Lady Demelza's Year in Books 2022

 New Year's Eve and the annual reckoning of the books - my favourite holiday ritual! You can click on the link at each book's title to find out more about it.

1. Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari by NPY Women's Council Aboriginal Corporation 2013 

2. Fight Like A Girl by Clementine Ford 2016

3. Desert Country by Nici Cumpston 2010

4. All Systems Red by Martha Wells 2017 

5. Artificial Condition by Martha Wells 2018

6. Splitting by Fay Weldon 1996

7. The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North 2016

8. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari 2011 

9. Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells 2018 

10. How We Became Human by Tim Dean 2021 

11. Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield 2018 

12. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa 1994, English translation by Stephen Snyder 2019

13. The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott 2020

14. Soil by Matthew Evans 2021

15. Oryx And Crake by Margaret Atwood 2003

16. The Second Cure by Margaret Morgan 2018 

17. The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida 2007, English translation by KA Yoshida and David Mitchell 2013

18. Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin 2004

19. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant 1997

20. Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories by Truman Capote 1958

21. Fly Away Peter by David Malouf 1998

22. Stradbroke Dreamtime by Oodgeroo Nunukul 1982 

23. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood 2000

 

Looking over this list, I reckon the book that had the most impact on me this year was Soil by Matthew Evans. It's absolutely turned my understanding of a lot of things about how nature works completely around and inside out. And I love it when that happens. Yes, there were quite a few bits that were tedious with excessive amounts of supportive statistics being listed, and I know that many readers complained that this made it fizzle out, so I found it expedient to just skim a bit through the boring bits, and then get to the marvelling in wonder at the next idea presented in the next chapter. It's so exciting.  

The one that really did fizzle out, though, was Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. It started off with the marvelling in wonder at some brilliant ideas, but the discourse really degenerated as the book went on. Some of the wild tangents it went off into by the end were quite dismaying. How We Became Human by Tim Dean was a much better exploration of the subject. That's the one I would recommend. 

Everything Margaret Atwood does is brilliant. She just can't help herself. 

I was surprised to discover that the original character of Holly Golightly was really very different than Audrey Hepburn's iconic representation in the movie when I read the gorgeous novella Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote. This writer's stories were superbly crafted. It was a beautiful little gem of a discovery in a tiny, remote op shop I passed through on a road trip. Blessed be the Op Shop Faeries! for all the literary treasures and surprises they bring into my life.