MPR News staff picks for 2022 books
Being journalists, we write a lot — but do we read? We asked our staff what their favorite books published in 2022 were. Here are their reviews.
Alex V. Cipolle, senior arts reporter and critic: “The Women Who Changed Architecture”
It’s hard to believe in 2022, but this is the first compendium of its kind of architects who are women. This book, written by Jan Cigilano Hartman, helps bust the myth that women simply have not participated in the field. Rather, women have been there all along, but often bosses or partners were the ones to receive credit for their work (e.g. Marion Mahoney, the lead designer for Frank Lloyd Wright). While the list is not exhaustive, it’s an extensive foundation for amending the record.
Denzel Belin, newsroom coordinator and Art Hounds ambassador: “This Is Why They Hate Us”
This book was a fantastic and fresh debut from Aaron H. Aceves that showcases the strength of the YA genre. Aaron writes messy characters that you root for, yell at and feel all too relatable. The book was never afraid to make you laugh and its voice is undeniable. I am excited to see what's next from this author.
Lisa Ryan, evening editor: “The Sentence”
My favorite book this year was “The Sentence” by Minneapolis author Louise Erdrich. I just moved to Minnesota this year, so I was looking for local authors writing about my new state. Erdrich perfectly captures Minneapolis, specifically Minneapolis in 2020. She doesn’t shy away from the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, or the resulting protests that forever changed the city. Although it’s fiction, she builds her story from very real truths. And—as someone new to the city — it was fun to see how many real places I recognized, like Midwest Mountaineering (I’ve been there!).
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Kelly Gordon, producer: “This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch,” “All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak” and “This Time Tomorrow”
“This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something—Anything— Like Your Life Depends On It”: This quasi memoir, quasi personal growth book by Tabitha Carvan is hysterical, charming and features—as the title implies—a great deal about actor Benedict Cumberbatch. But it also explores why we should all just love what we love—especially women, who find that their particular obsessions are often ridiculed by culture at large.
“All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak: A Funeral Director on Life, Death, and the Hereafter:” I’m showing my bias here. Kerri Miller talked with author Caleb Wilde in 2022, and it was one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking shows I’ve had the opportunity to work on. A third-generation funeral director who grew up solidly evangelical Christian, this book chronicles Wilde journey into something less than faith. As a funeral director, who walks alongside the grieving, he also cannot deny that our ancestors still speak. I’ve been recommending this one to all my ex-evangelical friends.
“This Time Tomorrow”: I fell down a bit of an Emma Straub wormhole this year. Her newest novel is my favorite to date. “This Time Tomorow” is a different kind of time-traveling story, with a focus on the relationship between a father and daughter and an exploration of what we would change about our past, if we could.
Tom Crann, All Things Considered host: “Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey”
“Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey” by Irish ambassador to the U.S. Daniel Mulhall's readable, compact companion to James Joyce's sprawling masterpiece published 100 years ago. If you consider the novel impenetrable, Mulhall gives you a wonderful way in. If you already know it, he'll add invaluable insight to the work. Mulhall says the book has been his "traveling companion" as he represented Ireland as a diplomat around the world for 40 years. He'll be yours on this enjoyable journey.
Jessica Bari, producer: “Olga Dies Dreaming”
It’s set in current day, Xochitl Gonzalez’s novel centers around a Puerto Rican family living in a mostly Latinx community in Brooklyn, New York. It’s warmhearted and fun. It also dives in the realities of an adult sister and brother navigating family trauma, identity, success and living in a gentrifying Brooklyn. It beautifully captures a part of New York that often isn’t focused on and I loved reading some of the funny family moments that I’m sure we all have our own versions of. As a Puerto Rican woman who just returned from living in Brooklyn for 13-years, this book was right up my alley.
Robyn Katona, fellow: “Penguin & House”
Akiho Ieda’s book is about a mute penguin that does household chores for his owner, who is fully self-capable but in the laziest way and unintentionally thwarts all of the Penguin's goodwill. Like buying lunch on campus when he forgot his lunch, while Penguin was just arrived from his mission of bringing his forgotten lunch to him. It's full of other shenanigans like a pancake contest between the two deciding who makes them better. 10/10 recommend.
Michelle Wiley, senior health reporter: “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty”
Patrick Radden Keefe is one of my favorite journalists and a superlative writer, especially when it comes to covering sources who do not want to be covered, like the Sackler family. (He also has another excellent book “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Nothern Ireland” about Ireland during the Trouble. Highly recommend).
Nina Moini, race, class and communities senior reporter: “Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, and Expand the Future”
An easy read by yung pueblo to help calm the mind during uncertain times.
Elizabeth Shockman, senior education reporter: “The Orchard”
The prose is delicious and her depictions of Perestroika Russia are familiar, haunting, bewildering, heartbreaking and overwhelmingly beautiful. In other words, she’s somehow managed to write something that mimics my own experience of Russia. I loved it.
Angela Davis, host of MPR News with Angela Davis: “The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times”
We all need to be reminded of the power we have within ourselves to survive uncertain times. Michelle Obama’s newest book does just that.
Mathew Holding Eagle III, Bemidji regional reporter: “Sinister Graves”
Set in Greater Minnesota, this mystery by Pinckley Prize-winning author Marcie R. Rendon addresses topics like Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, religion and historical trauma in a way that’s not weighed down or overbearing.
Todd Melby, newscaster: “The Golden Age,” “Janet Malcolm: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” and “Wastelands: The True Story of Farm County on Trial”
The Golden Age: The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution upended Chinese life, killing hundreds of thousands and sending an unknown number of people to reeducation camps. In "The Golden Age," novelist Wang Xiaobo satirizes the busy bodies who snoop into people's personal lives by focusing on two young people who escape the madness to lie in the sun, make love and farm. Upon their return, the People's Committee demands details! The Committee snubs protagonist Wang Er's cursory overview, holding him at the police precinct until he reveals more. His second draft is also insufficient. So Wang Er adds in-depth descriptions, including bodily smells and intimate details of moonlight tristes. Born in 1952 in Beijing, Wang lived through the Cultural Revolution. He died in 1997.
Janet Malcolm: The Last Interview and Other Conversations: I fell in love with Janet Malcolm's prose when The New Yorker published her 1989 indictment of my profession. "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." I didn't agree with it, but man, what an assertion. Malcolm died in 2022. In this collection of interviews, Malcolm muses, cautiously, on her nonfiction books, which explored modern photography, Anton Chekhov, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and other subjects. The Paris Review interview is most telling. Malcolm refused to be recorded. The interview took place by email so she could control the words, the shape of the sentences.
Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial: What if a pig farm moved in next to you? And what if that pig farm sprayed the feces of thousands of pigs into the air and the stench of that manure made it near impossible for you to sit on your front porch or cook in your own kitchen without that awful smell permeating your life? Corban Addison tells the story of several North Carolina families, mostly Black, who suffered, then successfully sued the owners of concentrated animal feeding operations (CFAOs) dedicated to fattening up pigs for slaughter. Lawyers first ignored the families because winning a civil lawsuit based on a stench was such a longshot. After all, how does one measure smell or prove harm based on smell? Addison, a novelist turned nonfiction writer, focuses as much on the local lawyers as on the plaintiffs in this legal thriller.
Todd Melby is also an author himself. Check out his book “A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere” about the movie Fargo.
Gretchen Brown, producer: “I’m Glad My Mom Died”
This book was such a window into addiction, recovery and what we put child stars through. I’m not always a memoir reader — I think they can be a little stuffy, and hard to do well — but Jennette McCurdy’s kept me hooked. It deserved all the buzz.
Euan Kerr, regional editor: “Young Mungo” and “When Women Were Dragons”
“Young Mungo”: From Douglas Stuart, whose Booker-winning first novel "Shuggie Bain" blasted him to international prominence for its beautiful, lyrically sad writing, comes another searing story set in Glasgow, Scotland. Mungo is a young man coming to terms with his sexuality in the midst of a gang-ridden section of the city where religious sectarianism often leads to bloody violence. To make things worse Mungo's mother decides a camping trip with a couple of older guys will do him some good. It does not end well. Many readers have said they don't want to read "Shuggie Bain" because it's so sad, but as he shows again in "Young Mungo" Stuart's secret power is how through the power of his words a reader experiences the pain and horror of his characters but ultimately the reward is in the glimpses in the strength of the human spirit and the possibilities of joy.
"When Women Were Dragons”: Kelly Barnhill’s novel tells of a researcher trying to unearth evidence of a global phenomenon in the 1950s which has since been silenced by the powers that be. He finds reports of women who become so angry about the strictures imposed by society, and in particular by men that they physically transform. Not only do they turn into dragons, more often than not they immediately either eat or immolate their husbands. You can hear echoes of the fantastic worlds of Barnhill's award-winning novels for young readers, but this fairy tale carries a bite that is rewarding, thought-provoking and refreshing.
Emily Bright, newscaster: “Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces” and “You have a friend in 10A”
Minnesota writer Will McGrath’s collection of essays “Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces.” I loved this one. Will McGrath is a masterful writer, and I happily followed along on as each essay immersed us into a new world: professional wrestling in Minneapolis, a homeless shelter in Arizona, an Elvis impersonation festival in Canada, a diamond mine in South Africa. Writing with humor and heart, McGrath makes deft switches between immersing us in a scene and stepping back to consider what it all means--and who has the right to tell each story.
“You have a friend in 10A” by Maggie Shipstead. Beautifully written, these fictional stories are wide-ranging in time and place. We dive into a love triangle on a Montana dude ranch, an account of women abandoned in a French colony in the South Pacific, a Romanian honeymoon veering toward disaster - and it just keeps going, each story its own world. “Acknowledgements” will crack up anyone who’s come through an MFA program.
If you like Shipstead's writing and want a lot more, read her novel “The Great Circle” from 2021, a sweeping novel about a daring female aviator trying to break new world records, and the contemporary actress cast to play her in a biopic about her doomed final voyage. This story spans 100 years and literally the whole world. Can we ever really know the whole story of a life?
Erin Warhol, assistant program director: “Living Untethered — Beyond the Human Predicament”
“Living Untethered – Beyond the Human Predicament,” by Michael A. Singer is short and easy to read and offers great practical advice for how to effectively deal with something we all face: the human predicament. My copy showed up in my mailbox last June, sent by a friend who loved it and wanted a circle of friends to read it together. The book offers spiritual perspectives and advice, so you can struggle less and enjoy life more, even when life is challenging, disappointing, or annoying! Spending time with good friends, and laughing together at our specific predicaments, while pouring over the book was a highlight for me in 2022!