by Victoria Bromley and Charlie Fabre
What a year 2022 was for reading! Here are the best books we read this year.
For bookworms, December is a time to reflect on all the books we’ve read that year and ignore the Goodreads goal we couldn’t quite reach because we were too ambitious with our bookish New Year’s resolutions. However, despite how many books you read this year, we all have our favourites, and we want to share with you the books which warmed our hearts and the ones we threw across the room. All these books have the Swim Press seal of approval. If you’re looking for new books to add to your 2023 TBR, look no further.
Vic – Betty by Tiffany McDaniel
I knew this would be my favourite book of the year back in April. For me, the best books are often the ones which break you in the most devastatingly, heart-breaking ways and change you as a person after reading them. Betty is a novel which achieves just that. It’s a book about a young girl, but is also a portrayal of trauma, brutality, racism, and religion. This coming-of-age story, set in 1960s Ohio, narrates the life of Betty and her family as they struggle through poverty and the grief they endure from the disasters that plague them. Influenced by her imaginative, loving, Cherokee father, Betty is inspired by the stories he tells and learns how to stand up to those who have hurt the people she loves, and those who have wronged her. Through beautifully written prose, this book is utterly compelling and will stay with you for a long time. Truly unforgettable.
Charlie – Motherhood by Sheila Heti
Motherhood is a theme that I tend to look for and/or really enjoy in the books I read, especially when it’s about the struggles and uncertainty of it all. It’s obviously nice to read about happy mothers, mothers who love being mothers, but personally I’m just more interested in the unhappy mother because it seems to be quite a taboo topic. Motherhood by Sheila Heti is neither, though. It’s half-fiction half-nonfiction about a woman who is not yet a mother and debates whether she should become one or not. Throughout, she discusses both the desire to bear a child, the primal and biological pull, and also her anxieties on how it may impact her life, the freedoms she doesn’t want to give up, etc. As someone who doesn’t want children and has debated the validity of my feelings at length, with others and myself, Motherhood was a massively reassuring text and it didn’t judge at all. Heti, or the narrator rather, employs a divination system called I Ching to help her write the book and answer the many questions she had. The use of this device adds such an interesting layer to the prose and to the topic at hand. My copy is ruined: dog-eared and annotated to death because so many of Heti’s words rang true. It’s a fantastic little book that I really feel all women, and even men, should read.
Charlie – Unquiet by Linn Ullmann
Yet another half-fiction half-nonfiction choice on my list, Unquiet is a moving memoir on time and memory written by Linn about her childhood growing up between her fathers home in Hammars, Sweden, and her mothers constantly moving landscape. As she grows older, Linn and her father agree to write a memoir about him in which Linn will interview him and ask questions, and her father will answer. They record these conversations, but her father dies and the project is unfinished. Unquiet starts at the point where these recordings are uncovered, and Ullmann details her life with each of her parents, the lives of her parents, and all the love and memories in between. This is a really moving memoir and it is stunningly written – some of the best prose I’ve read all year.
Vic – Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
Sally Rooney fans, this is for you. This book is masterful in detailing the lives of dysfunctional and passionate people. I love how this novel doesn’t just follow the love story of Cleo and Frank, but also gives the secondary characters space to live between these pages. Eleanor’s perceptive was really entertaining, with snippets of her thoughts and relationships, which I loved to read. While very traumatic and harrowing at times, these deeper themes make this book so honest and raw. The New York vibes were immaculate, and Cleo and Frank’s instant connection was explosive. However, this book is not just a story about falling in love. It deals with falling out of love, new love, forbidden love, friendship and family love. A must read for literary fiction lovers who can’t stay away from complicated characters and raw emotion.
Charlie – The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is a gem that I discovered this year through Bookstagram, and I am so so happy I have and cannot wait to read more in 2023! Of the two I read this year, Days of Abandonment was my favourite as it was just all about that all encompassing, beautiful female rage that I can’t get enough of. It’s a short and claustrophobic book that really gets the frustration and panic through. It almost feels sort of harrowing in a “I can’t believe this woman is having to deal with this right now” way, which just amps up the anger we feel at her husband for leaving and letting her handle everything. A must read if you want to get into Ferrante and if you are an angry woman at your core.
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