**2022 in Books **
If I had hoped that 2022 would be a return to a new normal, I was wrong. My wife and I went from 2:1 parenting to 1:1 parenting, moved houses, closed a record of real estate deals, and changed jobs four times.
Yet through late-night Chinese dictionary pulls and pre-dawn audiobooks, reading continued, even more than last year. The year started off finishing out last year’s project of big history with the somewhat disappointing tomes of Durant in Age of Napoleon and Ruosseau and Revolution. Feeling at least comfortable with the wide arc of history, I was more prepared to enjoy bites of history and put them in context, such as Roger Crowley’s discovery-era naval history and long overdue biographies such as Malcom X, Nelson Mandela, and Che Guevara.
If there was any theme to 2022 reads, it would be mid-20th century western history. The highlight was definitely Caro’s unfinished epic on LBJ. His gory, disgusting details of modern American political sausage exceed even this year’s books on literal sausage making such as Hooked or The Secret Life of Groceries. I wish there were more series Like Caro’s on LBJ. Long reads like this are almost a different media format that our mental model of a book, with enough time to actually teach the reader entirely new areas of content, the same way that Star Wars fanatics learn an entirely new world after reading 10 novels set in the universe. When paired with the biography on Nixon, I understand for the first time why boomers have so much scar tissue around authority and mainstream culture. Further back, reading about the transition of the American economy in Freedom’s Forge, as well as a more eurocentric view of WWII and the cold war in Bloodlands and Postwar help me understand even the 20th century from a slightly less western perspective.
Thanks to taking time off the tech day job, this was the first year in a decade I dove back into understanding China, even venturing into the sea of characters that is Chinese writing. Deng Xiaoping’s biography was a pleasant surprise, which I had originally hoped to read in Chinese, was an excellent recounting of one of the 20th century’s heroes, whose era only truly ended in 2010 with Xi Jinping’s ascension. Yet it’s a shame this book had to be written by a western author, and is still the best source on Deng, in any language, as the Subplot details the tragedy of Chinese censorship as it affects publishing. Yet for history, original language remains king. I finally got through Merits and Demerits of Chinese Historical Systems (中国历代政治得失), easily the best history book of the year, helping explain the cultural origins of meritocracy in multilayer bureaucracy, contrasting differing forms of power in different dynastic palaces, and why that would matter for both the people under their rule and historians alike. Since reading in Chinese is still 1/10th the speed of English, most reading on China was still in English, though many of the rest of the books (Wish Lanterns, China and Japan, Chip War, Shortest History of China) were disappointing.