maureen corrigan book reviews 2022

Maureen Corrigan's favorite books of the year: 10 disparate reads for a hectic 2022

Some years, my best books list falls into a pattern: like a year that's dominated by dystopian fiction or stand-out memoirs. But, as perhaps befits this hectic year, the best books I read in 2022 sprawl all over the place in subject and form. Here are 10 superb titles from 2022:

Copyright 2022 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air .

Maureen Corrigan's favorite books of the year: 10 disparate reads for a hectic 2022

Some years, my best books list falls into a pattern: like a year that's dominated by dystopian fiction or stand-out memoirs. But, as perhaps befits this hectic year, the best books I read in 2022 sprawl all over the place in subject and form. Here are 10 superb titles from 2022:

Copyright 2022 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air .

Maureen Corrigan's favorite books of the year: 10 disparate reads for a hectic 2022

Some years, my best books list falls into a pattern: like a year that's dominated by dystopian fiction or stand-out memoirs. But, as perhaps befits this hectic year, the best books I read in 2022 sprawl all over the place in subject and form. Here are 10 superb titles from 2022:

Copyright 2022 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air .

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Maureen corrigan's favorite books of the year: 10 disparate reads for a hectic 2022.

Some years, my best books list falls into a pattern: like a year that's dominated by dystopian fiction or stand-out memoirs. But, as perhaps befits this hectic year, the best books I read in 2022 sprawl all over the place in subject and form. Here are 10 superb titles from 2022:

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Poets, patriots, immigrants and robber barons are among the varied subjects of the books on Maureen Corrigan's 10 best list of 2022. Here's Maureen.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Some years, my best books list falls into a pattern, like a year that's dominated by dystopian fiction or standout memoirs. But as perhaps befits this hectic year, the best books I read in 2022 sprawl all over the place in subject and form. Let's start with nonfiction. Ada Calhoun's "Also A Poet" is a moving account of her attempt to connect with her elusive father, art critic Peter Schjeldahl, by trying to complete his abandoned biography of the beloved New York poet Frank O'Hara. Calhoun recalls how, one day, in the basement of the East Village apartment house where her parents lived for decades, she stumbled upon a treasure trove of cassette tapes from the 1970s - interviews that her father conducted with O'Hara's painter friends and fellow poets. Ultimately, the book Calhoun writes isn't an O'Hara biography either. It's a genre-defying memoir and work of criticism, as well as a love letter to O'Hara's poetry and to the city that inspired it.

Renowned critic Margo Jefferson's book, "Constructing A Nervous System," is also a virtuoso fusion of different forms - memoir, quick riffs and cultural criticism. As one of the few prominent African American female critics of her generation, Jefferson tells us she was always calculating - not always well - how to achieve, succeed as a symbol and a self. The pieces collected here range from a sharp consideration of the significance of Ella Fitzgerald's sweat during her television performances to the challenges Jefferson, herself, faced in teaching Willa Cather's work, along with its racist passages, to her majority-white college students. I wanted them to feel chagrined, says Jefferson. And I wanted them to be disappointed. That last response is one I'm certain Jefferson's own readers will not experience.

Two works of narrative history stood out for me this year. "The Facemaker" by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris tells the story of British surgeon Harold Gillies' pioneering work in reconstructing the faces of some of the estimated 280,000 men who suffered facial trauma during World War I. Stacey Schiff's biography of Samuel Adams, called "The Revolutionary," is a timely account of how the colonists came to think of themselves not as Bostonians or Virginians, but as Americans, and how Samuel Adams, the so-called forgotten founder, played an essential role in that transformation.

On to fiction. Dani Shapiro's profound new novel, "Signal Fires," jumps around in time to piece together the story of a car accident, two families and what persists even after neighborhoods change, people grow old and collective memories fade. Jonathan Escoffery's debut collection of short stories, "If I Survive You," overwhelmed me with its originality, heart, wit and sweeping social vision. The you Escoffery's mostly Jamaican-born immigrant characters are trying to survive is America itself. Survival of sorts is also the subject of Claire Keegan's matchless novella "Foster," in which a young Irish girl is palmed off by her parents for a summer with relatives she doesn't know. Keegan is a writer who revels in emotional tension, the suspense of the unspoken, the held breath.

A cast-off young person, is also the main character in "Young Mungo" by Douglas Stuart, which takes readers deep into the working-class world of Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1990s. There, a 15-year-old Protestant boy named Mungo falls in love with a Catholic boy. If that premise sounds sentimental, consider that the outer frame of Stuart's novel is a suspense story not just about innocence lost, but slaughtered. "Trust" by Hernan Diaz is an ingeniously constructed historical novel with a postmodern point, namely that readers can't wholly trust any of the slippery stories we read here, especially the opening one about the rise of a Wall Street tycoon much like Charles Schwab or J.P. Morgan. Diaz makes a dazzling connection throughout this novel between the fantastic realms of fiction and finance.

I was reluctant to put Elizabeth Strout's latest novel, "Lucy By The Sea," on this best-of-the-year list. After all, her novel "Oh William!" was on last year's list. But it's no use to hold out against Strout. She's too good. "Lucy By The Sea" transports Strout's familiar heroine, Lucy Barton, out of New York City and into a ramshackle house in Maine with her ex-husband, William. The two shelter in place there during the worst months of the pandemic, months Lucy recalls as having about them a feeling of diffuse grief and mutedness. Strout's spare sentences and her simple pacing constitute her own idiosyncratic take on Hemingway's famous iceberg theory, in which a depth of meaning and emotion lurks beneath the surface of the words on the page. In contrast, I'll just be direct and say that all 10 of these disparate books of 2022 are superb.

DAVIES: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. You can see her complete list on our website, freshair.npr.org. On tomorrow's show, how should a country memorialize its past sins? Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith has written about how American landmarks deal with slavery. In a new cover story, he explores how Germany has commemorated the Holocaust. The article is "Monuments To The Unthinkable." I hope you can join us.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.

(SOUNDBITE OF PROJECT TRIO'S "SHIR") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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'Entitlement' disappoints — 'Leave the World Behind' was a tough act to follow

Rumaan Alam’s bestselling novel Leave the World Behind was an inspired swirl of suspense, social commentary and apocalyptic disaster story. Given that it was published in the early fall of 2020, the novel eerily coincided with the “this-can’t-be-happening” atmosphere of denial and dread that prevailed during the first year of the pandemic. As a superb novel that unintentionally met its moment, Leave the World Behind is an almost impossible act to follow.

Maybe that’s why Entitlement , Alam’s just-published novel, is set earlier in the before-times of the Obama administration — what Alam’s main character, a 33-year-old Black woman named Brooke, thinks to herself as, “the good luck of a boring moment in the world’s long history.”

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And so she does, whipping out her corporate credit card to buy $1,000-dollar-heels at Saks; creatively fiddling with figures on a mortgage application to qualify for the kind of apartment that, as Brooke thinks to herself: “the place would be the thing to which she could tether her life. It would be her spouse, hold close her secrets, promise a steadfastness that people could not. People failed. The real estate market did not.”

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As a target for social criticism, Asher — the self-congratulatory old, white philanthropist being chauffeured around the city in his Bentley — is a character as broad and flat as a Times Square billboard.

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Maureen Corrigan's favorite books of the year: 10 disparate reads for a hectic 2022

November 30, 2022 12:02 PM

• Maureen Corrigan

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Some years, my best books list falls into a pattern: like a year that's dominated by dystopian fiction or stand-out memoirs. But, as perhaps befits this hectic year, the best books I read in 2022 sprawl all over the place in subject and form. Here are 10 superb titles from 2022:

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Maureen Corrigan's favorite books of the year: 10 disparate reads for a hectic 2022

Some years, my best books list falls into a pattern: like a year that's dominated by dystopian fiction or stand-out memoirs. But, as perhaps befits this hectic year, the best books I read in 2022 sprawl all over the place in subject and form. Here are 10 superb titles from 2022:

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Maureen Corrigan's 10 Books That Will Connect You In A Socially Distant Year

Sealed into our little Zoom boxes, masked when we're in contact with others, it's easy to feel separated from the world during the pandemic. These...

There's an underlying quality of solitude about this pandemic experience. Sealed into our little Zoom boxes, masked when we're in contact with others, many of us feel separated from the world by split-second time delays and a thin layer of lint.

Books break through. They enter directly into our heads, occasionally our hearts. Here are 10 of the books that broke through for me during this tough year.

Leave The World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

Leave The World Behind is an extraordinary, shape-shifting novel that begins, as so many stories do, with a journey: A white family is driving out to an Airbnb in the Hamptons on Long Island for vacation. What begins as a domestic tale soon morphs into a comedy of manners about race, when the Black couple who owns the Airbnb unexpectedly turns up. Slowly, that comedy of manners sours into a vision of global disaster that Alam's characters and readers alike will keep denying. Sound familiar?

Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

McBride is such a buoyant poet of a novelist that he could write a book about paper clips and I'd read it. Fortunately, Deacon King Kong is about so much more: Set in a Brooklyn housing project in the 1960s and focused on the apparently random murder of a neighborhood drug dealer, the novel captures the rough-edged communal life of a vanished New York.

The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

The Cold Millions was one of two vivid historical novels that carried me away this year. Walter, who's one of my favorite novelists, centers his tale on the free-speech demonstrations that erupted in Spokane, Wa., in 1910 and 1911, and pitted police against transient workers, many of whom identified as Wobblies. The story is reminiscent of sweeping novels by the likes of Herman Wouk and Howard Fast, tellers of big tales about the forgotten foot soldiers of the past.

The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

The Pull of the Stars is set in a maternity ward in 1918, in Dublin, a city hollowed out by the Spanish Flu, the first World War and the 1916 Irish Uprising. Donoghue gives us a cityscape of empty schools and cafes, and the ubiquity of masks, here quaintly described as "bluntly pointed ... like the beaks of unfamiliar birds." This is an engrossing and inadvertently topical story about health care workers inside small rooms fighting to preserve life.

Interior Chinatown

by Charles Yu

Yu's novel, which just won the National Book Award , is an inventive satire about racial stereotyping, particularly of Asian Americans. His main character, Willis Wu, lives in a rooming house and has a bit part in a TV cop show, called Black and White . About his career in show business, Willis tells us:

First you have to work your way up. Starting from the bottom, it goes: 5. Background Oriental Male 4. Dead Asian Man [All the way up to the pinnacle:] Kung Fu Guy. Image: Grove Atlantic

But as Yu dramatizes, even "Kung Fu Guy" is outmatched by the crushing perceptions of white society .

Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

Casey Peabody, the 31-year-old main character of Writers & Lovers , aspires to be a novelist. In this story, King captures the chronic low-level panic of taking a leap into the artsy unknown — and the cost of sticking with the same dream for, perhaps, too long.

The Searcher

by Tana French

Mysteries, as always, kept me sane-ish this year and the best one I read was French's stand-alone suspense tale. A Chicago police detective moves to the rural west of Ireland and finds that evil follows wherever he goes. The beautiful and menacing landscape of The Searcher may make you feel better about spending more time indoors.

by Isabel Wilkerson

Caste is, deservedly, one of this year's big books to ruminate over and argue about. Wilkerson's central insight — that possibility in America is largely pre-determined by a racial caste system — is dramatized through what's become her signature style: argumentation through vivid anecdotes and charged metaphors.

We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

Cooper presents a meticulously researched account of the murder of a female grad student that took place at Harvard in 1969 and remained unsolved until two years ago. In Cooper's narrative, the sexism and elitism of academia are the culprits that still remain at large.

Memorial Drive

by Natasha Trethewey

The violent death that poet Trethewey writes about in her harrowing memoir is that of her own mother, who was murdered by her stepfather when Trethewey was 19. Memorial Drive is about memory, race and the "phantom ache" that can't be laid to rest. Of all the books I read this year, this one was emotionally the hardest — and the one that felt most crucial to take in.

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Maureen Corrigan's 10 Books That Will Connect You In A Socially Distant Year

Maureen Corrigan

There's an underlying quality of solitude about this pandemic experience. Sealed into our little Zoom boxes, masked when we're in contact with others, many of us feel separated from the world by split-second time delays and a thin layer of lint.

Books break through. They enter directly into our heads, occasionally our hearts. Here are 10 of the books that broke through for me during this tough year.

Leave The World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

Leave The World Behind is an extraordinary, shape-shifting novel that begins, as so many stories do, with a journey: A white family is driving out to an Airbnb in the Hamptons on Long Island for vacation. What begins as a domestic tale soon morphs into a comedy of manners about race, when the Black couple who owns the Airbnb unexpectedly turns up. Slowly, that comedy of manners sours into a vision of global disaster that Alam's characters and readers alike will keep denying. Sound familiar?

Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

McBride is such a buoyant poet of a novelist that he could write a book about paper clips and I'd read it. Fortunately, Deacon King Kong is about so much more: Set in a Brooklyn housing project in the 1960s and focused on the apparently random murder of a neighborhood drug dealer, the novel captures the rough-edged communal life of a vanished New York.

The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

The Cold Millions was one of two vivid historical novels that carried me away this year. Walter, who's one of my favorite novelists, centers his tale on the free-speech demonstrations that erupted in Spokane, Wa., in 1910 and 1911, and pitted police against transient workers, many of whom identified as Wobblies. The story is reminiscent of sweeping novels by the likes of Herman Wouk and Howard Fast, tellers of big tales about the forgotten foot soldiers of the past.

The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

The Pull of the Stars is set in a maternity ward in 1918, in Dublin, a city hollowed out by the Spanish Flu, the first World War and the 1916 Irish Uprising. Donoghue gives us a cityscape of empty schools and cafes, and the ubiquity of masks, here quaintly described as "bluntly pointed ... like the beaks of unfamiliar birds." This is an engrossing and inadvertently topical story about health care workers inside small rooms fighting to preserve life.

Interior Chinatown

by Charles Yu

Yu's novel, which just won the National Book Award , is an inventive satire about racial stereotyping, particularly of Asian Americans. His main character, Willis Wu, lives in a rooming house and has a bit part in a TV cop show, called Black and White . About his career in show business, Willis tells us:

First you have to work your way up. Starting from the bottom, it goes: 5. Background Oriental Male 4. Dead Asian Man [All the way up to the pinnacle:] Kung Fu Guy. Enlarge this image Grove Atlantic Grove Atlantic

But as Yu dramatizes, even "Kung Fu Guy" is outmatched by the crushing perceptions of white society .

Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

Casey Peabody, the 31-year-old main character of Writers & Lovers , aspires to be a novelist. In this story, King captures the chronic low-level panic of taking a leap into the artsy unknown — and the cost of sticking with the same dream for, perhaps, too long.

The Searcher

by Tana French

Mysteries, as always, kept me sane-ish this year and the best one I read was French's stand-alone suspense tale. A Chicago police detective moves to the rural west of Ireland and finds that evil follows wherever he goes. The beautiful and menacing landscape of The Searcher may make you feel better about spending more time indoors.

by Isabel Wilkerson

Caste is, deservedly, one of this year's big books to ruminate over and argue about. Wilkerson's central insight — that possibility in America is largely pre-determined by a racial caste system — is dramatized through what's become her signature style: argumentation through vivid anecdotes and charged metaphors.

We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

Check Out NPR's Book Concierge

NPR's Book Concierge returns with 380+ new books handpicked by NPR staff and critics — including recommendations from Maureen Corrigan and Fresh Air staffers Seth Kelley, Kayla Lattimore and Molly Seavy-Nesper. Click to find your next great read. NPR hide caption

NPR's Book Concierge returns with 380+ new books handpicked by NPR staff and critics — including recommendations from Maureen Corrigan and Fresh Air staffers Seth Kelley, Kayla Lattimore and Molly Seavy-Nesper. Click to find your next great read.

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Cooper presents a meticulously researched account of the murder of a female grad student that took place at Harvard in 1969 and remained unsolved until two years ago. In Cooper's narrative, the sexism and elitism of academia are the culprits that still remain at large.

Memorial Drive

by Natasha Trethewey

The violent death that poet Trethewey writes about in her harrowing memoir is that of her own mother, who was murdered by her stepfather when Trethewey was 19. Memorial Drive is about memory, race and the "phantom ache" that can't be laid to rest. Of all the books I read this year, this one was emotionally the hardest — and the one that felt most crucial to take in.