End-of-year lists are by nature subjective, and selecting books in this way can be particularly hard. Tens of thousands of titles are published annually in the U.S., and a reader’s time is finite. We can digest only so much. Every publication, every jury making such judgments has a filter. So this time around, we asked ourselves: What were the books that had particular valence for us at The Atlantic? We looked for those that impressed us with their force of ideas, that drew us in not because of some platonic ideal of greatness, but because they got our brains working and presented fresh angles on the world. In a phrase, they were good to think with.
And so we arrived at The Atlantic 10.
Between the covers of these books, readers will find an enormously diverse set of subjects and an array of writerly moods, from the whimsical to the deadly serious. What binds them to one another is that, in 2022, they were the ones that gave us a new way of looking, that forced us to stop and consider—that, once the last page was turned, dropped us back into our lives as smarter people.
The Atlantic 10
The books that made us think the most this year
Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.
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📚 Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century, by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman
“Dictators have gotten smarter. The blunt tools of a Stalin or a Mao—shutting down the avenues of free expression, quashing any sign of protest, imprisoning or killing dissidents—have ceded some ground to more sophisticated means of control. This new ‘low-intensity coercion’ is the subject of Guriev and Treisman’s timely and indispensable Spin Dictators. The world’s emboldened authoritarian leaders, in Russia and Turkey and Venezuela, are not looking to rule primarily through fear; rather, they manipulate the information ecosystem of their country, using tactics such as armies of bots and snarky memes.”
📚 The Consequences, by Manuel Muñoz
“The stories in The Consequences, Muñoz’s first book in more than a decade, are hauntingly simple. His language is powerful and layered; it doesn’t perform for readers or try to impress. The pared-down style gracefully highlights the collection’s steady focus on the lives and families of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in Central California. In these surprising, vivid stories, worries are deeply felt but not often spoken aloud, and obligation to kin and the need to survive outweigh much else.”
📚 My Phantoms, by Gwendoline Riley
“Our family’s narratives—about love and loss—can hover, shape, and sometimes haunt our own experience of the world. Riley cannily understands this, and her formally daring, indelible novel depicts the many ways in which [the narrator] Bridget’s own story can be crowded out by those of her parents, namely that of her mother, Helen. For most of Bridget’s life, Helen has been emotionally opaque, reluctant to reveal her vulnerabilities, yet the book follows Bridget as she attempts to circumvent this resistance.”
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