ARCHIVE: Favorite Non-Fiction Books of 2022

FAVORITE NON-FICTION 2022

As the partner to the Favorite Fiction books list, it’s time to hit you with the smaller, but very solid Favorite NON-FICTION books list of 2022. Like with the first book list, I’ve added an asterisk to the entries written by people I personally know. However, unlike the first list, that designation only applies to one entry, so I’m going to count it as a contender.

I’ll confess, I’ve been swinging back and forth with Honorable Mentions for this category, and it’s really come down to this: I either have zero HM’s, or everyone gets an HM participation trophy. In lieu of not writing the most excessive list ever, I’ll choose the former, and forego any Honorable Mentions on account of loving all of them in different, nearly equal ways.

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BRONZE MEDAL:

“The Scarlett Letters” by Jenny Nordbak

I almost chose not to include this on the list at all because I know some of my family members will likely read this post, but decided that was deeply disingenuous and disrespectful to myself, the author, and the spirit of the book.

The Scarlett Letters is a memoir by a former professional dominatrix in an LA fetish dungeon. The story recounts her time in that role, how she got it, why she chose to pursue that line of work, and what it meant in terms of her own sexuality and how she engaged with the world around her. It was a book that helped open my eyes a bit more to an entire industry, its clientele, and its workers.

But it’s not just informational. It’s funny, personal, and personable. The author recounts dozens of anecdotes from her life throughout the book, all of them wreathed in humor, disappointment, curiosity, self-exploration, grief, or another core human element that made the reading experience feel familiar and enjoyable.

I gifted the audiobook to a friend for a road trip, because she sounded interested, but also because the audio version is excellent, on the grounds of it being narrated by the author. Jenny’s natural speaking voice is deep and husky in a way that really works for this story. My friend put on the book with the tentative expectation that we’d listen for one, maybe two chapters. We listened to seven before the road trip ended and we had to stop.

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SILVER MEDAL:

“How to Be Perfect” by Michael Schur

This year, I watched the totality of a TV show called “The Good Place.” The chief mind behind The Good Place was Michael Schur (co-creator of Parks & Recreation), who, in wanting to tell a story about the afterlife, plummeted headlong into the study of philosophy so would be better equipped to write the narrative of the show.

How to Be Perfect is a layman’s guide to philosophy, told by a hilarious man who openly acknowledges that he only sort of understands philosophy, with equally hilarious footnotes provided by modern philosophy professors. On multiple occasions, the footnotes would rabbit trail into an argument between the two as they discussed some opinion or ethical quandary. Like whether or not the trolly problem is a redundant moral exercise, the hierarchy of how “jerky” philosophers could get, and the value (or lack thereof) of reading Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tracatus Logico-Philosophicus” and how many migraines it gave them due to how difficult it was to read.

It’s a book that is intentionally tongue-in-cheek with its title and simply seeks to provide a baseline to introduce the reader to different major philosophical ideas or problems. It earns its Silver Medal by doing this, while making you laugh so hard that you have to apologize to the other people on your redeye flight.

So, are we good? Why do most people think of themselves as good? What does it mean for your mind if you don’t think of yourself as good? What are the logical scaffolds that support deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism, and ubuntu? Can we enjoy great art made by awful people? How much money should I give to charity, and am I allowed to feel superior to others if I sacrifice more than them? What qualifies as self sacrifice? Why are all of us a disappointment to Immanual Kant? Why does Kant suck? Why isn’t he proud of me like my dad?

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GOLD MEDAL:

“I’m Glad My Mom Died” by Jennette McCurdy

This book made me finally acknowledge that one of my favorite sub-sub-genres of reading material is the category “famous people from my youth who were secretly miserable, but at least they’re funny now.”

There’s probably a significant number of people reading this post who have at least heard about Jennette McCurdy’s book, as it got quite a bit of high-profile traction earlier this year. And for good reason. McCurdy, child star from Nickelodeon’s modern classic “iCarly,” recounts the unpleasant essence of her life in her own words. The title is brutal and blunt, but also, I kinda get it.

Subjected to the oppressive whims and expectations of her domineering mother for most of her life, McCurdy tells of how her acting career began as an outlet for her mother’s vicarious aspirations, and how the family dynamic in their home did not set her up to cope with this in any healthy way. We are forced to watch as McCurdy steadily grows older, while being eternally infantilized by her mother (even into their late teenage years, she and her siblings would be forced to shower together, where her mother would personally clean them, for example), she falls in love with every wrong person, self sabotages her healing processes, and never fully understands who she is, where she’s going, or what reason she has for living.

I’m Glad My Mom Died is a blatantly therapeutic, retroactive interrogation of a young woman’s entire living memory, from the perspective of herself as a now much healthier (but far from gentle, if the incendiary title and hilariously irreverent cover art didn’t give that away) adult, as she hopes to air out not only her personal grievances, but some of the predatory allowances granted in Hollywood (Nickelodeon offered a substantial quantity of money to deter McCurdy from publishing this book. She flipped them the bird) and how we can justify our own prisons while we’re in them. It is a heavy, but smooth read, which sheds light on the corrosive social cultures within Hollywood, the psychological obliteration we can experience at the hands of people we love, and the grim, lopsided determination to succeed out of spite.

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EVERY NON-FICTION BOOK I READ IN 2022:

*The Scarlett Letters by Jenny Nordbak

The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris

How to Not Die Alone by Logan Ury

Attached by Amir Levine

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jeannette McCurdy

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Disrupting the Game by Reggie Fils Aime

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell