Editor’s Note: This review is part of a new partnership between Santa Barbara Independent and California Review of Books. We are pleased to begin sharing these book reviews with our readers on a regular basis.
Ten Best Books of 2022
Our Reviewers’ Picks for the Best Books of the Year
While those familiar with other Best of 2022 lists will recognize some of the titles below, we hope the California Review of Books’ Top 10 will also nudge the curious to check out some lesser-known books. Once again, we found it was a great year to be a reader.
Hidden Cargoes by Chris Arthur
Hidden Cargoes showcases the work of one of the most deft practitioners of the art of the essay. Our reviewer, Walter Cummins, writes: “Hidden Cargoes — like Chris Arthur’s previous eight essay collections — is a book that can change your life, not so much your behaviors and beliefs but how you relate to the world around you. That is, to the objects in the room in which you read his pages and to all you encounter as you observe what passes through your immediate perceptions — a young woman’s ear when riding on a bus, long-eared owls in a thicket, an oystercatcher flying under a bridge, a tulip tree leaf, a photo snapped on a cruise ship.”
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom
Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the author’s husband wants to end his life through assisted suicide before the disease takes its terrifying toll, and he enlists his wife to take care of all the tedious and tortuous details. Our reviewer, David Starkey, writes: “Similar to a person facing their own mortality, In Love eschews the inessential. It is the sort of book — like John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, or Ann Hood’s Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, or Cory Taylor’s Dying: A Memoir — that is so gripping, and so honest about our greatest societal bête noire, that while you are reading it, everything but the narrative melts away to insignificance.”
