Reviewing my nonfiction reading for Nonfiction November makes things a little awkward when it comes to the year-end review, because it’s off by two months. So I decided to redo this post, counting from January through December.
Here again are the books I found most outstanding, slightly adjusted for 2022:
And my complete list by category, with links to blog post or Goodreads/StoryGraph review:
Biography and Memoir
- Writing My Wrongs
- A Girl from Yamhill
- My Own Two Feet
- What My Bones Know
- Inheritance
- C.S. Lewis: A Life
- Jack: A Life of CS Lewis
- Educated
- Midstream
- In Our Blood
- Red Comet
- Home Cooking
- A Time of Gifts
- I’m Glad My Mom Died
Reading the Theatre
Spirituality and Religion
- The Bible: A Biography
- Reflections on the Psalms
- First Steps in Christian Religious Renewal
- Writing the Sacred Journey
- Streams in the Wasteland
- Wilt Thou Be Made Whole?
- The Everything Judaism Book
- Jewish History
- The Rock, the Road, and the Rabbi
- Falling Upward (reread)
Cultural Commentary
Psychology
- The Language Instinct
- I Don’t Want To Talk About It (reread)
- Mother Hunger (audio)
- No Bad Parts
Science and Nature
Health
- Gut
- On Immunity
- Brain Maker
- The Good Gut
- When Food Is Love
- When Food Is Food and Love Is Love (audio)
- What’s Eating Us
- The Migraine Miracle
- Mind Over Medicine
- Kitchen Table Wisdom
- The Last Best Cure
- Breath
- The Myth of Normal
- Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve
I hardly ever read non-fiction, but the book by Amber and Lacey sounds great, mostly because I think Amber is a comic genius!
You should definitely read it then – or listen to them on the audio version.
What a good idea. I just decided that my non-fiction year goes from November to October, LOL.
Except for the Bible, I haven’t read any of your books but as a chronic migraine sufferer myself, I am very interested in The Migraine Miracle. Thanks for the recommendation.
If you’ve never tried an ancestral diet for your migraines, it’s worth a shot, although it didn’t work for me. The information was interesting.
I have to fix the Bible entry – I think we had this confusion before, it was “The Bible: A Biography” by Karen Armstrong that I read.
I really liked the two Beverly Cleary memoirs (and I think at least one of mine is autographed!). I would probably not have read Spare Oom if it hadn’t been for the Narnia group read, both of which I enjoyed.
The library where I work one day a month (alas, it is today, although it is cold out and I wish I could stay home) chose Braiding Sweetgrass for its Community One Read in 2022. I should ask one of my colleagues how that turned out.
Happy 2023!
The Cleary memoirs were surprising to me, as I didn’t expect her life to have so much sadness in it. But maybe that’s why she was able to relate to the emotional lives of children so well.