My Year[s] of Reading: 2022-2024

Quiet reading on a special weekend away in Tasmania.

I wrote an overview of my 'year of reading' in 2021, planned to do something similar year on year, started a half-hearted draft in 2022... and then never maintained my intention.

To allow myself grace, 2022 was the year I returned to full-time study alongside working full-time, so I believe I'm allowed to drop the ball in some areas of life (said no perfectionist ever).

As I complete the final semester of my bachelor's and get proverbially beaten black and blue by academia and exams once more, I thought I'd collate a few of my favourite reads from the past few years in one handy place, along with some general waffle about reading, reviews and reading goals - peak procrastination.

Writing About Reading

Though, I didn't manage to create my annual look-back of favourite reads year-on-year, I did write a few pieces about my love of reading, reasons not to read, and a little on the psychology of reading.

One of my units for university last semester was the Psychology of Language (love that journey for me) and it included a superb segment about reading, how we learn to read, how our brains process reading and just how vital reading is within our lives beyond books, we read e v e r y day. Think recipes, text messages, street signs, notices, medication instructions. The value of reading goes far beyond the joy of reading books, and it was a great reminder of how learning to read (and the complexities of this) can feel like a door opening or locking depending on the individual.

Foundational literacy is so crucial for every component of our lives and it still breaks my heart that something I personally find so much joy and life in is a painful, often shameful, experience for those who struggle. I've made a commitment to donate $50 a month to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation as a starting point to give back in a small way.

What Is Bibliotherapy?

While I've enjoyed learning more about the brain science behind reading, I've also been further upskilling myself in the concept of bibliotherapy as a way to explore the narratives we build for ourselves and how we can feel more connected to self and our worlds through the process of reading.

I've completed a couple of short courses so far and enjoyed learning more about the psychology and science behind why this form of low-intensity therapy can be such a positive doorway for many into understanding their well-being and sense of self in a chaotic world. What is bilibotherapy? In short, it's exactly what it sounds like; "a therapeutic practice that uses books to nurture personal growth, and improve mental health and wellbeing."

The books used may be of a clinical nature, but not always and not as a priority. There are many different types of bibliotherapy, including using poetry and children's bibliotherapy, depending on the individual. I'm working through some more guidance on this insightful area and will likely do a full-length blog about it soon (there's a lot to say on the topic!).

Book Reviews & Interviews

Alongside my own personal reading, I continued writing book reviews and author interviews for the wonderful Aniko Press. It's such a joy when authors and publishers reach out and want to place their works in my hands, and entrust their creative outputs for a review with me.

While it's great to be sent books to read, I have also had to learn when to say no, and have definitely gotten better at putting a book down when it's just not working for me with a couple of exceptions where I have powered through for the rage-read thrill of it (Intermezzo, I'm looking at you.)

I've found I've gotten better at discerning the books that I feel are 'for me' while also continung to broaden my horizons, ensuring that for every cis-white author I read, I pick up at least two by authors of colour and/or LGBTQIA+ identifying. Because if you're only reading books by people who look like you, think like you and have similar experiences as you, you're sorely missing out #howsthatechochamberworkingforyou.

'Read the World' Book Club

At the start of this year, I finally did something I've been thinking about for a while: I started a little (in-person) book club. I decided we would focus on world literature, and I've had fun so far picking our books by authors from around the world.

It's also prompted me to think more socially about books that would appeal to different members of the group (we're quite diverse!) and pushed me to get out of my own little reading comfort zone.

Doing something new, especially social things, always feels a bit scary to me and I find myself talking myself out of doing things with people more often than doing. It's been great to connect with some fellow readers and meet people whose paths I most definitely wouldn't have crossed otherwise. We've grown from a couple of tentative strangers to a solid group that feels safe, welcoming and inclusive - with in-jokes to boot. We held our first book swap social recently and I left with a little glow and heart-full reminder of how wonderful community can be.

Why I Keep a Book List (& why you might like to give it a go)

I started keeping a book list a few years ago, not for anyone else, but for me. At first, it was just a way to remember what I’d read and what I thought about each book. But over time, it became something more: a map of my moods, milestones, and mental states. I can look back and see which books held my hand through hard seasons, which ones inspired change, and which ones just gave me a much-needed escape.

You don’t need to be a serious reader or write detailed reviews to get something out of it. A simple list or an app (with or without ratings or notes) can offer clarity, motivation, and even a bit of joy. It’s a low-pressure, high-reward habit that helps you read with more intention - and you’ll never again draw a blank when someone asks, “Read anything good lately?”

If you're keen to use an app for ease, there are two main ones that people seem to use - I've used both (see below for my take on which one's better).

Goodreads vs StoryGraph: Which Should You Use?

Goodbye Goodreads.

In 2023, I transitioned from Goodreads to The StoryGraph after my book-bestie Penelope (who runs the most beautiful online secondhand bookstore, ByThePen) shared that Goodreads is owned by Amazon who've been having an absolutely FIELD day mining everyone's data. All affiliate links to purchase books from the platform go through to Amazon, so you're potentially funding a company that has ongoing workers rights issues, doesn't pay fair wages, and is owned by Bezos, who by all accounts doesn't need your book money (for the love of everything you believe in, support your local bookstores and libraries!).

Not to mention all the controversial review bombing that goes on within the platform and more recently, that apparently anyone can write a 'quote' on there and attribute it to any author (you apparently CAN make this shit up).

In light of the recent US election outcome, The StoryGraph shared a record number of users downloading and joining the platform, as Goodreads continues to fall into the black hole that is the capitalist 'masculine' tech bro Manarchy. AND if you really need another reason to rethink saying good riddance to Goodreads, The StoryGraph was created and developed by female Software Engineer Nadia Odunayo (who is honestly one of my new life role models).

Yes, The StoryGraph is a bit glitchy - but stick with it (and it's no more glitchy than Goodreads and its outdated UX interface). The StoryGraph does offer beautiful graphics and the recommendations based on past reads are pretty on point.

Another top highlight is that it offers 'mood' ratings for the books you read. As someone increasingly interested in bibliotherapy, this is has been a big green tick for me.

My 2023 reading moods.

Top Tip: You can download your data as a CSV file from Goodreads, delete your data from the platform, and then upload the CSV to The StoryGraph - all your reviews, book lists, and connections get transferred over. It's very easy and doesn't take much time at all.

Okay, Let's Get Into It

Now the good stuff: my favourite reads from 2022 through to 2024. I'll share those that garnered a hot five stars from me, and a few very worthy four star mentions.

These are divided into fiction, non-fiction and 'made my brain melt with joy' subsections below.

Enjoy!

Fiction: Novels

Bear by Marian Engel

She always attempted to be orderly, to catalogue her thoughts and feelings, so that when the awful, anarchic inner voice caught her out, her mind was stocked with efficacious replies. "What am I doing here?" could be answered with lists. She had another stock of replies to "Who the hell do you think you are, attempting to be alive?" She justified herself by saying that she was of service, that she ordered fragments of other lives.

After seeing this one popping up here and there in my reading peripherary, I picked it up from legendary Daunt Books on a London trip and did NOT regret it. Learning it was written in 1976 only heightened just how wild and ahead of her time Engel was.

Our narrator, a 'mousy' librarian and archivist is sent to a remote home that has been left to her institution to catalogue the library and other particulars. On arrival, she is informed that a bear lives on the premises, seemingly semi-tame, and there is some proverbial winking and nodding about those who 'know' the bear. And because this book caused quite a raucous on first publication, we already know what it means to know (wink wink) the bear but the build up and story-telling are superb. Bear is wrapped up in the taboo it explores but it's also a powerful unpacking of female desire, loneliness, resilience and a curiosity-provoking unpacking of the history of bear figures in cultural and historical contexts. I enjoyed far more than I anticipated.

We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

In Dutch writer Bervoets’ slim but punchy novella, Kayleigh, a broke but resilient young woman, takes a job as a content moderator for a global social media platform. Her role is simple: review flagged content and decide whether it should be removed or is allowed to stay up based on the black-and-white guidelines she has been trained to follow and consequently adopted into her psyche. Easy, right?

But soon Kayleigh, her colleagues and her new girlfriend begin to realise the job is so much more than they anticipated and that it will soon shape them irrevocably. Bervoets' well-researched narrative will introduce you to a world you’ve never considered before and is an exacting reflection on the consequences of vicarious trauma in a world obsessed with media consumption.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do, and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. So even though it feels like one could just die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.

Gosh. I loved this weird little novel that was essentially an outward flow of thoughts and memory and eccentricity and the little drop pins of insights that hit you right between the breastbone.

Pond is a monologue in fragments - domestic, feral, and wildly alive. Bennett’s narrator lives alone but her mind teems: with jam jars, failed lovers, cosmic loneliness. Nothing happens, and everything does. Language turns liquid here, pooling around the strange rituals of solitude. Reading it feels like eavesdropping on your own thoughts.

This telling of solitude and observation is just chefs kiss perfect.

Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy

In Exquisite Cadavers, Meena Kandasamy splits the page, and herself, in two. One side tells a fictional love story between a filmmaker and his wife, while the margins hold Kandasamy’s raw, real-time commentary: a writer wrestling with surveillance, grief, and the politics of being read.

It's less a novel, more a layered performance of protest, tenderness, diaspora, and craft. This is fiction spliced with autofiction, longing wrapped in a literary experiment, a meditation on what it means to create while constantly being seen. Kandasamy doesn’t just tell a story; she dares you to watch her write it, unguarded. The result is fierce, intimate, and dazzlingly self-aware.

A book that exposes its seams and in doing so, becomes whole.

Scary Monsters by Michelle de Krester

Scary Monsters is a novel split down the spine - two stories, two timelines, no fixed identity. On one side: Lili, a young woman in 1980s France, walking the line between liberation and looming threat. Flip the book, and you find Lyle, a migrant man in a dystopian Australia, reshaping himself to survive.

Michelle de Kretser writes with venom-laced elegance, exposing how racism, sexism, and assimilation slip into the everyday. It’s sharp, satirical, devastatingly good. Read one half first, then the other, it doesn't matter whose story you begin with, the unease accumulates.

I devoured this like a hungry little goblin, only sustained by engaging prose and narrative dexterity. A novel of performance and erasure that dares to ask: who gets to feel safe?

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

As much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

A fever dream of a novel, sunlit and unsettling. Deborah Levy drops a fragile poet and his family into a villa in the south of France, then lets the water ripple with the arrival of Kitty Finch, a stranger, barefoot and strange, carrying a poem like a detonator. What follows is a tight, glittering spiral of desire, grief, and the gaps in what we say.

Levy doesn’t shout; she hums, eerie and precise. Every sentence is sharp enough to draw blood. This is a novel about what lurks beneath the surface of marriage, of memory, of ourselves. You’ll read it quickly, then flinch when you realise what it’s really about.

The GASP I gasped at the penultimate chapter. Gorgeous. Unnerving. Like diving headfirst into glass.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

I think time stands quite stands quite still and we move around it, sometimes slowly and sometimes at a furious rate.

The Wall is a quiet apocalypse: a woman, a dog, a hunting rifle, and a glass wall that seals her off from the rest of the world, which may or may not still be alive. Marlen Haushofer writes with eerie stillness, sketching survival not as spectacle, but as ritual: planting potatoes, chopping wood, naming loneliness. There is no villain, only time. Only thought. The world shrinks and sharpens.

This isn’t quite dystopia, it’s something more tender, more terrifying: a meditation on womanhood, solitude, and the impossibility of being truly known. The wall is metaphor, mirror, and maybe mercy. Haushofer doesn’t ask for our attention she earns it, with every spare and staggering line. A masterpiece of silence that won’t stop echoing.

A magnificent book. Told me it would break my heart from the start and then did.

Fiction: Short Story Collections

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez

Was it a nocturnal butterfly or a moth? She had never been able to tell the difference. But one thing was for sure: nighttime butterflies turned to dust in your fingers, as if they had no organs or blood, almost like the still cigarette ash in the ashtray you barely touched.

A collection of twelve stories where the supernatural intertwines with the stark realities of Buenos Aires. Enríquez delves into themes of death, desire, and decay, presenting tales that are both haunting and deeply human. Ghosts linger not just in abandoned houses but in the memories and traumas of the living. 

Each narrative confronts societal taboos, from mental illness to the occult, challenging readers to face the darkness within and around them. Enríquez's prose is both lyrical and unflinching, drawing readers into a world where horror is not just a genre but a reflection of everyday life.

The more I read (and re-read) the more Enriquez pulled me down to the depths these stories have to offer.

Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay

I can smell more blood, other blood, new blood. Out there. Un-tasted. Big blood and small. Blood in the trees and blood in the yards. Blood at a time different from now. A time I can get to. And the folds rise on the air, and I go for it.

Gunflower (2023) by Laura Jean McKay is a bold, imaginative short fiction collection that flips familiar realities to explore the psychological depths of human and animal lives. From cats farmed for fur to ageing lions and caged hens, McKay masterfully crafts empathy for all creatures while confronting issues like climate change, pandemics, and reproductive rights.

Stories like the titular Gunflower and Come and See It All the Way From Town showcase her surreal, affecting style. With vivid prose and deep insight, McKay offers a startling, moving glimpse into worlds where dreams, dystopias, and truth collide.

I closed the book feeling rattled, grateful, and just a little more alive.

Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell

You knew, and didn't know. Sometimes it seemed that all my life had been knowing and not-knowing. As if it was a technique rather than a state: a safety mode, a way of coping. There were words for things now that we hadn't even realised were things, because there were no words for them.

A luminous collection that slips under the skin with quiet, startling precision. Each story holds the ache of girlhood, motherhood, grief, and the silences between people who love each other deeply but imperfectly. Caldwell’s prose is gentle yet piercing, like light through thin curtains on a heavy morning.

I read slowly, recognising things I hadn’t named before. These stories don’t shout; they echo long after the final page, somewhere deep in the chest. Seeing my own hometown dipped across the page of one of the stories left me with an ache of nostalgia and created a catalyst of understanding and empathy for the role of place in books I hadn't fully acknowledged before.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver

A masterclass in restraint. Each story pared back to its bones, yet vibrating with unspoken tension. Carver captures the stark ordinariness of working-class American lives with prose so sparse it feels like eavesdropping on something private and unfinished. Marriages unravel, silences stretch, small kindnesses flicker and vanish. Nothing explodes, and yet everything does.

These stories leave space for your own breath, your own ache. I read them like I was tiptoeing through someone else’s heartbreak, recognising the shape of my own in the quiet.

It's devastating, ordinary, and completely unforgettable. In Carver's sentences both the mundane and unusual become something powerful. I think about his words daily.

We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blain

I nodded although I still dream of it sometimes, the doors opening, but never quite wide enough to let me really see if it is him, and sometimes I am afraid for him, while at other times I am at peace because I know he is okay, he is in his pram, and he is with someone who loves him.

We All Lived in Bondi Then (2024) is a luminous, posthumous collection from Georgia Blain that hums with quiet power. Across nine exquisitely crafted stories, Blain traces the fragile threads of memory, motherhood, loss, and love, often all at once. From elevators and old dogs to phone calls with talking pets, each story lands with uncanny emotional precision. There’s grief here, but also grace, and the strange comfort of being seen.

Brimming with nuance and warmth, Blain’s characters are rich and deep, readily drawing you into their emotional worlds as they handle the common and uncommon challenges of everyday life. The subtle quality of these stories demands more than one reading, something I am all too willing to oblige! 

Non-Fiction & Memoir

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It's an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions - with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating - but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.

Nobody says it better than Joan. Say what you will about it, she makes my madness feel sane.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist, mother, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, invites us into a relationship with the living world that is reciprocal, reverent, and deeply rooted.

Through stories of science, Indigenous wisdom, and memory, she reminds us that the Earth is not a resource, but a relative. Sweetgrass becomes more than a plant; it’s a lesson in generosity, kinship, and listening. Kimmerer braids together ecology and emotion, myth and method, crafting a narrative that hums with quiet wonder.

This is a book to be read slowly, savoured, every sentence to be noticed for its individual stance and what it contributes to the whole. A full mind and soul reset.

Whose Story Is This? by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit holds up a mirror to power, voice, and the shifting terrain of who gets to speak and be heard.

With her signature clarity and grace, she traces how dominant narratives are being unsettled, reimagined, and rewritten by those long kept at the margins. These essays pulse with urgency and care, inviting us to question the scaffolding of history and the future it builds.

This is a book about listening as much as telling and it had me enraptured.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Imagine someone saying, 'Our fundamental situation is joyful.' Now imagine believing it. Or forget belief: imagine feeling, even if for a moment, that it were true.

Bluets is a love letter to the colour blue, but also to heartbreak, longing, intellect, and the exquisite ache of being alive.

In a constellation of numbered fragments, Nelson maps her devotion to blue across philosophy, memory, art, and desire, each entry a sigh. This is not a narrative, but a mood, a meditation, a collage of grief and beauty that refuses to be resolved. Nelson’s prose is precise and incandescent, her vulnerability both fierce and tender and measured.

To read Bluets is to fall in love with language, and with ache itself.

Books That Changed My Brain

(I've included only one sentence descriptions to encourage you to seek them out.)

Time by Etel Adnan (Poetry/Memoir/Non-fiction)

I read the first line and held my breath until the last, letting it out in one relieved, comforting sigh.

Fears for the Near Future by C.S. Mierscheid (Creative non-fiction/memoir/philosophy)

An unexpected capturing of what it means to exist in our current world, fictional academia might be my new favourite sub-genre.

It Lasts Forever And Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken (Fiction)

While reading, I existed in de Marcken's world where everything and nothing makes sense; I feel I am still living there.

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot (Memoir)

My third read of Mailhot's heart and certainly not my last.

All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui (auto-fiction/memoir)

Claiming the self is the most seductive thing we can do and Bouraoui knows this.