The Best (and worst) books I read in 2022

As in 2021 and 2020, the title says it all. But this time around, I read so many great books in the last year that it was extremely hard to narrow them down, so the list is longer than normal. Of the 66 books I read in 2022, the following stand out as particularly good or noteworthy.

(And by the way, if you love books as much as I do, make sure to follow me on GoodReads.)

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions - Jason Hickel

It’s no secret that we live in a world of grotesque inequality. The Divide taught me that it’s worse than I thought - and it’s completely changed the way I think about inequality and global poverty.

Hickel makes a convincing case that - contrary to the optimistic narratives promulgated by the likes of Steven Pinker - global inequality and poverty are very, very bad, and getting worse. Colonialism played a role (to put it mildly), but more enlightening to me was Hickel’s analysis of how things are fixed today - of how the international financial system is rigged to keep poor countries poor for the rich’s benefit. By Hickel’s account there’s simply no way under the current paradigm for “developing” countries to ever become “developed” - and the details are truly criminal.

I can’t do justice here to how many shocking and appalling things I learned from The Divide; all I know is that everyone should read it - especially those who, like me, enjoyed Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.

(I also read Hickel’s newer book, Less is More, which is about “degrowth” and the need to move away from economic growth as a measure of societal success. It’s a good accompaniment to The Divide and I recommend them both - but start with The Divide.)

The Long Emergency - James Howard Kunstler

What are we going to do when the fossil fuels run out? Maybe we’ll transition smoothly to a net-zero utopia, but The Long Emergency takes a less optimistic position: that, essentially, we’re screwed. Everything we love is a flash in the pan fueled by the colossal-scale burning of hydrocarbons - and the idea that we’ll be able to continue anything resembling our current lifestyles using some combination of wind, solar, hydrogen or nuclear power is a delusional fantasy that won’t survive contact with the laws of physics. When the oil and gas run dry, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and it may be coming soon.

Depressing much? The Long Emergency came out in 2005, and the worst of Kunstler’s predictions have not yet come to pass, but even if he’s completely wrong then this book still gave me a hell of a lot to think about. I’d recommend The Long Emergency to anyone who’s interested in thinking more than five minutes ahead into the future.

Winter is Coming - Garry Kasparov

I have nothing to say about Ukraine except the obvious (Putin is a villain, the invasion is condemnable, our corporate overlords find war extremely profitable.) But I learned a lot from this book by dissident grandmaster Garry Kasparov. The subtitle is Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, and… well, I don’t need to explain why that’s relevant, do I?

Winter is Coming was published in 2015, and reading it in 2022 one can only think we might have avoided a lot of trouble if we’d listened to Kasparov earlier. I found him utterly convincing.

Indian Givers - Jack Weatherford

Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and The Making of the Modern World is a book that completely mindfucked my understanding of history when I read it about ten years ago. But I only found out recently - hat tip to Ryan Holiday - that Weatherford has an older book about Native Americans, and damn it’s good. Holiday explains it better than I can:

It’s very rare that I read a book where there is nothing in it that I at least hadn’t heard about before, but that’s what I felt was happening on page after page of this book. Weatherford talks about [indigenous Americans’] breakthroughs in agriculture, their breakthroughs in building, their breakthroughs in hunting, animal husbandry, all these things that you didn’t know about. … Weatherford is a master of making poorly understood (or misunderstood) cultures inspiring and relatable.

A related book I read in 2022 was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown’s classic history of the displacement and subjugation of Native Americans in the late 19th century. It’s not super readable - I found the writing style quite dry - but it’s important history and more people should know these details. (Did you know that the largest mass execution in American history was of 38 Dakota people in 1862?)

I can’t resist another recommendation: Charles Mann’s 1491: The Americas Before Columbus. I read that one long before 2022, but as long as I’m on this topic it’s too good to not mention.

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Some honourable mentions:

• Unmasked by Ian Miller is worth a read if you need 200 pages of data and graphs to understand that COVID mask mandates don’t work. Although if you still haven’t figured that one out by yourself, you must have the mask over your eyes.

• Did COVID come from a lab? After reading Viral by Alina Chan & Matt Ridley examines the evidence, I’d say: probably. If you don’t read the book then at least read this review of it by Scott Aaronson.

• When you’re done with The Long Emergency, pick up a copy of Fred Pearche’s When the Rivers Run Dry. The somewhat clunky subtitle is Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century, and that says it all, doesn’t it? Worth a read if you feel like you don’t have enough reasons to be pessimistic.

• Remember that time when Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of its western neighbour and got bogged down in a savage conflict that defied all expectations? I’m talking, of course, about Finland in 1939 - and I really enjoyed A Frozen Hell by William Trotter, a gripping history of this strangely forgotten chapter of the Second World War. (No prizes for spotting the historical parallels.)

• Did you know that the word “loot” comes from Hindi? Can you guess why? That’s just one of many facts I learned from Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera, a short but incisive take on the British Empire and its legacy. File this one under “books that should be handed out to schoolchildren.”

• I’ve read most of the popular personal finance books, and I think that almost all of them are worthless. So I was surprised by how much value I got from The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Highly recommended.

Argh, there are so many more. Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel - which incidentally also exists as a Channel 4 documentary that’s well worth an hour of your time. War by Sebastian Junger (and the related film, Restrepo). Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje. All are excellent. Read them!

And finally, a few books I read in 2022 that didn’t impress me so much:

• Akala’s Natives wasn’t terrible, but I found it dishonest at times, and it mostly just felt like the author was writing a love letter to his own intelligence. Empireland was a million times better.

• After reading The Long Emergency I immediately bought a copy of Kunstler’s more recent book, Living in the Long Emergency - and was disappointed. It adds little that’s new - which is strange considering how many new things have happened since 2005 - and much of it is already irrelevant, unless you still care about analysis of the 2020 American presidential primaries. Not recommended.

• I liked Peter Zeihan’s The Accidental Superpower - a 2014 book that’s received renewed attention lately for some prescient things it said about Russia and Ukraine - but I thought his new book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, was hundreds of pages too long, obnoxiously written, and generally not worth the time it took to read. I wrote a longer review here, but the important point is that if you watch this presentation, you don’t need to read the book.

That wraps it up. Here’s to a book-filled 2023. 🥂