My Favorite Reads of 2022 and Contemplating New Year’s Resolutions

With the new year beginning today it’s time for my annual list of favorite reads from the previous year. As I look back on 2022, I see that I definitely did not stick to my plan to read books from my greatest books list. Nonetheless, I still had a fruitful year of reading. My intention was to begin with a re-read of the Iliad and the Odyssey and then move on to other epics like the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, but my reading philosophy began to change in the middle of last year. More on that later. First, here are my favorite reads from 2022:

1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
2. A Light in the Window by Jan Karon
3. Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
4. A Listening Heart: The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness by David Steindl-Rast
5. Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas
6. Awareness by Anthony de Mello
7. The Aubrey-Maturin Series by Patrick O’Brian, books 5-9: Desolation Island, The Fortune of War, The Surgeon’s Mate, The Ionian Mission, and Treason’s Harbour
8. Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening by Cynthia Bourgeault
9. A Spring Within Us by Richard Rohr
10. Open Wide My Heart by Macrina Wiederkehr

I finished the year having read 29 books, short of my goal of 36. The shortest book I read was The Lion, the Mouse and the Dawn Treader by Carl McColman, and the longest book I read was Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas. I read 15 nonfiction books and 14 works of fiction. While these statistics are interesting, I hope they have less meaning for me next year.

As I mentioned earlier, my reading approach changed in the middle of last year. I began slowing down in order to savor more deeply the books I was reading. For 2023 I am choosing to take more seriously this idea from Mortimer Adler:

“It’s not how many books you get through, it’s how many books get through you.”

I began reading Moby-Dick in a contemplative way last year through the resources at Benjamin McEvoy’s Hardcore Literature Book Club and I am still reading it several months later. It has been an enriching and rewarding experience, though I have had to completely re-adjust my mental approach to reading. I will be drastically reducing my Goodreads reading challenge so I don’t feel like I have to race through books, and I will only be participating in a select few additional reading challenges.

My intention is to drink more deeply of the books I am reading, taking my time to allow them to have more of an impact on me. But this is more than just something I am doing with reading. I have chosen the word contemplation to be my word of the year and this is going to be my approach in many areas of my life as I work on my resolution to be more contemplative.

As I wrote in one of my comments on the Hardcore Literature website, what I love about the etymology of the word contemplation is that it’s a combination of com- and templum. In other words, the root meaning of contemplation is “being in a temple.” What that says to me is that contemplation is the habit of looking at the world as if it is a temple, a sacred place where God is present, patiently waiting for me to slow down and really see the divine which surrounds me.

The word contemplation originated around the year 1200, where it meant “religious musing.” This is exactly the sense of the word I mean. Contemplation encompasses mindfulness, simplicity, savoring, awareness, authenticity, longing, depth, slowing down—in other words, it is the sum total of all the many aspects of slowing down that have been calling to me recently. And yet it goes deeper than all those concepts, because its end is communion with the tender, loving God of the universe.

So this year I hope to slow down, do less, pray more deeply, be more present, focus on people, appreciate nature, and breathe.

Happy New Reading Year! Many blessings to you and your family.