5 Favorite Books I Read in 2022 PATRON ONLY EARLY ACCESS/AD-FREE

I have taken up a string instrument- the viola . It's gone really well a much longed project. My reading though in 2022 has not been great but getting back now. So: 1.The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard Highs and lows of tragedy and comedy ...and you feel so much for all his characters even the ones you don't like. And my copy is signed ! 2.The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. By Yukio Mishima What can I say I really was dragged into reading this as I feel shocked by what he did to himself and those still living around him....all the more because he wrote wonderfully, especially in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, writing with such understanding, accuracy and compassion of what that generation of Japanese people went through directly after the war. Hard for anyone in Japan now to remember or record but its all here. It was a bit hard going at times stylistically and I needed a break, when I finished. 3.The Rattle Bag Edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes and 4.The School Bag Edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes both collections of their favourite poems. and both have never been far away from me in 2022.

Great list of books read in 2022 Cliff. My top 5 reads of 2022 were: 1. High-rise by J G Ballard. 2. Vietnam: an epic history of a tragic war by Max Hastings. 3. The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy. 4. Small things like these by Claire Keegan. 5. Mindf*ck by Christopher Wylie. Honourable mentions: Nina Simone's gum: a memoir of things lost and found. Souvenir (by Michael Bracewell). The Killer Inside Me. The Driver's seat. The Little Virtues. In praise of shadows. A winter book (by Tove Jansson)

Scott McLanahan. The Sarah book willy vlautin. The night always comes. Fernanda melchor. Paradis Tove ditlevson. The Copenhagen trilogy. Olga tokarczuk. Drive your plow over the bones of the dead

The Necrophiliac - Wittkop The Murderess - Papadiamantis The Tartar Steppe - Buzzati The Erasers - Robbe-Grillet Miss Lonelyhearts - West

I really like Lapvona by Moshfegh that’d be fun to review. Very funny

A rough 5 for me would be: Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 Lanegan - Sing Backwards and Weep (read in late January, made his death hit all the harder as his life was so fresh to me) Barker - Sacrament Ballard - Crash Houellebecq - Serotonin If I had to pick a single favourite it would probably be Sacrament. Definitely not the "best" book as Crash and Lot 49 are both unquestionably more important works, but something about Sacrament really captivated me, which was such a surprise for one of Barker's lesser known works that I picked up on a whim. Thanks Cliff for prompting me to finally read Crash and also putting me on to Serotonin!

1. Child of God -- McCarthy 2. Hard Rain Falling -- Don Carpenter 3. A Farewell to Arms -- Hemingway 4. Crash -- Ballard 5. Mary -- Nabokov Outer Dark by McCarthy probably belongs on there, too, but I will let Nabokov slip in there instead.