I love looking back over the books I’ve read each year, recalling my thoughts and choosing favorites. I didn’t meet my goal of reading 60 books but I’m on track to finish 33 before the end of the year. Last year I read 32 so I guess you’d could say that’s a slight improvement. And of course, there’s always next year! Let’s take a look at my favorite books of 2022.
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Favorite Books of 2022
What Falls From the Sky: How I Disconnected With the Internet and Reconnected With the God Who Made the Clouds
by Esther Emery
This was the most thought-provoking book I read this year. I’ve tussled with mixed feelings about my online life and was both impressed and envious of the author’s decision to unplug for a year.
What Falls from the Sky is Esther’s fiercely honest, piercingly poetic account of a year without Internet – 365 days away from the good, the bad, and the ugly of our digital lives – in one woman’s desperate attempt at a reset. Esther faces her addiction to electronica, her illusion of self-importance, and her longing to return to simpler days, but then the unexpected happens. Her experiment in analog is hijacked by a spiritual awakening, and Esther finds herself suddenly, inexplicably drawn to the faith she had rejected for so long.
Ultimately, Esther’s unplugged pilgrimage brings her to a place where she finally finds the peace – and the God who created it – she has been searching for all along.
What Falls from the Sky offers a path for you to do the same. For all the ways the Internet makes you feel enriched and depleted, genuinely connected and wildly insufficient, What Falls from the Sky reveals a new way to look up from your screens and live with palms wide open in a world brimming with the good gifts of God.
Our Country Friends: A Novel
by Gary Shteyngart
I picked up this novel at my favorite bookstore in New Orleans – Faulkner House Books. What began as several friends joining up for a few weeks to wait out the pandemic turns into 6 months of…well…you just need to read it. As the pandemic drags on, it’s rather interesting to look back on the early days. Oh, we were so naive!
In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.
The French Gardener: A Novel
by Santa Montefiore
I read this one on our trip to Belize in November. It was a wonderful beach read and I left it in the resort library for someone else to enjoy.
It begins as Miranda and David Claybourne move into a country house with a once-beautiful garden. But reality turns out to be very different from their dream. Soon the latent unhappiness in the family begins to come to the surface, isolating each family member in a bubble of resentment and loneliness.
Then an enigmatic Frenchman arrives on their doorstep. With the wisdom of nature, he slowly begins to heal the past and the present. But who is he? When Miranda reads about his past in a diary she finds in the cottage by the garden, the whole family learns that a garden, like love itself, can restore the human spirit, not just season after season, but generation after generation.
Wise and winsome, poignant and powerfully moving, The French Gardener is a contemporary story told with an old-fashioned sensibility steeped in the importance of family and the magical power of love.
Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live
by Becca Levy, PhD
I turned 60 in 2022 so this last one was rather timely for me. I was truly surprised to learn to what degree our attitudes about aging, as well as that of our culture, affect our health is such specific ways. I listened to this one but will be purchasing a copy in order to highlight passages to return to often.
Yale professor and leading expert on the psychology of successful aging, Dr. Becca Levy, draws on her ground-breaking research to show how age beliefs can be improved so they benefit all aspects of the aging process, including the way genes operate and the extension of life expectancy by 7.5 years.
The often-surprising results of Levy’s science offer stunning revelations about the mind-body connection. She demonstrates that many health problems formerly considered to be entirely due to the aging process, such as memory loss, hearing decline, and cardiovascular events, are instead influenced by the negative age beliefs that dominate in the US and other ageist countries. It’s time for all of us to rethink aging and Breaking the Age Code shows us how to do just that.
Based on her innovative research, stories that range from pop culture to the corporate boardroom, and her own life, Levy shows how age beliefs shape all aspects of our lives. She also presents a variety of fascinating people who have benefited from positive age beliefs as well as an entire town that has flourished with these beliefs.
Breaking the Age Code is a landmark work, presenting not only easy-to-follow techniques for improving age beliefs so they can contribute to successful aging, but also a blueprint to reduce structural ageism for lasting change and an age-just society.
What were your favorite reads this year?
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