It’s that time of year again! We asked everyone at all three Third Place Books locations for their 10 favorite books that came out in 2022, collected the hundreds of books we loved this year, and compiled the ten books that appeared on the most lists.
So without further ado, here are the top ten books that Third Place Booksellers loved in 2022:
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Genre: Fiction
Price: $28.00
Audiobook at Libro.fm
Reading this book is like experiencing the best parts of growing up and art school and learning theory and finding community and breaking your heart and collaborating and falling in love all smashed into one story that's so big and so small it must be a life. It's a rare thing to hold a book in your hand that feels like the key to another world, and you want to give that world to everyone you meet. Tomorrow is that key. — Bookseller Kitri (Seward Park)
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Genre: Fiction
Price: $26.99
Audiobook at Libro.fm
"...and so I held my breath and thought about screaming and imagined the ocean coming to an end."
I can't even with this. What right has Julia Armfield to write such a soul-stirring piece of fiction? This book eddied the dark waters in my stomach and squeezed my heart until it ached and lolled limp in my chest. You are given just enough, the rest is laid vast, like the pitch black of the endless sea.
— Bookseller Dean (Lake Forest Park)
Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth
Genre: Horror
Price: $17.00
Audiobook at Libro.fm
Everything starts normal enough, you know, a hypothetical hot tub full of shit kind of normal. But then everything begins to ooze and build and she just wants to be the perfect wife, the perfect woman. Kill the bacteria, save your family. Buy the healthy snacks, save your family. Do whatever you can, save your family. Enjoy with jellied salmon, Chicken à la King, and a wine cooler or five. A quirky, gruesome, fresh horror that will rival the classics.
The trashier (in a good way) cousin of A Certain Hunger and the 60's housewife sister of Nightbitch — Bookseller Emily (Lake Forest Park)
Liberation Day by George Saunders
Genre: Fiction
Price: $28.00
Audiobook at Libro.fm
New collection by the great short story writer hovers on the dangerous edge of hilarity and horror. Settings and characterizations are weird in the best sense, and with such style! -- arch, taut, formal, recursive. Mid-century names and habits give the stories an out-of-timeness. In many, perspective seems to pour like fluid from one character to another.
I can’t pick a favorite, but the title story, Liberation Day, was vivid to me, with a “sound wall” and the creation of an artform for entertainment in which captive storytellers and aleatoric singers perform a fearsome first person account of Custer’s Last Stand to guests who are uncomfortable with their complicity (unless the performance is good). Using an upgraded pipe to stored information, our protagonist is still an artist who asks, “What is lush? What is bold, what is daring? In which direction lies maximum richness, abundance, delight?" There is compassion here for the confused and complicit, but Saunders leaves justice out of it. — Bookseller Laura (Ravenna)
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
Genre: Biography
Price: $27.99
Audiobook at Libro.fm
The hype for this book is real. Jennette is reckoning with her fraught childhood, her difficult relationship with her mother, with an industry that tears so many kids apart, and the fame that comes with it. We’re excited to see what she writes next. — Bookseller Rosa (Third Place Books)
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire
Genre: Poetry
Price: $17.00
Audiobook from Libro.fm
This book was recommended to me by a friend and now I wish to recommend it to all of you, friends! Shire's words are monumental, compelling, heartbreaking, and simply incredible. You may need a moment to stare at a wall, in silence, after finishing this. Read this then give it to a friend to read as well. — Bookseller Sofia B. (Ravenna)
Town of Babylon by Alejandro Valera
Genre: Fiction
Price: $27.00
It's only March but this may just be the best book I've read in 2022! A beautiful novel about coming home, confronting the past, and embracing the future. This book put me in ALL MY FEELS and I haven’t been the same since.
— Bookseller Rosa (Lake Forest Park)
The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Genre: Biography
Price: $30.00
Audiobook on Libro.fm
In this memoir, Ingrid Rojas Contreras examines the violence that has impacted her family since the Spanish invasion of pre-colonial Colombia, and the perseverance of her indigenous heritage in the magical practices that have been carried through the (male) generations. Meditations on memory, trauma, beliefs, and history are both lyrical and thought-provoking, especially when Rojas Contreras laser focuses on her relationship with her mercurial mother and their mirror-image experiences with amnesia and supernatural experiences. — Bookseller Sarah C. (Lake Forest Park)
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton
Genre: Graphica
Price: $39.95
Kate Beaton loves nothing quite like she loves her hometown. And when your hometown is the former factory town of Cape Breton, loving is forever intertwined with leaving. For Kate, this means leaving for the oil sands of Alberta to work off her college debt, a journey undertaken by a naive young woman who won't come back the same.
Ducks is many things: a chronicle of the failures of capital, a meditation on the things we do to keep our bodies and minds intact, and even, occasionally, a workplace comedy. But above all, it is Kate's love letter to Cape Breton and to the people who yearn for it. No one in this book is one-dimensional, with only a few clear heroes and villains. Everyone is intensely and unflinchingly human. Beaton simply lays out the pieces for us to look at, and the picture is one of heartbreak and beauty. — Bookseller Lou (Seward Park)
Dr. No by Percival Everett
Genre: Fiction
Price: $16.00
Audiobook at Libro.fm
If you've read Percival Everett before, then you know (No) what I mean when I say that there is Nothing that you've read that is like this book. It is a hilarious, page-turning, philosophical spy novel in which Nothing literally happens. Nothing else I can say could do justice to this small masterpiece.
— Bookseller Robert (Lake Forest Park)
