2022: My Year in Reading

For a list of my favorite books I read this year, go here >

I read 54 books in 2022. It felt like a pretty normal year in reading, for the first time in a while. I read when I wanted to, didn’t when I didn’t, and didn’t overthink it either way, other than to reaffirm my intense dislike of Jack McDevitt. I didn’t watch much TV—my desire for visual storytelling has been subsumed by YouTube, where I follow many channels. I finally went back to a movie theater for the first time since the pandemic started. I missed seeing things on the big screen! I saw Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (so good, but it should have been so much better!)

I also purged half of my personal book collection this year, which still sometimes feels a bit like sacrilege, but I remain confident it was the right thing to do and I haven’t regretted it yet.

You’ll notice there’s no link to my annual #LibFaves list at the top of this post. I bit the bullet this past fall and finally quit Twitter. I’d been wrestling with the desire to leave that site for a couple years, for the same reasons I quit Facebook, but it had functioned as my primary connection to the library profession since grad school. I followed many librarians from across the country and it was my main source of library news. It amused me how often I’d hear coworkers bring up some controversy affecting the profession, and I’d already known about it for weeks because it had been all over Twitter. I was always ahead of the curve. This professional network was the main reason I’d stayed on the platform.

I hit my limit this year. The doomscrolling became legitimately unhealthy. Elon’s takeover was the final straw.

I haven’t figured out other options for maintaining the same type of professional network. I’m working on curating new sources of news, but I feel like I’m falling behind in my awareness of what’s going on in the wider library world. Twitter was also the last place I still had connections to some of my old friends, after dumping Facebook. It was definitely a hard price to pay, but I feel much healthier without the constant barrage of tweets demanding my attention every day, so it’s worth it.

This means I’ve deleted my accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Goodreads, and Tumblr, all in the past couple years. Not to mention several other social media / community-based websites over the past couple decades which went defunct. [Insert fond memories of LiveJournal, Friendster, and MySpace here.] Now I’m left with my LibraryThing account, my various email addresses, and this blog. This is most off-line I’ve been since the ’90s.

I’m becoming a luddite in my old age.

Books Read in 2022

Asterisks (*) indicate titles I reviewed for Booklist.