Books of 2022: Essays

Trying to keep my posts to a relatively-short length I divided a good year in non-fiction reads in a possibly-arbitrary way.  One might call Sacks's book memoir, but it's more than that because he was so complex and multi-faceted.

Best of the Year Essays

Everything in its Place; First Loves and Last Tales, Oliver Sacks, 2019

My coworker Tom Persinger recommended this posthumous collection of mostly previously unpublished essays.  Here, Sacks - as always - blends the scientific with his personal and professional experiences.  He waxes elegiac about scientific heroes, succinctly summarizes cases of his neurological patients, and reveals how nerdily he has engaged with interests like ferns over the years.  He also gets nostalgic and intimate about his early years and some key, unique relationships like the one with his Aunt Len.  Sacks thought at breadths and depths inaccessible to many, certainly to me.  To read this book is to be thrilled by how interestingly he could write about so many different things. Ironically, although I've been familiar with Sacks from other media, I've never read any of his books including, of course the famous ones with the engaging titles like The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

Dusk, Night, Dawn; on Recovery and Courage, Anne Lamott, 2021

A pandemic-appropriate book, whether these essays were all written during the pandemic or not.  I couldn't tell, honestly.  I picked this book up on an early visit to the downtown branch after it reopened and I started going to the office a few days a week.  It hadn't been on my to-read list, and I didn't even know Ann Lamott had a new book.  Nonetheless, it was easy to know that I would be in competent and familiar hands.  As it turned out, this sat under my nightstand for months until a little bit into my resolution project to read my floor piles before bringing any more books into the house.  And it hit when I needed it.  I was going through one of those rough patches common to us all - circumstances, seasonal affective blahs, and the vicissitudes of life.  Lamott's big-hearted messy mom persona comes through in these wide-ranging essays about her life experience, and several turns of phrase in her steady on-rush of thought helped me.  The best is this:

"Here is what I know of love.  Love is the gas station and the fuel, the air and the water.  You might as well give up on keeping the gas cap screwed on tight, keeping love at bay, staying armored or buttressed, because love will get in.  It will wear you down.  Love is ruthless, whether you notice this or not.  It is Sandy Koufax, Megan Rapinoe.  It will win.  It always does, at least in the long term - think Susan B. Anthony, who died before people like me could vote.

"Trust me on this: We are loved out of all proportion.  Yikes and hallelujah."