Books, 2022
The year's reading, more or less in order. Thirty-four books, helped along by a lot of buses and a week in Duluth in February with not much to do but cook.
- Strong Poison, Dorothy L. Sayers. Started in January because Jonah told me to. A detective novelist on trial for murder, and a man who decides she didn't do it.
- Have His Carcase, Dorothy L. Sayers. A body on a rock on a beach, a cipher, and two people who keep almost saying what they mean.
- The Maid, Nita Prose. A hotel maid who takes everything literally finds a guest dead in his bed. Funnier and sadder than I expected, and I read it in a day.
- Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers. I wrote about it in June. It's the best book I read this year, and I suspect it will be the best book I read in several.
- Busman's Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers. The last of them, and a strange, private, tender book. A murder on a honeymoon, mostly as an excuse.
- Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel. Time travel, an airship terminal, and a pandemic novelist on a book tour. Short, odd, and it stayed with me all summer.
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin. Two friends who make video games together for thirty years. I've avoided novels about my own job for most of my life. I'm glad I didn't avoid this one, and I couldn't talk about it for a day after I finished.
- The Bullet That Missed, Richard Osman. The Thursday Murder Club's third. I'll read these as long as he writes them.
- The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers. From the first of my mother's boxes in November: a Wimsey without Harriet, the kind I'd skipped on my way to her. Church bells, a flood in the Fens, and a stranger in someone else's grave. Her slip in it says "You skipped this one."
- Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. David Copperfield, retold in the mountains of Virginia in the years of the opioids. I'm still reading it, so it counts for this year by my own rules, which I made up.
The rest were mysteries for the bus, books I read for work and can't name, and one very good cookbook I read cover to cover like a novel, which my mother says is the only way to read a cookbook.
What should go on next year's list?