The Best Books I Read in 2022

Each December I publish a list of books that I read over the past year, highlighting a handful of them that I found most interesting. This isn’t a book list for everyone, and I’m not pretending that I’m the most well-read person, but I do enjoy books in all formats and I follow my own passions, so my list tends to be interesting, if nothing else.

This year my reading volume was down, largely because last winter I participated in a program called Exodus 90. It was one of the most meaningful things I did this year. For nearly three months, I joined a couple dozen men from my church to practice prayer, asceticism, and fraternity. It was intense; just the hour of prayer each day forced me to change my regular routine, and prayer was one small part of the overall program. I’ve kept many of the habits I formed during E90 as part of my new routine and am grateful for it. If you belong to a parish with an Exodus 90 program, I highly recommend you give it a try. 

As always, please don’t read too much into this list. Neither Strong Towns nor I are compensated for endorsing any books, I’m not using my book list to project an image (which should be obvious when you see my list), and these authors aren’t friends of mine whom I’m promoting or anything like that. These books are genuinely the ones I read and found the most meaningful. If you’d like to see all the books I finished this year (I don’t bother to track the many books I start and set aside), I share that list on Pinterest.

1. Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, by Carl Safina

I read this book early in the year and knew immediately that it would be my top recommendation in 2022. The book was not what I was expecting, and in retrospect I’m not sure what I was expecting—certainly something that would be either more hard science and less emotionally provocative, or something more frivolous and less meaningful. Instead, Beyond Words resonated with me like few books ever have.

The science was there, credible yet humble: not the kind of one-sided propaganda one might expect. Yet, this book was so much more than just science. In a way that only the best National Geographic documentaries pull off, the animals were allowed to speak for themselves, the author showing awe and a considerable restraint to not impose human narratives and motivations on them. 

I find myself returning often to the many scenes in the book; the playful and cunning whales signaling their arrival, the confident female wolf showing how it was done by evening the score (and then some) with bothersome coyotes, and the elephants randomly showing up and hanging out—miles from where they would normally be—in a vigil for a sick and dying human friend. There were many more, but one in particular haunts me.

My colleague John Pattison has also read this book. When he found out that I had, he said to me, “The scene with the elephant and the whale.” Yeah, John, that’s the one. I get a lump in my throat just thinking about it. It’s impossible not to feel humble in the face of such grandeur and mystery.

2. The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality, by Robert Lanza

Last year, I recommended the only fiction book to ever make one of my Top 5 lists: Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir. It tapped into so many mind puzzles that I’m still pondering the implications of. For instance, we (humans) perceive reality through our senses, but our senses have evolved to perceive a certain version of reality (we don’t see infrared, for example). Beyond a mere extension of our basic senses, there has to be aspects of reality that we not only can’t perceive, but lack the capacity to even ponder. That was the case with one of the characters in Project Hail Mary, an alien who didn’t grasp relativity because, well, their species didn’t perceive light the way we do (thus distorting time measurements relative to the speed of light). 

Quantum entanglement presents a clear case where something is missing in our understanding of reality. It doesn’t make sense that something can be both particle and wave, that things exist in a state of indeterminism until they are observed, that observing something in one place not only determines its existence but the reality of that existence transfers instantly to an entangled particle, regardless of how much distance is between them (thus breaking the supposed laws of physics). It doesn’t make sense, but it is what we observe.

Through biocentrism, Lanza provides an answer that is both simple and spooky: that our consciousness is not a condition that evolved out of the universe but that it is our consciousness—the fact that we exist and observe what is around us—that creates our reality. We observe it, and then it exists. This means that there is an indeterminate reality out there somewhere (maybe even behind you right now) that is only rendered when observed, like some kind of master computer simulation.

I’m not ready to be a biocentrist, and I’ve run into some really smart people who find this to be nutty work, but I’m also aware that many new ideas are nutty at first. If the biocentrism idea is wrong, it is still a worthy thought experiment to ponder. And, if it gets us closer to understanding reality, then today’s crazy idea will be tomorrow’s textbook entry. That is spooky.

3. The Devil in the White City: A Saga of Magic and Murder at the Fair that Changed America, by Erik Larson

For some reason, I thought this was a fiction book and, as such, I saved it for vacation. So I read this one on break with my family. It was definitely non-fiction, but Erik Larson is such an amazing storyteller that it read like a page turner. It was fortunate that I had the time to turn those pages, because I couldn’t put the book down.

The World’s Fair in Chicago pushed the architects of that time to build something that would be akin to today’s Olympic villages, but far grander, more impressive, and (in many ways) more slipshod. The logistical challenges of such an undertaking are overwhelming to ponder, but layer in the condensed time frame, the construction methods of the era, and the oversized egos of all involved, and there is something astounding to what they accomplished.

Larson pairs this civic stunt with the tale of a serial killer who, amid the craziness of the fast-growing city and the throngs of visitors who flocked there, entangled himself in the lives of multiple women, killing many of them and disposing of their bodies in increasingly bizarre ways. The juxtaposition of Chicago’s great civic undertaking with the high price paid in its shadows makes for vivid storytelling.

4. Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One, by Majora Carter

This is the book I’ve been waiting for in so many ways. Majora Carter is a hero and her writing gave me great joy. As someone who has stayed in a struggling place I love rather than pursue greater wealth and opportunities elsewhere, I felt an immediate connection to Carter. Her assessments of the challenges that “low-status communities” (her term) face is spot on, and her prescriptions for making them better come straight out of the Strong Towns playbook. 

And, most impressively, she’s living it. The neighborhood projects she has been part of are equal parts amazing and simple, a combination that inspires action. I was able to have Carter on the Strong Towns Podcast earlier this year and lots of listeners reported being inspired by her to roll up their sleeves and get to work in their places. 

Unlike a lot of books that intersect with America’s racial conversation, this is one I can share with everyone. It’s not that Carter pulls punches, but she writes in a way that is relatable, accessible, and empathetic. Her goal is to make things better, and help others make things better, and that shines through even when she challenges us to look within ourselves.

I had the chance to meet Carter at a private gathering in Maryland this past fall. I introduced myself and we were shaking hands and then I went in for a hug. She said, “Ah, you’re a hugger. Good; I am, too.” Of course she is.

5. The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, by Sam Quinones

I had Quinones on the podcast back in 2018 to discuss his prior book, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. This was a powerful story, one I could see playing out in my city: a human wasting that runs parallel to the denuding of the community we talk about so often at Strong Towns.

The Least of Us is not a mere update to Dreamland. It’s the next chapter in this saga of decline, one with a frantic urgency to it. Globalization and mass production have come to the drug industry, flooding America’s cities with cheap and potent narcotics. This happens at a time when we Americans are more primed than ever for addiction. The book felt overwhelming at times, like when local cops in Akron discovered they could order pounds of fentanyl through the mail from China with a simple phone call. They discovered this when they were trying to figure out why the drug was suddenly everywhere, and why it was killing people.

As much despair that Quinones’s writing can create, it is also not without hope. He’s a great journalist and the story he writes centers around compelling characters who are doing beautiful things. And Quinones is a Strong Towns guy; he gets the way that people and community go together. With cheap and powerful drugs now ubiquitous across North America, we need real community at the neighborhood level, not just to help get people off of drugs and stay sober, but to give them purpose and hopeful alternatives that help them avoid these very human addictions.

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Honorable Mentions

• Render Unto Caesar: The Struggle Over Christ and Culture in the New Testament, by John Dominic Crossan. I’ve had Crossan on the podcast a couple of times and am an avid reader of his many works. This book was very ambitious, in some ways an intellectual culmination of his many prior works, even though the scope was focused and the book tighter than some of his earlier tomes. To what extent did early Christians stand in opposition to the Roman Empire (Book of Revelation) and to what extent did they conform their message to it (Gospel of Luke/Acts of the Apostles)? Fascinating insights, as always. 

• The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I know my including this book is going to make a certain segment of our audience angry. I was going to keep it out, but that felt very inauthentic in a way that is not me. I’m going to say: this was a really compelling book. A friend of mine, who strongly recommended it to me, said that “if 10% of this is true, there should be people rotting in prison for it.” I felt the same way when I finished it. And, for the record, I am double-vaxed and boosted against COVID-19, so my journey into this topic is less a search for validation than curiosity about a man whom I think will someday be thought of as the public health version of J. Edgar Hoover. It’s hard to read about the patent kickbacks—which are fully legal, but ethically dubious—and not have a sickening feeling.

• The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914, by Barbara W. Tuchman. Tuchman’s book on the beginning of World War I, The Guns of August, is perhaps the greatest ever written on the topic (at least, it is to me). The Proud Tower is a collection of essays Tuchman wrote delving into different aspects of society prior to the Great War, from art and culture to the anarchist movement. It provides a great deal of depth to help understand the most consequential war in modern times.

If you’d like to see all of the books I read this year, do make sure to check out my list on Pinterest. You can also go back and see my recommendations for 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.

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