staning + the arts

best books of 2022

I’m always on the lookout for my next read and I love hearing people talk about the books that really moved them. So I thought I would share the books I’ve read this year that I fell in love with and that you simply must read. I’ve also included some quotes that made me gasp they’re so good! ✨✨ In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado - there is something so beautiful about this book. The writing is so gentle, raw, touching and compelling. It talks about trauma, love and heartbreak and I devoured it in 2 days and I think you might too. “It's not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail. But people have trouble with this concept. It’s like how, after Finding Nemo, people who were ill equipped to take care of them rushed to buy clown fish and how the fish died. People love an idea, even if they don't know what to do with it. Even if they only know how to do exactly the wrong thing.”

✨ Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson - I needed to read a love story that just makes me fall in love with love again and fall in love with intimacy and the intricacies of romance and this was it. It feels/reads like poetry, it’s gentle and joyful and heartbreaking. “It's summer now, and you're craving a simpler existence. You want to read. You want to write. You want to meet strangers for dinner, and not refuse another drink at another bar. You want to dance. You want to find yourself in a basement, neck loose, bobbing your head as a group of musicians play, not because they should, but because they must. It's summer now, and you're looking forward to worrying less. You're looking forward to longer nights and shorter days. You're looking forward to gathering in back gardens and watching meat sputter on an open barbecue. You're looking forward to laughing so hard your chest hurts and you feel light-headed. You're looking forward to the safety in pleasure. You're looking forward to for-getting, albeit briefly, the existential dread which plagues you, which pains your left side. You're looking forward to forgetting that, leaving the house, you might not return intact. You're looking forward to freedom, even if it is short, even if it might not last. You’re looking forward.” ✨ Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin - you will fall in love with the characters, you will want to scream at them for acting out and you will probs cry as well, all while learning about video games and creativity and partnerships of all sorts. It’s so mesmerizing and different, you have to read it!! ✨ Upstream by Mary Oliver - there’s this very rare feeling you sometimes get with art - it makes you giddy with excitement, it warms your whole body and makes you super fucking emotional. That’s what this book did for me. Mary Oliver is just great. These essays are so beautiful and they make you fall in love with nature and literally make you want to move to the countryside and start building your own house. But the one essay that made me fall in love with her writing is ‘Time and power’. Every time I read it (yes, perhaps I read it multiple times) it just send an electric jolt through my body and calls upon my creative side in such a visceral way. “It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poems gets written. I have wrestled with the angle and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all. There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” ✨ The Idiot by Elif Batuman - there is something about this book that really sucked me in. The writing is just so good and I was hooked from the first page. It might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but I will say you might love it if you’re an immigrant or your parents were ones. “I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time - the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.” ✨ Notes to Self by Emilie Pine - a series of honest, relatable and touching essays about what being a woman is like that I became obsessed with. There’s something so fucking nice about a woman just being brutally honest about life, it takes your breath away. “But you can be silent and loud at the same time, it turns out. Though I have no fear of speaking publicly, or of being perceived as ambitious, both of which are classic stumbling blocks for professional women, I am prey to an equally treacherous problem: I give away my power. In side-stepping, in not calling out the sexist remarks, I act as if they are in the right, I act as if women should not have voices, and I act as if I am not a feminist. And the truth is, I am tired of being a feminist. I am tired of it being women's responsibility to identify and tackle and fix sexism. I am tired of it being so necessary and so difficult. And I am tired of my own acts of internalising, tired of my complicity, tired of playing the game.” ✨ A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara - this book is quite well know by now and I’m no revolutionary by recommending it, but I’ve never felt more things while reading a book, I’ve never felt more heartbroken and sad and I honestly wanted to throw the book away after finishing it, and if a 800+ page book can leave such a deep mark on me, it must be a masterpiece cause I still think about it months after reading it. I will say, you need to read it when you’re in a somehow stable state of mind, when you feel a bit bored perhaps, not when you’re going through some heavy shit in your life cause this will just break you. ✨ No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood - I just loved it. It’s written in a super interesting and creative format. So heartbreaking and sad, gentle and eye opening. In a world where we are all glued to our screens and feel every pain of the world so deeply, we sometimes forget about our own little life. I think this book shows how little anything really matters in the face of grief, tragedy and love. “A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”