Welcome to the 18th installment of our Year in Reading series! Over the last two decades, Year in Reading has grown into a beloved Millions tradition, an annual gathering of writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. What makes YIR special is that it’s not just a roundup of book recommendations (as if we needed to add anything more to our TBR) but a celebration of the books that move us—and, in many cases, a thoughtful and intimate look at why they move us.
This marks my first YIR as editor of The Millions, a series of words that feels surreal to type; I distinctly remember, as an undergrad, finals fast approaching, sitting in a cafe near campus and, instead of studying, scrolling feverishly through YIR entries, dreaming that one day I would write one of my own. Which is to say: getting to not just contribute to but assemble this year’s series has been, quite literally, beyond my wildest dreams.
This year’s prompt was open-ended—contributors were simply asked to reflect on what they read in 2022. Some guiding questions: What did you love? What did you dutifully trudge through? What eerily coincided with your personal life, or maybe illuminated something in it? Responses took many forms, and it was important to me to preserve the diversity of contributors’ approaches.
The shape of a YIR essay can reveal a lot about the nature of one’s reading life; at the heart of YIR’s prompt are questions of temporality, taxonomy, reflexivity. Some contributors, for instance, divided their essays into months or seasons, while others organized their essays around an experience—a trip, a pregnancy, a book tour. Some contributors did a deep drive on a singular book, others stuck to the highlights, and yet others attempted to tabulate an entire year’s worth of reading. Yet, varied as the entries are, there were patterns: The work of Percival Everett and Annie Ernaux appeared often, as did recent books by Gwendoline Riley, Sheila Heti, Jessamine Chan, and Elaine Hsieh Chou. Contributors also frequently wrote about “devouring” or “inhaling” books this year; eating, breathing, reading: all essential, life-giving functions.
We our deeply grateful for the generosity of our 2022 contributors, the names of whom will be revealed below as entries are published throughout the month. Bookmark this page and follow us on Twitter to make sure you don’t miss an entry—we’ll be running at least three a day, Monday through Thursday, through December 22.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
Delia Cai, author of Central Places
Elisa Gabbert, author of Normal Distance and The Unreality of Memory
Kashana Cauley, author of The Survivalists
Chantal V. Johnson, author of Post-Traumatic
Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers
Monica Heisey, author of Really Good, Actually
K-Ming Chang, author of Gods of Want and Bestiary
Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian and author of Figuring
Jenny Wu, staff writer for The Millions
Porochista Khakpour, author of The Brown Album
Emma Alpern, writer and senior copy editor at New York Magazine
Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone
Adam O’Fallon Price, staff writer for The Millions
Vanessa A. Bee, author of Home Bound
Kyle Lucia Wu, author of Win Me Something
Dan Kois, writer for Slate and author of Vintage Contemporaries
Laura Warrell, author of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm
Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual
Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker and author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon
Hannah Gold, critic and fiction writer
Ed Simon, staff writer for The Millions
Kevin Powell, author of Grocery Shopping with My Mother and The Kevin Powell Reader
Allegra Hyde, author of The Last Catastrophe and Eleutheria
Nick Moran, staff writer for The Millions
Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
Edan Lepucki, author of California and Woman No. 17
Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Sonia Jaffe Robbins, writer and contributing editor at Publishers Weekly
Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House and A Visit from the Goon Squad
Maud Newton, author of Ancestor Trouble
Terry Nguyen, senior writer at Dirt
Iyana Jones, editorial assistant at Publishers Weekly
Alana Pockros, editor at The Nation and Cleveland Review of Books
Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
Sophie Haigney, web editor at The Paris Review
Adam Dalva, senior fiction editor at Guernica
Clare Sestanovitch, author of Objects of Desire and managing editor at The Drift
Jamia Wilson, v-p and executive editor at Random House
Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Romantic Comedy and Prep
Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
Joseph Han, author of Nuclear Family
Il’ja Rákoš, staff writer at The Millions
Piper French, writer
Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different
Daisy Alioto, cofounder and CEO of Dirt
Stephen Dodson, creator of Language Hat
Summer Farah, associate book editor at Catapult
Elena Saavedra Buckley, associate editor at Harper’s and The Drift
Chloé Cooper Jones, author of Easy Beauty
Hafizah Augustus Geter, author of The Black Period
Maris Kreizman, books editor at Vulture
Krithika Varagur, editor at The Drift and author of The Call
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
