2022 Favourites

Last week I looked back on everything I did in 2022, but today I'm looking back on my favourite things I read, watched, listened to and loved last year...

Books

In 2022 I read 80 books and completed my 5th year of reading every single day. My original goal was my usual 100, but I cut it down to 75 when I realised I was spending a lot of my free time sewing instead of reading. So while this was my lowest reading year since 2017, I still read a lot of amazing books.

These were my top 10:

Top 10:

1. The Arena of the Unwell by Liam Konemann
2. Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater
3. What We Don't Talk About when we Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon
4. Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalis
5. Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova
6. Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews
7. Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
8. The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gra
9. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
10. Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

While these aren't in order, my number one book of the year last year was The Arena of the Unwell because I loved it so much I read it twice in a row. 

I had such a great reading year. I'm very fortunate that a few of my favourite books of the year actually don't come out until 2023 - I'm eternally grateful to Netgalley and the fantastic publicists who let me read early advanced copies!

Choosing a top 10 was so hard so here are my honorable mentions...

Honorable Mentions:

• The Sound Mirror by Heidi James
• In The End It was All About Love by Musa Okwonga
• The Friday Gospels by Jenn Ashworth
• Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan
• The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin
• Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson
• The Storied Life of AJ Fikry
• The Guest by Emma Cline
• Yellowface by R F Kuang
• Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty 

Podcasts

Whenever I write this section every year I want to make it really clear that this list is only podcasts I discovered in 2022 and of course I am still listening to Maintenance Phase and Decoder Ring and What Page Are You On?

My most-listened to podcast of 2022 was hands down Celebrity Memoir Bookclub. I feel like I spent my entire year listening to it wherever I was and whatever I was doing. After listening to hundreds of episodes last year I'm almost up-to-date but it's so much fun and I'm so glad I discovered it last year.

Other podcasts I loved last year were:

• Things Fell Apart
• Endless Thread
• Sentimental Garbage
• Harsh Reality - The Story of Miriam Rivera
• Once Upon a Time at Bennington College (which I loved so much I think I still I have half an hour left of the last episode because I didn't want it to be over)
• The Tipsy Sewists
• 60 songs that explain the 90s

2022 films (cinema):

The first normal cinema year since 2019 so we were back making use of our Cineworld Unlimited cards. I finished the year having been 19 times which I think is the exact number of times I need to go per year to break even on my card.

2022 was a fantastic year for the cinema! Any one of my top 5 could easily have been my favourite film of the year in any other year.

These are my top 10 favourites in order:

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once
2. Licorice Pizza
3. The Worst Person in the World
4. Maverick
5. Aftersun
6. Barbarian
7. Banshees of Inisherin
8. The Batman
9. Glass Onion
10. Bones and All

Special mentions to Scream and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies which were great fun.

TV

We are rubbish at watching TV and 2022 was no different, but these were the TV shows we loved (though they're almost all still unfinished...)

• Welcome to Wrexham
• Severance
• Only Murders in the Building
• Brooklyn 99
• The Great British Sewing Bee 

Misc

Other fun stuff I loved in 2022...

• Finally going out for my birthday 2 years after I turned 30
• Ruby Tandoh's most recent book, Cook As You Are (which is so good I've been trying to write a review of it for about a year...)
• Learning to drive on the motorway finally 
• My perfect yellow coat
• Kayali Vanilla perfume
• Completing my perfect gin collection
• Gnocchi in most forms 
• Our monthly date night 
• Ginger beer 
• Regular cheese nights (and also Manchester Cheese Crawl)
• Peloton pivot
• My running vest 
• Our Cocktail book collection 
• The best meal of my life at Where The Light Gets In for my 32nd Birthday
• Lizzo’s new album 
• Lukas Volger's Snacks For Dinner
• A year of rainbow nails 
• Video essays about rollercoasters 
• Emo night at Dr Feelgoods
• The Manchester Alcatraz experience 
• Going to Flight Club three times (and twice in one week)
• Buckle and Boots country festival for the third year

I can't wait to see what I'll discover in 2023!

Charlotte x