My Top Content of 2022
Come January 1, I tend to ask everyone I know, “What the most influential piece of content was that you consumed this past year?” So this year, I decided to track my favorites — the books and movies and songs and articles that stuck with me that I would wholeheartedly offer my McKenzie stamp of approval on.
JANUARY
CODA
If it tells you anything, I learned how to sign “Both Sides Now” because of this movie. And when it won Best Picture, it felt like a win for me too. Like I got to play a small part in this tiny-budget film that no one really knew of.
Love Songs of WEB Dubois
I’m a big fan of “Show, not tell.” Too often authors have an all-important message or theme they want to communicate, but then they try to hit you over the head with it (or rather their characters do). While their characters are asserting their opinions, I can’t help but think — this is not what storytelling is meant to be. This is a missed opportunity.
Stories exist to wrap people and places and tension around an idea, a cause. You throw away the gift of stories when you assert yourself into the narrative. Your reader has come to hear the story — not you.
By no means is this an all-inclusive statement, but the best writers let the narrative create space for wrestling, let it make their reader think, and let it peel back the nuanced layers of it all.
Why do I say that?
Well, I read Love Songs of WEB DuBois right after reading The Final Revival of Opal and Nev. Two very different books. Both cover topics of racism, but with Love Songs, the author shows instead of telling. While one felt like a soapbox (not saying the statements weren’t valid, just that they felt forced), the other made me feel. I felt empathy towards characters, anger towards the familiar spiraling of a life.
Love Songs is what the critics might call a “sweeping saga.” Multi-generational, multiple timelines. It is long, but a worthy read.
FEBRUARY
Oops. Nothing to report here.
MARCH
Oops. Nothing to report here.
APRIL
Stardust
The movie, not the book. Charming, in the same vein of The Princess Bride.
Four Loves (re-read)
First half is a bit slow, second half you can’t get through fast enough — but it carries so much weight only because of the first half. I love how Lewis’s literature background informs how he thinks about God. Or rather, how God put in Lewis a love and mind for literature, and used that lens to draw him into a deeper understanding of Love itself.
True Biz
I loved this book. If I had not watched CODA right before this, I might not have picked up this book.
My great aunt and uncle are deaf and both have intellectual disabilities, yet no one in my family has learned anything beyond the ASL alphabet. This book expanded my knowledge and understanding of the ASL language and culture, while also entertaining me with its multiple narrators.
MAY
“I’ve Got Good News” album by Bryan and Katie Torwalt
This album is full of the songs that I’ve been singing over myself and singing to God this year. “Holding Onto Hope” in particular.
“What if trying for a baby isn’t working?”
I included this on the list mainly because I still think about these lines — “I want a baby because I have love in my bones. It’s building up there like a calcium deposit.”
Have you ever heard two sentences so beautiful, so raw, so aching?
JUNE
Top Gun
Cliché to have on this list? Sure. But I loved it.
JULY
Find Your People
Honestly this may be one of the most impactful books for me this year. Part of it is timing — i read it at a point in my life where I’d identified that longing for deep friends, not more friends. More consistent connections, not sporadic hangouts. Jennie put words to a lot of the things I was already feeling, but also gave practical applications for how to build deep friendships. A few big takeaways — 1) I say I want depth, but really I need a shared vision, mission, and purpose in my friendships. 2) I need to bring people into my mess — allow them to meet me in my need. 3) I don’t need to go out searching for new friends, plug into different groups, add more things to my calendar. Who are the people already in my life, and what am I already doing? That means inviting friends to go to the grocery store with me because I was already going. Or inviting the friend on my nightly walk. Or meal prepping together.
Persuasion
Honestly was surprised at how much I liked this book. The lack of dialogue could make it a bit hard to read, but Jane has mastered the art of subtlety.
AUGUST
Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting
Just darling. Loved it. Feel good British fiction. Stayed up until 2am on a work night reading it, if that tells you anything.
Surprised by Oxford (re-read)
I could go on and on about this book. It’s a very tender book for me, for a couple reasons. 1) It speaks to the high school English nerd in me that loved literature and the simple beauty of words. 2) The academic environment of Oxford Carolyn describes stirs something up in me. I didn’t experience that environment in college, but also long for that environment out of college. We get into the working world and stuck in our niceties and to-dos, and never dig deep and ask, “why??” Doesn’t hurt that as a high schooler I dreamed about going to Oxford. 3) I love how God used literature to speak to Carolyn, because he often does that for me! It’s a sweet gift, creating a lot of “Ah! yes! I connect with that!” moments while reading the book. I read it once right when I graduated college, and it was about time to pick up again (the sign of a truly good book!).
West with Giraffes
I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did. First few pages are a little tricky to get into (especially with the voice/writing style for the narrator), but it’s an endearing, coming-of-age story that reminded me of William Kent Kruger’s This Tender Land (also 5 stars). Slight spoiler — it’s a bittersweet ending. To be honest, I wrestle with whether I want books to hand me a happily ever after (and if I measure the “goodness” of a book by whether it does or does not). Or is there something to be said about books that leave you with an unadulterated view of life and no rosy filter? That lean into that bittersweet element that makes up the majority of life? Rambling here, but some thoughts that this book prompted!
SEPTEMBER
Beartown (re-read)
I love this book deeply.
I’ve heard people described this book as Friday Night Lights meets hockey, which, I’ve never seen FNL (nor read it) so I’m just going to guess it’s accurate.
It’s the story of a small town that casts all its hope and love on their hockey team. But before you think, “Oh, I don’t do sports books,” The game is an underlying part of the story, but it is made up of people. Fredrik Backman actually wrote once, “Stories about sports are never just about sports, because sports is never just about sports. It’s about people. The best and worst in us.”
People with pasts, people with trauma, people with weaknesses and people with strengths. There is no perfect hero to this story, but instead it is the story of a broken people, a struggling town, and a story of what comes out of us when we are under pressure — good and bad. But despite it all, you feel empathy at some point or another for all of the characters. And that is very hard to do, and so I applaud Blackman for it.
If that wasn’t enough, Fredrik Backman writes the way I hope to write. I love how every other page there’s just a sentence that makes me go, “Damn! I wish I had written that!”
Beartown: Us Against You (re-read)
A lot of the things I’d say about this book, I already said about the first Beartown book.
I can’t help but see a little bit of all of our towns in Beartown. At some point, all of us have acted or felt like one of its citizens. Our actions or words have not reflected what we truly believe, and we’ve often been caught up in a wave of events.
Beartown is a heartbreaking town, full of heartbreaking people. But the good that runs through it gives me hope and I hold on to it.
OCTOBER
Beartown: The Winners
Damn it. I didn’t want it to end this way.
The first two Beartown books felt like a study of people. This one felt like a study of conflict. How we so often get things wrong. How an escalation is just that — not just a point in time incident, but the sum of hundreds of small events that build and build and build.
If I’m going to nitpick this book, it was too long. Unnecessarily long. Too many characters, too many new plot lines (don’t get me wrong, I’m fond of a few of the new characters). About 150 pages in was when it started to groove for me.
And if I’m going to be an eternal optimist, I wish it didn’t end this way. I know it’s fiction, but the author had all the plot paths in the world — why take this one? Why did this have to happen???
I will still love this book and love these characters, but I’ll always feel a little sad, a little heaviness in my chest when I think about it. I wept and I wept reading the last 50 pages. Crying for characters and the happily ever afters they did not get, but it felt like they’d earned. I will still recommend these books to everyone, and I will crack it open once a year when I want to feel something, when I want to be reminded of the themes, the patterns, the metaphors that surround us in our own lives.
Lessons in Chemistry
Adored this book. The witty dialogue, the unflinchingly smart characters. There’s a heartbreak or two along the way, and I still hate the “life is not fair” moments in books, but it was sweet and spunky and just what I wanted to read. Very original, very clever.
Peaky Blinders
Some might argue that this show is too vulgar, too violent for its own good. And there’s truth in that. I think what makes this show so compelling (and this is probably true of most gangster shows) is the psychology of it all. Why do they keep doing the thing that will only create more havoc, more grief, more loss? What is the price of this life the Shelley family desires — and is it worth it? It’s a bit like the wreckage of a car accident on the side of the road — you can’t help but look.
The Common Rule
A friend recommended this book as a follow up to Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, as a practical guide for implementing a lot of the teaching of that book. And I think that’s a good summary of it — concrete, realistic rhythms are laid out, but always with an explanation of the why behind them.
NOVEMBER
Open Water
So in November I took a solo trip to london, and while I was there I spent many hours in bookstores. I also spent a lot of time talking with strangers, and I was in Daunt Bookstore in Marylebone and I asked Laura the bookseller, “What’s a UK book that’s gotten a lot of buzz, has yet to hit it big in the US, but that you think will?” She came back with a stack of 5 books and this one was at the top. Now, coincidentally, I had just started reading this book on my Kindle and was loving it, so we fangirled over it. She told me the rights had already been bought by some streaming service and they were already filming a tv series.
So this book.
It’s about two British-African artists that meet in a pub and fall in love, but I don’t know if I would necessarily call this a love story. It almost feels more like a story of internal and external conflict, told from the point of the male narrator. And that’s where the title comes from — open water. This reoccurring theme of stepping into the unknown and risking it all, and feeling untethered in life.
Caleb has a way of writing that feels like one long poem, and there’s this undercurrent of rhythm to it. Someone described Caleb as writing with a sensitivity to words like a poet, and with the rhythm of a rapper. I thought that was the perfect description. All that gave me this sense of water — water lapping on the shore, water rocking a boat back and forth. This steady, constant beat. It was just beautiful.
I often measure fiction by how often I want to underline it, or how often I feel sucker punched by it. And I felt that a lot with this book.
Overall, I would say that the writing drew me in more than the plot. Part of me wonders if it would have benefitted from being longer, from exploring the depths of their relationship. But I realize that this book is really about the narrator. It’s about the waves within him, the treacherous waters of life, and I think that’s something we can all connect with.
1917
The single shot!!! Oh shoot, the parallel to the beginning and the end! The cherry blossoms in the river! The no trees to one tree at the end!
The Newsroom (re-watch)
Forgot just how much I love this show. I love it for and in spite of all it’s ideals and high-horse positioning. I love this fictionalized narrative of going against the grain, maybe because I don’t think it will ever actually happen in real life. Maybe that’s why it got cancelled after 3 seasons.
DECEMBER
The Girl Who Drank The Moon
This book was recommend to me by a 6th grader with excellent taste. Loved it! I love how as an adult I got to pick up on all these hidden meanings, themes that a child might miss the first go around — but it is appropriate for both ages! It was delightful and fairy tale-ful and a book I hope to read to my kids one day.
Song of Songs sermon series
This one barely made it into 2022. I listened to this series by Ben Stuart at Passion City DC during the drive down and back from the beach. Song of Solomons is one of those confounding books of the Bible. It has a few verses that we cling to, that sink deep, but what does is mean when the lover tells his love that her neck is like the tower of David??? That her hair is like a flock of goats??
In each sermon, Ben helpfully broke down each chapter of the book — it felt like a churchwide bible study. And he connected it to our here-and-now world. I’ve already recommended it to several friends.
Benjamin William Hastings
Normally I’m a cherry-pick kind of gal when it comes to music. But this album is a straight-through listen. When I pitch this album to friends, I say, “This is not explicitly a worship album. But it is an album of poetry, of wrestling with faith and feelings and life. It is the reminding of our souls of truth, while also the honest conversations with God that he desires.”
For fans of “Seasons,” “So Will I,” “Still / PEACE” (All written by Ben Hastings).
