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R Sukumar picks his favourite reads of 2022
End-of-the-world scenarios, a nature book that explores the idea of Umwelten, and graphic novels that synthesise fable, myth and the artist’s own universe
I read at least one book every week in 2022; on most weeks, I read two (other than the guilty pleasures). So, I am not going to pick one book, but four.The first, under the category of end-of-the-world-books is Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, a set of interconnected stories that deal with life after the world, as we know it, ends, again, because of some kind of plague: how we grieve; how we survive; how we endure.The second, under the category of non-fiction (which seems such a dull description of what the author calls Technophilosophy) is David Chalmers Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, because any book that has a chapter titled Is it likely that we’re in a simulation? has my voteThe third, under the category of nature books has to be Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which I am hoping to read over the next two weeks (my son is reading it now), but the essence of which I got from a cover story based on the book in The Atlantic. Why? Because it argues that every animal lives in its own sensory bubble, called Umwelten, and that we have the “profound gift… as the only species that can come close to understanding other Umwelten.
And the fourth, prompted by the Netflix show was a re-reading of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels, a mix of fable, myth, and the classics — but within a universe of Gaiman’s own creation. It is about dreams (and nightmares), but also worlds, and words. As for the guilty pleasures (guilty because I have a huge reading backlog, on my Kindle and in every room of my house), I moved from Rex Stout to Michael Connelly to John Norman’s Gor through the year, re-reading stuff just for the heck of it. Through December, I’ve been re-reading the Flashman books.
