Favorite Books of 2022

May you read for the love of God

For my Reading for the Love of God (March 2023), I created an appendix of recommended books, from nursery to adults. My favorite part of the list is “Writers Whose Works Touch the Sacred & the Profane,” a title that pays tribute to one of my favorite podcasts. I love making book lists; I grew up aspiring to own a bookstore and spend the day suggesting beloved titles to eager readers. Now, I spend each year composing my favorite reads from that year (here’s 2021): some are old, some are current, but all have changed the way I see the world.

1. Novel of the Year: Not written in 2022, In this House of Brede by Rumer Godden is a 1969 novel about nuns in a fictious order in Britain. I could not put the book down. I woke my husband to read a passage aloud, crying, “I see Christ! Do you see Christ!?” At this point, I have purchased five copies of this book to give away to people. Additional novels about convent life worth reading: Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (both of which I taught this fall).

2. Unexpected Delightful Purchase: When I go to conferences, I try not to buy books. I usually have a few dozen on my shelves I’m supposed to be teaching, reviewing, researching. But, with its beautiful, full-page, colorful illuminations, Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts was yelling from its place on the Eighth Day Books table to take it home. I’ve loved every pilgrimage into a manuscript and am learning about the history of ideas through its pages.

   

3. Eye-Opening Book of the Year: I’m a huge Abigail Favale fan girl and have been since we were both on a panel at Loyola Chicago, 2019. Her The Genesis of Gender rocked my world—I had no idea “gender” was such a recent concept (1955) or where it came from or why it’s misused. While I could have talked with Dr. Favale for hours about the book itself, we did a podcast recording on a 1915 dystopic novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland; another worthwhile read.

4. “Great Book” of the Year: It’s been my recent mission to make sure great books programs and classical schools do not leave women off their great books lists. Towards that end, I’ve been reading books from the tradition by women that I’ve never read, such as The Book of Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. The latter brought me an epiphany about the book I’m writing on women. In short, it tells the history of the world through the stories of heroic women. Check out my convo on the Great Books Podcast on it.

   

5. Saint’s Life of the Year: When I say “saint,” I’m always including those uncanonized. This year, I loved bios on Dorothy Day (D.L. Mayfield & I discussed her Unruly Saint in season 2 of Scandal of Reading), Sigrid Undset (reviewed here), Edith Stein. But the one that stuck with me the most is St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul. Having read a handful of bios on the saint, nothing beats reading her story for yourself. I gave two talks last year about her “little way.”

6. The Real Indiana Jones Award: Zena Hitz and Marianne Wright recommended I read The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels. Going to the Holy Lands has always been on my bucket list, but this book moved that adventure to the top of my list! It’s such an epic adventure that you keep forgetting it’s real life. These women’s discovery and determination to share the real Gospels will encourage your faith and trust in providence.

   

7. Strangest Amalgam Nonfiction: I was listening to the Wade Center podcast on the Inklings when I heard Matthew Milliner discuss G.K. Chesterton and the Native Americans. As a teacher of Chesterton, I thought I had heard it all, and I was wrong. Not only did The Everlasting People show me a way to teach Chesterton well in the twenty-first century, but also the book showed me Christ through the eyes of the First Nations.

8. Most Liberating Title of the Year: Since 2020, I have been occasionally touring classical schools and conferences with two powerful women, Angel Adams Parham and Anika Prather. Their book has been long awaited, and it does not disappoint: The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature showcases black literary heroes from antiquity to present. The book illustrates for classical schools how to highlight the writings of persons of color that already exist in the great tradition. If this topic is of interest, check out E. Ashley Hairston’s The Ebony Column, Claude Atcho’s Reading Black Books, and Amber O’Neal Johnston’s A Place to Belong.

   

9. Blast from the Past: Last year, I discovered Ivan Illich (scholars are rolling their eyes at me because he was a famous twentieth-century critic that I should have already read). When my friend Myles Werntz recommended Illich’s Deschooling Society (on ERB podcast), I jumped at it. The book was written in 1970 but reads like a contemporary accusation against the worst practices of government-run schools. We are de-forming people with the hidden curriculum of our modern education system. It is not merely about the ideology but the system itself—the system of grades, ranking, high student-teacher ratios, and so on. For The Liberating Arts, Myles and I discuss the book here.

10. Translations of the Year: My knowledge of Italian is scarsa (a year and a few months in Florence), but I had the opportunity to review two Italian classics this year in their new translations. If you were part of 100 Days of Dante, you saw my talk on Paradiso 19. While I understand the use of scholarly translations in the classroom, I recommended Mary Jo Bang’s version of Purgatorio, which will open itself easily to non-scholars. My review of Michael F. Moore’s translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed is forthcoming in Public Discourse (I thought I’d have it read by October, but this is a mighty novel). If you’ve ever (like me) tried to read this novel before and failed, you’ll be blessed by this translation.

When someone I respect challenged me on Twitter that rather than make booklists, to go out and dine with the homeless or bake cookies with my children, I meditated on his words. The reality is that active charity is both drawn from and pours back into the contemplative life; my calling is to offer resources for contemplation, to point others to books that may encourage such beautiful acts in the world. I pray I chose well.

So, what books encouraged your charity this year?