My Favorite Books From 2022

As I've mentioned before, 2022 was a watershed year for my reading capacity, and while it is probably a little late in the new year for a retrospective post, I did want to take some time and expressly call out, and recommend, a few of the books I read last year.

In no particular order, my favorite books last year were:

Never the Wind, Francesco Dimitri

This book was an absolute joy to read. It's a coming-of-age, ghost story set in nineties Italy, and it is just so well written and charming that I found myself spellbound by every page. Give this one a go if you're in the mood for some excellent fiction.

What Diplomats Do, Brian Sir Barder

This one I read for a yet-unannounced project I'm working on, and while I was hoping the book would be useful to me, I was not prepared for just how much fun it would be to work through. The author, a former U.K. Diplomat, spends as much time explaining the intricacies of overseas diplomacy as he does fictionalizing his time abroad and telling simply incredible stories about how and why certain diplomatic agreements were reached.

A Farewell to Arms, Earnest Hemingway

I read a lot of Hemingway last year, and this one was my favorite. A classic for a reason, and an excellent read. I did also like The Sun Also Rises.

The Matter of the Gods, Clifford Ando

This one, I'll admit, was a bit tough to get through. It's a treatise on Roman Religion, but it is written by and for historians and classical theologians. I picked this up after scouring the citations for one of my favorite blogs, and while the book assumes you've already read the ancient classics, and the medieval christian rebuttals to those texts, (which I have not) it was still an interesting read. Ancient mysticism is fascinating to me, and if the topic sounds enticing to you then I'd recommend skimming through this one. A deep read might be a bit too intense.

Existential Physics, Sabine Hossenfelder

Sabine is one of my favorite YouTubers, and her book is basically just more of the same. The book is a fun romp through many different parts of Theoretical Physics and both acts as a guide to what modern science can, and cannot, hope to explain. It's a good reminder, from the perspective of a physicist, that while science has given us the modern world, it cannot ever hope to solve some very important questions.