Top Five Books of 2022

knerd.knitter: I saved this book as my last Murakami to read because I love his longer books. This one did not disappoint! It had all the elements I expect from a Murakami book and felt familiar almost from the start. I love reading a long book that is written well and enjoyable. You begin to really feel that you know the characters and the settings. This book made me feel that I wanted it to go on forever.

knerd.knitter: This was one of the last Murakami books I had left to read as I read through all his works. I'm not sure if I'm disappointed I didn't read it earlier or glad to have had it to enjoy near the end. In some ways this was very different from the rest of his books. Usually his books contain small elements of "unreality" (for lack of a better word), but this book didn't really have anything set in the real world although one part was clearly closer to the real world than the other. But of course, the people were all real enough, which is one thing I need to have in any non reality-based story. I would say, like a lot of good plot writers, Murakami is not necessarily an ending writer, so I can't say I understood or was particularly satisfied by the ending, but I didn't really expect to be. His books are journey rather than destination, and the journey is almost never disappointing!

knerd.knitter: This story was very fascinating. It's probably the first book I've read that addresses Covid, so that made it feel very familiar. The characters seemed very real and were well developed, which is one of my favorite things in a book. Another thing I enjoyed in this book was the use of multiple meanings of language, for example the title re-appearing many times throughout the story in different contexts with different meanings.

knerd.knitter: This book was amazing. I was floored. I was also strangely reminded of a series of books... an unfortunate series... the self-aware narrator, bizarre characters, meta-fictional elements, and general absurdity of this book reminded me at odd points of A Series of Unfortunate Events. And I have LT members to thank for bringing this book up in a Talk post so I was able to learn about it!

knerd.knitter: A novelization... normally, I would shy away from a book like this, but somehow I didn't realize that's what it was until I had started reading it, and by then I was enjoying it so much, I didn't care! I love the film, and this book was very true to the plot of the movie, while also adding backstory that wasn't in the movie, but that adds to the richness of the story itself. This is the perfect kind of story for me: whimsical, fairy tale-like, but with just enough horror to remind you that it's not a children's story.