A Year in Reading: Sophia Stewart

2022 was, for me, cleaved in half, courtesy of a cataclysmic heartbreak that fell right at the year’s midpoint. I didn’t realize how neatly the year was split in two until I sat down to write this: I haven’t had a 2022 so much as a 2022a (lush, textured, all possibility) and 2022b (hollow, flat, a cul-de-sac). Of course, books were a constant in both halves. I read when I felt vigorous and curious and when I felt hopeless and desperate. I read to experience the world more fully and to shut it out completely. And I read because I needed to make a dent in the embarrassment of riches that accumulated on my bookshelf this year. Here are some highlights from that reading.

2022a 

I’m always a sucker for biographies about women writers, thinkers, and luminaries. Partly as a source of inspiration—in charting their life paths I can make a bit more sense of my own—but mostly for what calls “the pain.” I’ll explain: In the title essay of her 1996 collection , Fraser writes, about “a time when my life seemed too painful to me that reading about the lives of other women