with the text in front of me.
All The Books I Read in 2022
My favorite books of 2022, in no particular order (links go to where I’ve gushed about them previously)
Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados
Luster by Raven Leilani
Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Gideon the Ninth (and the rest of The Locked Tomb series) by Tamsyn Muir
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi
Seven Days in June by Tia Williams
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura
Fantasy novellas that transported me when I needed escapism the most
The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo (books 1-3)
The Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire (books 1-8)
A Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers
Devastating, beautifully written, and illuminating memoirs/narrative nonfiction
Crying In H Mart by Michelle Zauner
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
Books that play with time (or, as I like to call them, the time-y wime-y books)
This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
Queer romantic narratives to the FRONT of the line!
A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske (M/M main couple)
A Restless Truth by Freya Marske (F/F main couple)
Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park (M/M main couplings)
The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas (trans protagonist, lots of queer secondary characters)
Books that primarily just felt really good to read, generally for being very sweet or fizzy or wholesome
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci
Book Lovers by Emily Henry
Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola
LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin
The eerie stuff that felt kinda like reading a book that washed ashore in a bottle, often leaving me with more questions than answers about its contents
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd
Parade by Hiromi Kawakami
Scattered All Over The Earth by Yoko Tawada
Books in which I support women’s wrongs
The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
Where The Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda
The Trojan Women by Anne Carson
Elektra by Jennifer Saint
Slutty stuff that breaks the spicy scale for regular humans, ranked by 🌶️ for seasoned smut readers
Electric Idol by Katee Robert (🌶️)
Lola & The Millionaires Part One and Part Two by Kathryn Moon (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️)
The Company of Fiends by Kathryn Moon (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️)
Particularly good audiobooks for walking over the Brooklyn Bridge or Promenade (which, you know, is when I listened to them lol)
You Can’t Be Serious by Kal Penn
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
Informative nonfiction that struck a cord with me: on race, intersectional identities, mental illness, and more
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun Harrison
I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee
A Molecule Away From Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain by Sara Manning Peskin
My favorite Sally Rooney books, because she can publish anything and I now know I will gratefully eat it up, listed in favorite order (and, coincidentally, publication order)
Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
The absolute best magic system of the year, no notes, I love tea magic
A Magic Steeped In Poison by Judy Lin
The weakest of the 2022 litter: my least favorite reads of 2022, in no particular order
The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd
A Venom Dark and Sweet by Judy Lin
Down The Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Playboy Bunny by Holly Madison
Under The Whispering Door by T.J. Klune
Hopefully that will tide you over until next time. See you next month—but feel free to message me on Bookstagram if you find yourself in urgent need of chatter before my next book blast!