In summer of 2020, I quit my job to read and travel full time, hoping to figure some things out about myself and round out my, well, let’s call it idiosyncratic, education. In November of 2021, I started working again part time, and over the last year I’ve been making strides towards a more regular social life and getting involved in my local community in Rochester, NY. Looking back on my reading for 2022, while not as impressive as 2021, given the other priorities I’ve started to pull up it’s definitely my strongest reading year so far.

I read twenty-eight books this year (two being re-reads) for a total of 7,326 pages, with an average length of 271 pages, along with several essays not included in the total (the shortest work included, at 80 pages, definitely straddles the line between book and essay). Of these books, 5 were fiction, and the rest spread around the world of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. About half were chosen as part of a deliberate and long-term reading plan; about half were picked up on random interest or recommendation, which I find more enjoyable and ultimately productive than sticking rigidly to a chronological list. Some longer works I have been working through this year will ultimately fall in next year’s count, even though most of the reading happened in 2022.

Several themes for this year:

• Gradually moving away from a strictly philosophical focus by adding works with a historical and anthropological focus. Philosophy remains a strong interest, but now tempered by a desire to ground myself in the concrete and practical.
• Still a whole lot of dead white men. Definitely something I want to start to move away from next year, specifically by reading third world and anti-colonial primary sources; but will probably continue to exert a preference for the dead over contemporary writers. Fanon, Mbembe, and W.E.B. Du Bois are top of mind here (a list exclusively of men; there’s only so much you can do, given my areas of interest, but also happy to receive recommendations).
• Deleuze continues to be an excellent entry point into the philosophical cannon; following his fixations has consistently borne fruit, so I expect I will continue use him as a guide to the right thinkers and problematics.

My favorite books of 2022 all also happen to be books I expect to refer back to again and again over the rest of my life. Despite the late capitalist sense of perpetual novelty-as-boredom, I find these works to be rather timeless (or perhaps untimely) for the historical moment of neoliberal austerity and intransigence that stubbornly persists in the global north, despite left and right attempts to restart history. Like any truly historical moment, it’s hard to say whether the postmodernist turn in the operations of power and control will ultimately give way to a renewed struggle between ideologies. But even if it does, I can’t see the reading I’ve done this year ever failing to be a useful referent in understanding the terrain for solidarity and action in the Anthropocene.

Alright, enough, here are my favorites of the books I read in 2022:

Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Henri Lefebvre⌗

A beautiful explication of problems without solutions, a grand narrative which sets the the scene for our historical situation by reference to three thinkers who seem to haunt us, most often invisibly. More often it seems the triad of modernity goes “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud”; the tension between Hegel and Marx places the emphasis on the question of philosophy’s role in this moment. Does thinking, like the owl of minerva, take flight only at twilight? Can philosophy change the world, or can it only serve either as simpering justification or lame critique of a social situation perpetually in advance of it?

The attempt to construct a grand narrative of “our” thought, “our” situation often pulled me up short; it’s a rather outdated, phallogocentric mode of critique. But the quality of his analysis, the sheer breadth of his knowledge of the subject matter, and the value of looking at our present situation from a vantage point now impossible more than make up for it.

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean Francois Lyotard⌗

You get two thinkers in one with this one: Lyotard makes heavy use of late Wittgenstein in describing how it became both impossible and unnecessary to produce narratives justifying what exactly it is we are doing with this whole late capitalism thing. Or rather, we produce them constantly, but it is irrelevant whether they are believed, even by the people who utter them. Like some feat of black magic, postmoderns discover a society can cohere with no other universal value than efficiency.

I found this text to be extremely accessible, given the subject matter. Lyotard is an absolute pleasure to read, never boring, and so far I’ve always found him to be writing about something worth thinking deeply about. I expect I’ll recommend this book to many people in years to come.

Ethics, Benedict de Spinoza⌗

Written in a somewhat awkward style, and lending itself to determinist readings which distract from the real beauty of the construction, I nevertheless see why Deleuze holds Spinoza in such high regard. A courageous and life-affirming thinker. My paperback is already well worn, and I expect to reread it regularly through the coming decades.

An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, Michael Heinrich⌗

Absolutely essential reading. Clears up common misreadings and misattributions, acknowledges difficulties within their proper historical context, and serves as an excellent starting point for understanding how Marx’s categories apply today. Re-reading as I work through Capital myself.

The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow⌗

Full of inspiring anthropological clues to societies which maintained complex organization without permanent classes and domination. The crux of their argument is that, contrary to our evolutionary stageist myths of the inevitable passage from savagery to barbarism to modern states, humans as far back as we can observe have been political creatures, often organizing themselves in conscious opposition to domination. We usually think of the opposite of civilization (always taken to be synonymous with massive inequality and coercion) either in terms of Hobbes or Rousseau; either an endless war of all against all, or as an innocent garden of Eden, free of the ills of modern complexity and convenience. This book undermines both narratives, which ultimately serve the same end: to convince us that the freedom to reorganize ourselves is and ought to be placed out of our hands, by economic and social necessity. I’ll be referring back to it for inspiration for an upcoming fantasy tabletop campaign.

The Accursed Share, Vol 1, Georges Bataille⌗

I did not care for Story of the Eye when I first read it; I don’t know why that tends to be the default recommendation for getting started with Battaile. Now, however, I get what he’s about, and I love it. Just the right blend of the abstract and the concrete, extremely quotable, and exactly the kind of pessimistic optimism which will be needed to make it through ecological crisis.