My 10 Favourite Books of 2022
🎬 See this article as a video here.
This year, I exchanged watching series, working, or other unsuited activities, for bedtime reading, as the last action of the day. Not only has this helped me sleep much better, but it has resulted in a lot of new knowledge, ideas, and experiences! In this article I have shortlisted the ten books of 2022 I recommend the most! The books are quite different, so this is not a list in chronological order.
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
I think a lot of us like reading because it enables us to visit a different world. Through reading we travel to foreign places, or ancient times. We can live a great romance, or attend Hogwarts, even though we never received any letter at age 11.
With Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, you also visit a brand-new world, full of mysteries, dramas, friendships, even romances. This is the world of the largest living beings on this planet; the world of the trees. The best thing, however, is that you remain in that world even after you have closed the book, because you’ll never look at the trees around you in the same way again.
The hidden life of trees should be mandatory reading for everyone in an age where we are destroying our planet in a way that would be impossible if more of us knew a bit more about the incredible life of the trees. If you have the chance, I recommend reading this book outside, among the very trees it talks about.
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Atomic Habits was among the first books I read in 2022, and it certainly shaped how the rest of the year looked. Being the best book I have read about habit change, it helped me greatly refine my habits, resulting in my current Happiness list. This is a checklist of the 13 things I aim to do every day, in order to maximize happiness and productivity. You can see a link to that up here or in the description below.
If you need another argument for reading this book, a good one is that, contrary to mainstream belief, breaking bad habits or starting good ones, does not require superhuman discipline or putting yourself through a lot of discomfort. In fact, all you need is to be clever about how you structure your day and your environment. The trick is making habit change fun and easy, and Atomic Habits gives you a great toolkit for that.
Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki
If you want an introduction to minimalism (and you should!), Goodbye, Things, by Fumio Sasaki is the book! By drawing on his own transition to minimalism, Fumio, gives a detailed description of the many benefits of minimalism ranging from less stress, a better economy and healthier eating, to rediscovering ourselves, being satisfied with what we have, and no longer comparing ourselves to others.
Fumio also gives a lot of very hands-on tips on how to implement minimalism in your own life. My absolute favourite, is to not start simplifying your wardrobe by going through your clothes one by one. Instead, start throwing out the wardrobe itself. With all your clothes in a pile on the floor, you won’t take long to get rid of what you don’t need, and you’ll likely not go crazy next Black Friday if your only storage space for excess stuff, is you living room floor.
As you have probably understood by now, Fumio is quite extreme. In fact, he needed only 30 minutes to pack all his stuff when moving house permanently. The book, however, is great, regardless whether you want to follow in his radical footsteps, or just want to become a bit more organized.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
In the minimalism community, Essentialism is another ‘must-read’. Where Goodbye, Things by Fumo Sasaki is about the physical clutter that obstructs our lives, Essentialism is about the clutter of our calendars and to do-lists. In one phrase, Essentialism is about prioritizing, and it gives you lots of tools for becoming more essentialist in your approach to work and life.
One of my favourites is Greg’s three criteria for deciding whether you should take on a task:
Is it important?
Is it interesting and fun?
Am I the only one who can do this? Do I contribute with uniqueness?
Evaluating all my tasks through this exercise was quite eye-opening.
The book is very focused on a professional context, and I would recommend it especially to people who feel like they are drowning in a million tasks, each feeling so important that doomsday will follow unless you execute all of them with perfection. Perhaps for this reason, I identified a lot with Essentialism, and even made an in dept book review here.
Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
The book starts with the obvious, yet overlooked logic that if sleep did not serve an essential purpose, it would be the most stupid trait in the history of evolution. Spending a third of our lives in a state of unconscious paralysis, profoundly vulnerable to predation, and without executing vital tasks such as eating, mating and moving, would be a complete waste of time. Unless sleep serves a greater purpose…
Matthew Walker unveils this purpose through an impressive compilation of evidence on the positive effects of sleep, ranging from better memory to slower aging to reduced risk of nearly any disease you can name (and a lot more). It is impossible to go through this book without looking at sleep in a whole new way. Luckily the book also provides you with tools and methods to help you get the amount and quality of sleep you need.
After reading this book I have made several changes to my morning routine, but all of that you can read in a separate article, along with a thorough review of this book.
The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
I tend to be sceptical of excessive foul language, and have therefore put off reading The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*ck for a long time. Early this year, however, it popped up as a suggestion in my audiobook app, so I decided to give it a try. Although the crude language from the title, remains throughout the book, it is a very useful, and brutally honest read, and does live up to its promise of being different from conventional self-help books.
In his book, Mark Manson says that if he were to be a superhero, he would be a panda walking around telling people painful truths about themselves, which they need to hear, but everyone around them are too polite to point out. I would say the book succeeds in doing just that, and the biggest takeaway for me is that we are responsible for everything in our life.
We can be unlucky, people can treat us unfairly, and we can fail for reasons beyond our control, but we nevertheless have the power to decide how we will deal with that misfortune. We always have the choice between blaming others and giving up when we fall, or getting back up and trying again. Most people, including myself, have a tendency of blaming external factors when things don’t go our way. This relieves us of the responsibility of taking action, and is the easy and comfortable, yet self-destructive choice. The new me will not do that anymore, thanks to this book.
The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People by Dan Buettner
A blue zone is a place where people live significantly longer than other places in the world. Dan Buettner explores five such blue zones, asking what they do different, and how we can import these practices to promote healthier lives in our own societies and households.
The five blue zones explored in the book are Ikaria in Greece, Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Loma Linda in California and Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rice. Habits most of them have in common, and which are believed to promote longevity, include regular physical activity, having a clear purpose in your life, reducing stress, eating only until you’re 80% full, eating very little meat, drinking vine in moderation, being surrounded by people with healthy habits, and having strong social connections.
As you can see, many of these characteristics are connected to food, which is probably why Dan also includes 77 recipes from these blue zones, to help you create a blue zone in your own house. It also provides several examples of large-scale projects to promote healthier habits at a societal level.
Lifespan: Why We Age - And Why We Don't Have to by David Sinclair
Already in the title of the book, David Sinclair starts his ambitiously quest characterizing aging as a disease, and setting out to prove it might be preventable. This left me quite sceptical at first, but David presents the newest research on combatting aging. Some of it already exist, and a lot in the pipeline. Although not necessarily stopping aging completely, these are likely going to continue the incredible expansion of human lifespan that we have seen over the last century.
This is fascinating reading for anyone interested in science and exciting, sci-fi-like new discoveries. Even though I find this interesting, my main motivation for reading the book was the fact that it also addresses what we can do right now to live longer and healthier. Although we have all heard that eating well and exercising is important, the book offers an explication of the scientific reasons behind this, giving an in dept understanding of all the aspects of our lives which affect aging, and how to change these in our favour.
Some of these include eating less calories, cutting animal protein and sugar from our diets, intermittent fasting, intense exercise (but it doesn’t have to be for long times), and exposing yourself to hot and cold temperatures.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
The midnight library is a fiction book, which makes you reflect upon the very meaning of life. The central concept is that there is a library between life and death, where you can relive all the possible paths your life could have taken, had you made different choices. This is a great book, especially if you spend a lot of time thinking about things you should have done differently in your own life. The book can get a bit repetitive in the middle, but listening to this as an audiobook was great.
Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
I have read the Harry Potter series probably ten times, and it is beyond any doubt my favourite book series. This year however, I started reading them in German, as part of my experiment of learning German solely through immersion, with no structural studies of vocabulary and grammar allowed. In fact, Harry Potter has been a central part of all my language learning processes, and I have read the series in Norwegian, English, Spanish, French and Portuguese
If you are also trying to learn a foreign language, I recommend Harry Potter as a great way to immerse yourself. If you have not yet read it, you can look forward to a very fun learning process. If you’ve read it ten times, like me, it’s even better, since you’ll understand a lot of the new words, just because you know the story so well.
Those were my top books of 2022. I hope some of them sparked a desire to read for you. If you have books you’ve enjoyed reading this year, I would love hear about them, as I’m looking for exciting books for next year’s reading list. Good reading, and happy new year!
