5 books to remember in 2022

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast:

As 2022 nears its end, we wanted to know what the year was like for books.

5 Things Sunday host James Brown sat down with USA TODAY book editor Barbara VanDenburgh to talk about the year and what books were the most interesting, the best sellers and the ones that left you wanting more.

According to VanDenbugh, 2022 was full of "smart" books. She brought a list of five she thinks should be remembered in 2022.

For more on the best books of 2022:

Best of 2022: See which books USA TODAY critics gave perfect reviews this year

Cormac McCarthy's brilliant 'Stella Maris,' new Jane Smiley: 5 must-read books this week

USA TODAY Book Club: Celeste Ng's 'Our Missing Hearts' is a book that demands discussion

Follow James Brown and Barbara VanDenburgh on Twitter.

If you have a comment about the show or a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, send James Brown an email at jabrown@usatoday.com or podcasts@usatoday.com. You can also leave him a voicemail at 585-484-0339. We might have you on the show.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

James Brown: Hello and welcome to 5 Things. I'm James Brown. It's December 11, 2022. Go Bills.

Barbara VanDenb...: Ah, go Dolphins.

James Brown: Oh!

Barbara VanDenb...: We're mortal enemies.

James Brown: Right off the top. This week, we're talking about five books that we'll remember from 2022 with USA TODAY's books editor, Barbara VanDenburgh. Welcome, Barbara.

Barbara VanDenb...: Thank you so much for having me, even though you are a Bills fan.

James Brown: Ah!

Barbara VanDenb...: Breaking my heart.

James Brown: Oh, Barbara, that's a different show. We'll do that someday.

Barbara VanDenb...: Have me back on another time, we'll get into it, but for now, we'll be friends and talk about books.

James Brown: For now. How many books do you read in a given week or month?

Barbara VanDenb...: I start more books than I finish. My house is such a fire hazard. I have so many books. I have piles of books on the floor that, I mean, we're on Zoom, so you can see how many books I have in the background. I have so much more all over the house. I try to complete at least a book a week. I start a lot of books that I don't finish because I'm constantly trying to figure out what people are reading, what people should be reading. But yeah, no, I read a lot of books.

James Brown: So you've read at least 52 books this year.

Barbara VanDenb...: At least, probably more than that.

James Brown: Based on that consumption, higher than just about anyone who's listening. How would you describe the year in books?

Barbara VanDenb...: Smart. It's just been such a smart year. You had asked me to come up with five books that I think people will still be talking about. It was the easiest list I've ever come up with because I could easily make it a list of 10 books or 20 books. There are so many smart, insightful, just so much brilliant literature from the past year that it's really humbling and makes me never even want to try to write a book.

James Brown: Well, is it abnormal? Are there years that just aren't smart?

Barbara VanDenb...: No, I don't think so. I mean, think good stuff is always there if you look hard enough for it, but I just didn't have to look hard this year.

James Brown: So overwhelming, the flowing of smart books one after another.

Barbara VanDenb...: I think the last few years have been really strange and challenging historically and culturally. There's been a lot of political upheaval. There's been the pandemic. People are sort of economically pressed. I mean, there's just a lot that's happened in the past, I don't know, five years and you're starting to see the fruits of all of that chaos and struggle and sadness, and there's humor in it too, start to come out in the books that are being published now.

James Brown: Because books operate on a bit of a delay. You mentioned trying to avoid writing a book. It usually takes a couple years at minimum.

Barbara VanDenb...: I mean, for the average person, yeah, unless you're somebody like James Patterson or Danielle Steele who has a new book every month or so. Some people have a factory set up and are able to get tons of books written. But I mean, even our beloved Stephen King, huge fan of Stephen King, I mean, he's got a book every year seemingly, I don't know how he does it, but yeah, I think the average person who's not Stephen King, it takes a couple of years. You got to think about it. You got to write a first draft that probably sucks, and a second draft that sucks a little bit less and a third draft that's pretty good. It's a years long process for I think most people.

James Brown: So, five books to remember 2022 by, it's a very smart year in books. Was there a clear number one?

Barbara VanDenb...: Oh gosh, a clear number one. Now, I didn't know I was supposed to organize them. I am obsessed with Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It is a book about two friends who are often in love, but never lovers, Sam and Sadie, and they're best friends who are sort of intellectual peers. They're both very smart and it's set in the '90s and the aughts, and they designed video games together. And so, it's about their friendship over the years through the video games that they make together.

One of the reasons I'm obsessed with it is the first book I've ever read that treats video games seriously, that treat it as a serious art form. You don't have to play video games to appreciate the book. You can totally be a non-gamer. It's a really just page churning story about this intimate friendship. You don't have to have played a single video game to appreciate it. But as somebody who plays a lot of video games, for me, it was personally very exciting to see that represented in literature and treated seriously.

James Brown: Well, bring us to number two. What else do you have for us?

Barbara VanDenb...: I have to shout out Celeste Ng's latest novel, Our Missing Hearts, which we actually just spoke to Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts was our USA TODAY Book Club November Pick. We spoke to her about her novel and it's just so brilliant. She's the author of Little Fires Everywhere, which was adapted into a Hulu series with Reese Witherspoon in it that you may have seen.

James Brown: I saw it, actually.

Barbara VanDenb...: Celeste is a Chinese American author and she's written this dystopian novel inspired in large part by COVID and the pandemic and the uptick, especially in anti-Asian violence that occurred in that first year of COVID. Like in the United States, there was this pretty alarming uptick in anti-Asian violence. She sort of takes that idea and runs with it that the United States starts banning Asian literature, starts taking Chinese American children out of their parents' homes and rehoming them with white families. Like all dystopian literature, it takes a nugget of truth and it worst case scenarios it, but it gives, I think, readers so much to think about what our response to COVID-19 was, what Asian Americans went through and feared during the pandemic. I just think it's a really important book for this moment in time.

James Brown: As we continue this top five countdown, move on to number three.

Barbara VanDenb...: Well, what I think is my favorite non-fiction book of the year, and that's Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones. Now, Jones, she's a brilliant writer. She's a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a philosophy professor. Just she's smarter than all of us. She's just the kind of writer where you're reading it and you're like, oh, this person is definitely smarter than me. She was also born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis. And so, what that does is it gives her a shorter stature. It makes it difficult for her to walk, it affects her gait. It's hard for her to navigate stairs and it puts her in a lot of pain frequently. She writes so eloquently and eye-openingly about how she's perceived in the world, how she perceives herself as a woman moving through society without conventional beauty. She writes about the way the unthinking and cruel ways that people treat her because she's not a conventionally attractive woman. It was really eye-opening and I think a really important perspective that everybody should acquaint themselves with.

James Brown: To stop you there for a moment, you said eye-opening. Can you please elaborate? How did it touch you?

Barbara VanDenb...: What was really touching and what was really just alarming was some of the stories about the way people treat her. She shared stories about men just stopping her on the street, telling her she's ugly. Out of the blue, strangers, just people treat her with a shocking amount of just casual cruelty because she's not conventionally attractive and because she has a congenital condition. I think people who don't experience that might not realize what people with conditions like that go through. And so, I don't think, I mean, I certainly don't read enough stories from disabled writers. I don't think we champion those stories enough. If I could put this book in everybody's hand to read to give them a more empathetic perspective, I would.

James Brown: Casual cruelty, that's one hell of a phrase.

Barbara VanDenb...: The world is full of it.

James Brown: Well, let's move on to number four.

Barbara VanDenb...: Number four is Trust by Hernan Diaz. I think this is maybe the smartest book I read all year. It was one of those books that made me feel instantly smarter for having read it. Now, this is a novel, it's kind of structurally complicated, but don't be afraid. It's a historical novel. It's told from four different perspectives, and it's about an American Wall Street tycoon during the Great Depression. He gets fabulously wealthy during the Great Depression. When everybody else is suffering, his wealth just explodes.

As you read each of these sections, your understanding of who this tycoon is, how he got wealthy evolves and changes. It's hard to, I don't want to say too much because this is a book that you can spoil, but it's a book about money and power in a capitalist society and whose stories get told through history, like who gets to decide and dictate what history is and is that actually what happened? It's almost like a Russian nesting doll of a book where there's a narrative inside a narrative, inside a narrative, and the more you read, the more complicated the story becomes. I don't know if I'm selling it, but it's a really, really smart book. This is a really good book to read with book clubs if you can read this with other people and dissect it. If you're one of those geeks who gets really into the way a story is told and why, then this book is for you.

James Brown: I take it you're one of those geeks.

Barbara VanDenb...: My dog is named after Charlotte Bronte. I am one of those geeks.

James Brown: History is written by the victors. That's the other thing I thought.

Barbara VanDenb...: Very much. And so, I don't want to say too much, but the story's not quite what it appears to be on the surface.

James Brown: What a tease. We're moving on to number five.

Barbara VanDenb...: Number five. Well, I'm going to cheat. It's two books, but they're connected. Cormac McCarthy is one of our living literary legends. He's the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Road and No Country for Old Men. He wrote this year, The Passenger and Stella Maris. Those are two separate books, but they're connected and they're his first books in 16 years. I don't want to make any predictions, but they're possibly his last books. He's 89 years old and it's about, I don't know if you're familiar with Cormac McCarthy. He's a really dark, kind of tortured writer and it's about this brilliant brother and sister who are very, they're mathematicians and they're haunted by the sins of their father who helped develop the atomic bomb.

And so, he's dealing in these two books with big philosophical quandaries of life, like whether or not there's a God or if anything we do matters, mortality, what comes after death. It's not a book that's going to make you feel good. I mean, none of Cormac McCarthy's books make you feel good, but they pose a lot of deep questions that I think are important for all of us to think about. I think that second book, so The Passenger is the first book. You do have to read that first, and then Stella Maris comes after it. I think Stella Maris is one of the greatest things he's ever written. It's a series of conversations with this young woman with her therapist in a mental hospital, and she's got schizophrenic and delusions and hallucinations, and it's a series of conversations between her and her therapist. It's as dark as that sounds, but it's really, really brilliant.

James Brown: I loved The Road and I loved No Country for Old Men, and I love both of their film treatments. Is there potential here?

Barbara VanDenb...: Oh gosh, I don't know how you would do it. I think that these are a lot less cinematic. No Country for Old Men just reads like a movie on the page. It's very plot forward. That's one of my favorite movies of all time is the Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. I think that is a brilliant book. I think it's a brilliant movie. I love these books, but they don't so much have a plot, but I don't know, maybe the Coen Brothers tackle that one too.

James Brown: We may be fighting about football, but you had me at No Country for Old Men.

Barbara VanDenb...: I still like you. It's okay that you're a Bills fan. We can still be friends.

James Brown: Any famous last words?

Barbara VanDenb...: Go Dolphins!

James Brown: The pain. Barbara VanDenburgh, thanks for joining me.

Barbara VanDenb...: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

James Brown: If you like this show, write us a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening, and do me a favor, share it with a friend. What did you think of the show? Email me at jabrown@usatoday.com or leave me a message at 585-484-0339. We might have you on the show. A special thanks to Barbara VanDenburgh for joining me and to Alexis Gustin and Shannon Rae Green for their production assistance. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning. For all of us at USA TODAY, thanks for listening. I'm James Brown, and as always, be well.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 5 books to remember in 2022