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Booklists, Awards, & News

Time releases “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2022.”

Vulture picks “30 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Winter.”

The Millions shares notable new releases for the week.

LitHub has 12 books for the week. 

The Center for Fiction’s Annual Awards Benefit will take place December 6 at 6:30 p.m. and will honor Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and Editor-in-Chief of Riverhead Books Sarah McGrath. Plus, the winner of the 2022 First Novel Prize will be announced. 

The 2022 Rhysling Award Long Poem winners are announced.

“Usborne and HarperCollins Announce American Distribution Deal,” Publishing Perspectives reports.

Reviews

NYT reviews The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times by Michelle Obama (Crown): “Each chapter is a tool, as Obama puts it, to help keep yourself together. Her thoughts are nuanced and never prescriptive; she tells stories about what has worked for her.” The Washington Post also reviews: "What makes the book special is that it builds on parts of Becoming, and Obama serves as mentor and guide, using pivotal moments in her life to demonstrate when she had to rely on boldness, pluck and grit as she made her way from a second-floor apartment on Chicago’s South Euclid Avenue to the Ivy League to what she describes as a '132-room palace, surrounded by guards'.”  Also, So Help Me God by Mike Pence (S. & S.): “Amid so much tortured rationalization, the most obvious conclusion to draw from So Help Me God is that Pence continues to have political — perhaps presidential — ambitions and so finds himself in bit of a pickle.” The Washington Post also reviews: “Aside from its one remarkable event, and its close-up descriptions of a unique figure in the history of the American presidency, Pence’s memoir resembles those of other politicians.”

NYT also reviews How to Survive Everything by Ewan Morrison (Harper Perennial): “Alas, Morrison hardly begins to excavate the possibilities of his intriguing premise, and by the time the twist ending arrives, and Haley makes the dramatic choice on which the novel ends, the reader is more than ready to return to the world beyond the farmhouse gates.” Also, Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life by Brigitta Olubas (Farrar): “six years after her death, comes Brigitta Olubas’s Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, an impeccably researched and deeply incisive account of Hazzard’s life and work, and the intriguing interplay between the two.”And, They're Going to Love You by Meg Howrey (Doubleday): “She deftly arranges her characters’ betrayals, fidelities and accumulated disappointments to portray a family stymied by its own silences, one in which ‘nobody knew how to stop themselves from being themselves’.” And, The Great Air Race: Glory, Tragedy, and the Dawn of American Aviation by John Lancaster (Liveright: Norton): “Among the many virtues of John Lancaster’s delightful The Great Air Race is how vividly it conveys the entirely different world of aviation at the dawn of the industry, a century ago.” Plus, As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb (Basic Books): “He is a scientist with deep respect for the profession; he’s worked with genetically modified organisms and knows they can be used for good. And yet, he cannot take that last step across the threshold of complete trust in a profession that he believes, especially recently, has failed “to speak clearly or act decisively” about its dangers.”

The Washington Post reviews The Presence of Absence by Simon Van Booy (David R. Godine, Publisher): “On its face a memoiristic reverie jotted by a dying man, it sets in motion a gentle carousel of richly dimensional, comfortingly specific lives — while hinting at a vaster, deeper project.”

The Guardian reviews Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino (Harper; LJ starred review): “Tarantino likes looking under the bonnet and pulling at the fabric, showing how a film was put together and explaining how it could have gone other ways.”

Slate examines how “Prince’s generation searches for their past selves in a lost genius,” through three recent books: My Pinup by Hilton Als (New Directions), Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby (Riverhead), and None of This Would Have Happened If Prince Were Alive by Carolyn Prusa (Atria; LJ starred review). 

Vox reads and reviews all of the 2022 National Book Award finalists.

Briefly Noted

Vanity Fair talks with Andrew Morton about his new book, The Queen: Her Life (Grand Central: Life & Style; LJ starred review), The Crown, and Prince Harry’s memoir. 

Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times (Crown), shares her “favorite TV shows, movies, and music,” with Entertainment Weekly. Obama also adapts portions of her book for an essay in Time. 

NPR interviews Steve Martin and cartoonist Harry Bliss about their collaboration “to tell the story of Martin's life through pictures” in Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions (Celadon).

LA Times highlights Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins by Aidan Levy (Hachette), due out December 6. 

Christian Science Monitor features “Cookbooks with recipes that come together in a snap,” including: The Fast Five by Donna Hay (4th Estate), Prep And Rally: An Hour of Prep, A Week of Delicious Meals by Dini Klein (Harvest), Milk Street: Cook What You Have: Make a Meal Out of Almost Anything by Christopher Kimball (Voracious), Foolproof Veggie One-Pot: 60 Vibrant and Easy-going Vegetarian Dishes by Alan Rosenthal (Quadrille), and Sheet Pan Sweets: Simple, Streamlined Dessert Recipes by Molly Gilbert (Union Square & Co.).

Woman’s Day shares “9 Vegetarian Cookbooks Even Meat Lovers Will Adore.”

Entertainment Weekly offers a preview and excerpt of Emily Henry’s forthcoming novel, Happy Place (Berkley), due out in April. 

The Atlantic considers “political lessons from America’s past.”

BookRiot asks “How many books does the average person read?”

ElectricLit has “8 Books About the Reality of Living with Chronic Illness.”

Seattle Times recommends recent crime fiction.

BookRiot shares 10 best Sci-Fi/Horror books.

T&C offers 5 books about Princess Margaret, 6 books about Princess Diana, and 20 books about Queen Elizabeth II.

Authors on Air

ABC News has an interview with Mike Pence about his new book, So Help Me God (S. & S.), the January 6 insurrection, and his future plans. 

NPR has an extended interview with Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times (Crown), who “hopes her book will start a conversation, helping readers to feel less disconnected and adapt to an uncertain world.”

NPR’s Fresh Air talks with Misty Copeland about her new book, The Wind at My Back: Resilience, Grace, and Other Gifts from My Mentor, Raven Wilkinson, written with Susan Fales-Hill (Grand Central).

Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Shuggie Bain will be adapted for TV. BBC reports. 

The Atlantic talks with Taffy Brodesser-Akner about “stress dreams, the beauty of long scenes,” and the new TV adaptation of her novel, Fleishman Is In Trouble.

Patti Smith discusses her new book of photographs, A Book of Days (Random House), on CBS Mornings. Smith will be on The Tonight Show tomorrow.

Ina Garten, Go-To Dinners: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook (Clarkson Potter) will visit Drew Barrymore tomorrow.

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