Favorites books and other content I consumed in 2022

Fiction

• Children of Ruin: author Adrian Tchaikovsky continues to invent interesting answers to the question: what would sapient descendants of other Earth species be like? (review)
• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: excellent prose recounts an eccentric old woman's struggles with bitterness about her community's apathy toward animals, in the midst of a murder investigation (review)
• Leech: a deliciously atmospheric gothic horror novel starring a parasitic hivemind (review)
• Life Ceremony: twisted stories from the unique mind of Sayaka Murata (review)
• Pachinko: follows four generations of Koreans through life in 20th-century Japan (review)
• The Wayfarers series (1, 2, 3, 4 - though I didn’t love #3): heartwarming personal stories in a space-opera setting (reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4)

Honorable mentions: Good Morning, Midnight (review), The Echo Wife (review), The Lonely Hearts Hotel (review), The Long Earth (review)

Nonfiction

• The Age of Em: a mind-blowing exercise in imagining the consequences of hypothetical brain-upload technology (review)
• The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion: includes great explanations of relativity (review)
• Brain on Fire: a terrifying account of a young woman who experiences psychotic episodes and radical personality changes seemingly out of nowhere (review)
• The Cuckoo’s Egg: a surprisingly gripping story of a computer administrator trying to track down a hacker in the late 80s (review)
• The Genetic Lottery: great explanations of how we know what we know about genetics (review)
• Persepolis: a heartbreaking, heartwarming, funny, and fascinating memoir of life during and after the Iranian Revolution (review)
• The Status Game: a useful perspective on the question of what the hell is wrong with us all (review)
• What We Owe the Future: a case that we should, and can, take action to safeguard the wellbeing of our distant descendants (review)

Honorable mentions: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear (review), Don’t Panic (review), Ejaculate Responsibly (review), Logicomix (review), The Psychology of Money (review)

Video games

• Dead Cells: this helped fill the void left when I stopped playing Hades; it’s my favorite 2D roguelike so far
• Guacamelee 1 & 2: two excellent metroidvanias set in "the Mexiverse"
• Inscryption: a truly creepy roguelike built around a deceptively simple card game
• Neon White: a 3D platformer that makes you retry each short stage over and over until you can lose yourself in the flow of perfect, precise movements
• Outer Wilds: an exploration and puzzle game that evokes feelings of freedom, awe, and mystery like nothing else I've encountered
• Rogue Legacy 1 & 2: two fun, whimsical 2D roguelikes
• Slay the Spire: honestly the most addictive game I've played in years

Honorable mentions: Cult of the Lamb, Death’s Door, Risk of Rain 1 & 2, Tails of Iron

Miscellany

I don’t watch enough shows or movies or listen to enough different podcasts to merit separate sections for those, but there are a few I want to highlight.

• Centaurworld: a delightfully absurd musical cartoon ( ♫...breeeeeeathe in a bag, you inhale you exhale, my name is Glendale…. ♫)
• Dune (2021): a rare example of an epic sci-fi film that really lives up to its potential
• Knowledge Fight: a podcast devoted to deconstructing InfoWars; I particularly recommend the “Formulaic Objections” episodes, where they discuss depositions from the Sandy Hook trials