The Best Books of 2022… So Far!
Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel - This was the first book I read in 2022 and I’m still thinking about it 7 months later. Ninth Street Women chronicles the careers, commercial successes, and personal lives of women in the Abstract Expressionist movement from pioneer Lee Krasner in the late 1940s to those she paved the way for like Helen Frankenthaler in the later 1950s to early 1960s. My personal favorite was Elaine de Kooning’s life story. The book is packed with information, well researched, and a bit gossipy, making the 900+ page tome a fun read. If I had a time machine, 1950s-1960s East Village New York would be my first stop and this book is about as good as it gets until then.
Waiting for the Sun: A Rock ‘n’ Roll History of Los Angeles by Barney Hoskyns - Spanning five decades of music in LA from the 1940s through the 1990s, Waiting for the Sun was an honest, titillating, and unabashed romp through the great musical Wasteland of the West. Hoskyns is opinionated and at times a mite bit harsh of his subjects but this gives a book with an otherwise Silmarilic level of name-dropping a bit of humor. Included in the appendix is a playlist titled “Los Angeles in Song” which I’ve put into Spotify format for your enjoyment. If you’re drinking, take a shot every time Hoskyns says “Hollywood Babylon”.
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem - I don’t often read novels but when I do, I enjoy a good coming-of-age story more than anything else. This probably says a lot about my stunted emotional growth but that’s a topic for another time. Lethem is a great writer, painting a vivid picture of 1960s and 1970s Brooklyn, an inner city shithole where white nerd Dylan Ebdus befriends his black neighbor Mingus Rude and complexities abound. Written in a magical realist style similar to Murakami, the book is surprising, heartfelt, and immersive. It wasn’t quite what I expected when I first started reading it and that was something I came to love about the book by the end.
Stranger Than Kindness by Nick Cave - As if I needed another reason to be obsessed with Nick Cave, along comes Stranger Than Kindness. Less a proper book but more a collection of Cave’s journals, scrapbooks, collections, and detritus, Stranger Than Kindness gives the reader a glimpse into his creative practice. We see how he writes and edits his lyrics, what he values, and what he deems worth keeping. The end has a little exposition on some of the items. Reading this book prompted me to sign up for The Red Hand Files which has been amazing.
Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman - Chuck Klosterman is one of my favorite cultural commentators because he (like me) likes reality TV, rock music, and sports. I went down a bit of a Klosterman K-hole earlier this year, prompted by a desire to read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs which I read in high school and it flew right over my head in my cultural duncity. Reading it now wasn’t much more interesting but at least I could get the references. Killing Yourself to Live, however, reads more like a novel than a standard cultural commentary. We follow Chuck on a journalistic expedition to visit the places where various rock stars have given up the ghost. Along the way, we learn a lot about Chuck, his love quadrangle, and his music taste. Even though Klosterman tries to give us some sense of enlightened meaning, there really is a paucity of deeper philosophy in the book which I happen to appreciate. What better metaphor for modern American life than a meaningless, meandering road trip to look at the places long since irrelevant musicians died?
The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr - Now what would a book recommendations list by Sierra be without a depressing, sociological excursion through something we all have to do and can’t really do much about? Enter The Secret Life of Groceries a fascinating yet somewhat horrific look at how the food we eat ends up in our grocery stores. I really enjoyed the in-depth look each chapter took from commercial trucking and transport of goods to mom-and-pop brands trying to make it, to commercial agribusiness and farming. Like anything in modern America, the thin veneer of abundance and unlimited choice in our supermarkets is hiding a dark, dangerous, and exploitative reality behind the shelves.
Follow me on GoodReads to see more of what I’ve read this year and share what you’re reading. What are your top books of the year so far?
