Books from 2022
So this blog seems to have turned more into a reading list than anything else, but I still love reading other people’s recommendations, so here is another year’s round. Again this time I included a list of children’s books that the kids and I read together and we would certainly recommend all of them!
Books are sorted into the usual categories: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Fiction. Below the list is a quote that resonated with me from each book. If you’ve read any of these, I’d love to know what you thought!
Quotes:
Preemptive Love “Yes, I recognize that there are real political, theological, and philosophical differences that warrant serious debate, but I don’t want to be easily summed up as a left-leaning liberal, so that the far right can ignore me and brand me immoral. And I don’t want to be summed up as a right-leaning conservative, so that the far left can ignore me and brand me a religious nut. Our souls, like Kurdish klosh, require the discipline of spending time on both sides, in order to not get warped, in order to stay straight.”
Modern Romance “In the history of our species, no group has had as many romantic options as we have now, so in theory this should be a great thing. More options is better, right? It’s not always such a great thing……When we have more options we are actually less satisfied and sometimes even have a harder time making a choice at all.”
Biased “Our studies show that what we perceive is influenced not only by the labels we are provided, but by our own attitudes about the rigidity of categories. Though we tend to think about seeing as objective and straightforward, how and what we see can be heavily shaped by our own mindset.”
The Souls of Black Folk “Daily, the negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him. They are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration. And finally, the accused lawbreaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often, by men who would rather punish 10 innocent negros than let one guilty one escape.”
Unseen Lives “Change will come from an appreciation and acceptance that the situations they faced were often impossible, that their freedoms were limited, and that if we were in the same situation, we may have made exactly the same choices. For us to truly start working out how to tackle slavery, we first need to break down the barriers and notions that it only happens to people who are not like us.”
Songbirds and Snakes “‘Remember, Coriolanus, that wherever you go, you will always be a Snow. No one can ever take that from you.’ He wondered if that wasn’t the problem.”
Why not Me? “...which is why you need the tiniest bit of bravery. People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you’re succeeding. People do not get scared when you’re failing…But when you’re winning, it makes them feel like they’re losing, or worse yet, that maybe they should’ve tried to do something too, but now it’s too late. And since they didn’t, they wanna stop you. You can’t let them.”
Daring to Hope “When life was not what I expected, where hope was not what I thought, He carved a space in my heart for Him. This didn’t make the pain easy. Some days, prayers seemed to go unanswered and loss overwhelmed our lives…No, He didn’t make the pain easy, but He made it beautiful.”
The Bluest Eye “I believe our sorrow was all the more intense, because nobody else seemed to share it. They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, ‘Poor little girl,’ or ‘Poor baby,’ but there was only headwagging where those words should’ve been.”
War Horse “‘In an hour, maybe, or two,’ he said, ‘we will be trying our best again each other to kill. God only knows why we do it, and I think He has maybe forgotten why. Goodbye Welshman, we have shown them, haven’t we? We have shown them that any problem can be solved between people if only they can trust each other. That is all it needs, no?’”
Where the Past Begins “We see what we want to believe. We are all unreliable narrators when it comes to speaking for the dead.”
Dubliners “She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the general post office, as something large, secure, and fixed. Though she knew the small number of his talents, she appreciated his abstract value as a male.”
When Breath Becomes Air “..I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor, but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
Beloved “Now, too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn’t count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The whitefolks had tired her out at last.”
Guernsey “That’s what I love about reading. One tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you on to another book, and another bit there will lead you on to a third book. It’s geometrically progressive, all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”
Untangled “The adolescent drive toward autonomy can take the form of a teenager refusing to do something, even something that she should do and might even have been about to do, simply because a parent has suggested it.”
American Dirt “All of her life, she’s pitied ‘those poor people’. She’s donated money, she’s wondered with a sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be where they come from that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives. All for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.”
Long Path to Wisdom favorite stories were ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’ and ‘The Fear Virus’
Noughts and Crosses “But I also realized what you’ve been trying to tell me all these years. You’re a Nought and I’m a Cross and there’s nowhere for us to be, nowhere for us to go where we’d be left in peace. Even if we had gone away together when I wanted us to, we would’ve been together for a year, maybe two. But sooner or later, other people would’ve found a way to wedge us apart. That’s why I started crying. That’s why I couldn’t stop. For all the things we might’ve had and all the things we’re never going to have.”
We Were Dreamers “Acting, like life, gets a bit stale when you only make safe choices.”
White Teeth “No fictions, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs–this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over Irie, was that it sounded like a beginning.”
The Beautiful Struggle “Bill’s new friends–Marlon, Joey, Rock–were boys of our ilk, stuck in that undefined place between the projects and the burbs. They did not live in squalor. Their mothers tried their best. But still they had to confront the winds of the day. The most ordinary thing–the walk to school, a bike ride around the block, a trip to the supermarket–could just go wrong.”
