David Davis

what I read in 2022

Between work, this newsletter, my novels, my lover and friends and hobbies—being alone, yoga, running, sex and violence, dancing—I’m a busy girl. Every December, I resolve to spend less time on Twitter and more in bed (alone) with a book, and every December I look back on the past year with not a little regret.

This December, I’ll allow myself some rationalization: for the most part, the books I read this year were challenging, enriching, diverting, and beautiful. A few are still in process (Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran, Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris, and The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy). Some were began but never finished for reasons outside my control (Sam Delany’s About Writing was lost to summer depression, and anyway it had to go back to the library), others because they were not at all pleasurable to read (Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac). I even discovered, to my heartbreak, a Manuel Puig that I not only didn’t adore, but couldn’t stomach: his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth.

I don’t include near-misses and abandoned ships in my final count, but if the point of these end-of-the-year lists is to peek over the shoulder of our parasocialites, they give a fuller sense of how I read, if you’re curious about that: messily, sporadically, furiously, judgmentally (if not always critically). Jade says that when I’m obsessed with a book I spend a week or two talking endlessly about how its author is Just like me!, whether or not they are and whether or not their work resembles mine; I think this sensation is the closest I get to feeling seen, and delight in knowing that this recognition has very little to do with the liberalism’s CVified identity politics. That’s the power of literature, baby! If an artist is doing their job, I fall in love with both of us.

Anyway, here’s what I read this year. Wish me luck for a more readerly 2023!

• Cataracts, John Berger

• In the Cut, Susanna Moore

• Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

• Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, Da’Shaun L. Harrison

• Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt

• Pig Earth, John Berger

• Candy Darling: Memoirs of an Andy Warhol Superstar, Candy Darling

• Palmares, Gayl Jones

• How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alex Chee

• Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, Amber Jamilla Musser

• The Continuous Katherine Mortonhoe, D.G. Compton

• Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

• Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

• How Far the Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler

• Gargoyles, Thomas Bernhardt

• Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, Wil Haygood

• My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Mark Leyner

• What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell

• The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, Sam Wesson

• Brother Alive, Zain Khalid

• Couplets, Maggie Millner

• Limbic, Peter Scapello

• Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

• Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stewart

• At Certain Points We Touch, Lauren John Joseph

See you next year. Find me on Twitter. Get my second novel, X, right here.