Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life.
📖 Sea of Tranquility - Emily St John Mandel.Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel is one of my favourite books of all time - to the extent that I’m planning a tattoo from it - and I’ve pre-ordered every one of her books to come out since. This wraps up a ‘multiverse’ (I don’t know if I’d call it a trilogy) with Station Eleven and her subsequent book, The Glass Hotel, and as every it’s exquisitely well-plotted and full of beautiful words that say something about humanity. To misquote Harry Styles, this is a novel that really feels like a novel - it was a fantastic choice to sink into on January 1st. (Ad - Bookshop.org link to pre-order in paperback)
☕ Ovaltine. In the evenings, I’ve been making an Ovaltine (the original ‘make with milk’ version) in this gorgeous and sadly discontinued mug and, let me tell you, it warms you up inside like nothing else. I’ve copied a lot of Danielle Coffyn’s beautiful poetry into my journal over the last few weeks, and her piece How To Survive Winter absolutely chimes with me.
🧣 A Giant New Scarf. I was influenced by all the TikTok videos and instagram photos of people looking effortlessly cool wearing this season’s Acne scarf (and of course the famous Lenny Kravitz scarf photo), and found this gorgeous cloud of a scarf at White Stuff. I wouldn’t normally buy polyester or acrylic but the fact that it’s mostly recycled polyester made me feel better about it - and it’s so cosy!
I’m a firm believer in waiting until the year is actually over to do a ‘favourite books’ roundup - and as always I’ve found that a significant portion of my favourites are things I read in the last few weeks of the year, so I’m afraid the pattern will continue. My top five reads of 2022, in alphabetical order rather than anything else, were:
Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City - Ana Kinsella (ad - Bookshop.org affiliate link). I picked this up at Daunt’s in Marylebone in May and just devoured it - it gave me what I was hoping for from Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, which was a great book but just not what I was looking for. It’s all about being part of a city and also watching the people in it, with some discussion about how that changed for Kinsella over the lockdowns. Eminently giftable too.
The Education of an Idealist - Sam Power (ad - Bookshop.org affiliate link). This was an audiobook listen over the end of 2021 and the start of 2022 and I’m still thinking about it (Power reads it herself). Sam Power, former US Ambassador to the UN (under the Obama administration), tells her story - from immigrant to journalist to activist to the top of government. There were aspects of it that were very hard to listen to - in particular her years as a war correspondent in the Balkan region in the 1990s; I hadn’t known a lot about the detail of the conflict before. As someone with a somewhat ideals-based job in a big organisation, I was very encouraged to hear how Power went about putting her principles into practice and making a difference.
Loveless - Alice Oseman (ad - Bookshop.org affiliate link). Under this one I”m also going to sneak in Alison Cochrun’s delightful The Charm Offensive (ad - Bookshop.org affiliate link). Between the two I felt like I got to know myself and understand the inner workings of my brain a lot better. If you’ve watched Heartstopper on Netflix I’d highly recommend picking up more of Oseman’s fiction - their books should be in school libraries everywhere! In particular, Loveless follows Georgia, a fanfic-obsessed romantic desperate to get her own love story started when she starts university.
Tranquility by Tuesday - Laura Vanderkam (ad - Bookshop.org affiliate link). I was until relatively recently a sceptic of books falling under the ‘self-help and personal development’ category, but this is one of the best examples I’ve read. In a similar vein to Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, Vanderkam lays out nine simple rules for making the most of the time we have. I read this over the Christmas break and have entered 2023 with weekly planning sessions in my diary and lots of ideas for small adventures as a result.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin (ad - Bookshop.org affiliate link). Yes, this is a novel about computer game developers. But really, it’s a coming-of-age story about three lives that are entwined, and the messy way in which we all try and figure out who we are and how we fit into the world. Once this is out in paperback, I’ll be buying it for everyone.
For some honourable mentions, the rest of my top-ten list was made up of Two Wrongs Make a Right, Escape, The Apollo Murders, and Can’t Even (ad - all affiliate links to Bookshop.org).
And my reading in numbers: of the 100 books I read in 2022:
77 were fiction, 22 were non-fiction, and there was 1 poetry collection
14 were by men, 80 were by women, and 6 were by groups or non-binary authors
The authors were overwhelmingly white and writing in English - I am always looking for more recommendations for authors of colour and translated fiction!
I’d love to hear what you enjoyed most in 2022 and what you’re looking forward to reading this year!
Speak soon,
Lily