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Best and Worst, 2022

I read 57 books in 2022, and these are the ones that stood out. I stumbled onto a lot of very good books this year--and a few not so good. Each link below will take you to my review and discussion notes.

If you'd like to support my work here, you can feel free to use this Amazon link to do your shopping, I'll be paid a modest affiliate fee at no extra cost to you. Thank you for reading, and all the best for 2023! 


Best (5/5 stars):
The Ethics of Money Production by Jorg Guido Hulsmann
I and Thou by Martin Buber
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Near-Best (4/5 stars):
Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert S. Mendelsohn
The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot
Layered Money by Nik Bhatia
Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann
Discourses on Livy by Niccolo Machiavelli
Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz
The 39 Steps by John Buchan
Greenmantle by John Buchan
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss


Worst (1/5 stars or close):
The Year Without Summer by William K. Klingaman
The Paranoia Switch by Martha Stout

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Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Tedious, weak, and worst of all  "riddled" with errors  and oversights. Do not read. I recommend instead  Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction  by J. Allan Hobson  for information about the REM/dreaming stage of sleep, as well as  Restful Sleep  by Deepak Chopra  for readers interested in practical help for improving sleep quality. Unlike Why We Sleep , both of these books are short, direct, readable and clear. Sadly, I also have to spend a brief few sentences  on Alexey Guzey's devastating criticisms of this book . Alexey's entire post is very much worth reading, but if you want to see just one glaring example of atrocious academic ethics, you can start with a chart Matthew Walker uses in Chapter 6 to prove a linear relationship between sleep loss and sports injury-- except that he cuts off the part of the chart that disproves his argument . This is childish middle school stuff, way beneath the line of a Berkeley and Harvard professor, a...
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