Book Beach Bunny

The Best Books of 2022! My favorite reads of the year! It’s all the same 🙂

Admittedly with a few surprises however. Like my top 3 books this year (so far…)

My Top 3 Books of the Year:

An emotional contemporary about two very different fathers out to avenge their sons. Sons they had both pretty much disowned when they came out as gay.

A heartbreaking moving but also somehow very funny story about grief, loss and family. Also contemporary.

A moving story set in the 50’s and 60’s about a brilliant chemist. Struggling under the weight of sexism and needing to raise her daughter she winds up teaching women how to cook with chemistry on afternoon television. Also funny and moving with a great dog!

A top 3 for me with no fantasy or sci-fi? Who even am I this year?

I Have Actual Classics on My List!

Kindred could count as sci-fi I suppose but I think of it as classic first. The way our reader brains work these genres! It’s one I’ve put off for far too long and I’m glad I finally picked it up this year. Well worth the read!

Kindred is about a woman in the 70’s who keeps getting pulled back in time to a slave plantation. She has an uncanny ability to keep saving the sons life and comes to realize her very fate might depend upon him in more ways than one. But does she want it too?

I know I have a tendency to be harder on classics to just think I won’t like them but this one surprised me.

I read The Goblin Market and immediately picked up some of Christina Rossetti’s other work. (Also I always thought The Goblin Market was a kids poem which I suppose it is but definitely works on multiple levels!) But I love her work. Definitely a favorite poet! I really wish I had studied her in school.

Another classic I enjoy and would recommend is Rendezvous with Rama. I picked this one up as it’s talked about for the next movie Denis Villeneuve is doing after Dune. It’s about a ship that appears dead is just moving its way through our atmosphere with no contact. Naturally we send people out to explore.

The descriptions are beautiful. The ship itself is interesting. Don’t expect answers though and I have to warn a little sadly that the next books in the series are not nearly so well regarded.

Also on My List:

I admit I have not related harder to a character who just wants a mindless job. Especially when we find out the reasons why and her ability to get over involved despite her wishes. A very fast easy read and highly relatable.

I read this for the Women’s Prize 2022. A lot going on in this one. But I was intrigued at the woman who works in a haunted bookstore part. There’s a lot more. COVID is very prevalent in this one. All the characters were likable and I think it manages to juggle it’s many threads nicely.

A super fun series about a woman and her friend who kind of accidentally fall into the assassin for hire business. I don’t like this book as much as I like the first but that’s mainly because so much of it concerns trying to save her shithead ex-husband. Frankly I think she puts too much effort into saving him 🙂

Still very fun worth the read and I will continue to pick up the series.

As usual my TBR is a mile long so hopefully they’ll be plenty more to add by the end of 2022!