And finishing catching up with porting my top 10 book-I-read-this-year lists to my blog by posting this from 2022:

As I’ve done the past couple years, I’m making a list of my ten favorite books I read in 2022. No particular order. (Well, actually, the order is the order I read them.) They’re not books that came out this year, just books I read this year.

• Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling. I’d love an update to this for the pandemic and new AI era, but it provides a far more useful way to look at the world and understand its development. One of the few books that actually gives some optimism for the future.
• Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell. I’d heard about how things like oceans receding 60 million years ago informed modern voting patterns, but this book covered so much more, like how geology led to the evolution of intelligence itself.
• Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. Or, really, the entire Grisha series, but this was the first I read. The characters are captivating, and every book has a remarkable ability to make you think it’s going one way before veering somewhere else while remaining believable.
• The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack. There were so many concepts that I was familiar with from other books, but I never really grokked until I read the far more elegant explanations in this book.
• The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. From the title you’d expect self-help, but it’s more pop science. The number of sources it draws from is amazing, yet it’s still written in an incredibly approachable way.
• Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. That rare book that defies any sort of genre boundaries. It’s like the autobiographical version of historical fiction: plenty of truth, but plenty of fantasy as well. It’s beautiful.
• What Is Real? by Adam Becker. A fantastic look at the different macro interpretations of quantum mechanics. One of the more accessible quantum physics books I’ve read.
• Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict by Heather Boushey. A great summary of the real economics at work behind so many societal changes and trends that we see, and what we should do about them.
• Zoey Punches the Future in the … by Jason Pargin/David Wong. I loved the humor, but I wasn’t expecting such an insightful look at a whole bunch of modern themes: social media, human augmentation, privatization, identity, and more. Plus, great characters.
• The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. Words created to capture common feelings that are hard to describe without a word to label them. My favorites are galagog, star-stuck, harke, yu yi, grayshift, moledro, and foilsick.