My 2022 reading retrospective

In 2021, I noticed two things that didn’t take specific effort, but that I wanted to keep doing in 2022: read a lot, and incorporate diversity into my reading choices. I think I’ve achieved both goals this year, which I’m really happy about! So, let’s dive into the 212 books I finished this year and see which ones ended up being my favourites.

My top 10 books (well, top 20)

Novels

1. Discworld series by Terry Pratchett (which I started in March 2022 and finished in January 2023)
2. The Adventures of China Iron
3. The Great American deception
4. The love hypothesis
5. Wahala
6. The Spectacular
7. Païerali
8. You exist too much
9. Au-revoir là-haut trilogy
10. Ace of Spades

Documentary

1. Broad band
2. Et tes parents, ils font quoi ?
3. Ici on noya les Algériens
4. Travailler moins, travailler autrement, ou ne pas travailler du tout
5. Beyond the gender binary
6. Our women on the ground
7. Les dissidents : une année dans la bulle [[théorie du complot|conspirationniste]]
8. The disconnect: a personal journey trhough the Intenret
9. La peur et la haine : enquête chez les survivalistes
10. Butch is a noun

How I find books to read

In 2022, my recommendations come mostly from:

• Blogs that are not dedicated to books – I’ve left most blogs & podcasts that only talk about books because they tend to make my
• My local library & my local bookshop are both absolutely amazing and have wonderful suggestions for books I would never have found in any other way.
• When I see a clearly leftist or anarchist-leaning library, I enter and, uh… support them financially.
• Friends, of course!

Reading challenges

I took part in a few reading challenges, but ended up looking at them less and less as I was having a much better time reading what I actually care about. I do still use them as a vessel for inspiration when I realize that I’ve fallen into a habit of always reading about the same topics or from the same demographics of authors. In 2023, I’m trying not to take part in any year-long challenge, because I have a pretty big backlog of bought-and-not-yet-read books, and I rely more and more on my local library’s recommendations; I’ll try to tackle all of this before adding new ideas.

I do still take part in two geographical challenges that span over several years:

• MyReadingChallenge54 is a challenge to read a book by a woman from 54 African countries;
• The Around The World Challenge is exactly what it says on the tin: read one book from every country in the world.

Follow me

I try to track all of my reading, reviews, and reading challenges on The Storygraph, so feel free to follow/friend me there if you wish to.

In 2023, my goal is to focus on POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Share Elsewhere), which means you should expect more book reviews on alexsirac.com (that’s here, unless I did something wrong), which I’ll then copy and paste into The Storygraph.