I read (and buy) a great many books in many genres. I don't keep count, but I am usually reading at least part of 3 or 4 books a day - the ones I can hold in my hands and mark up in pencil as opposed to those I read on screens, which are often very arcane and scholarly material for my research, from the mass mummification of cats and dogs in ancient Egypt to the early Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. .
In addition I read at least 30 books a year by guests on my Way of the Dreamer radio show and authors seeking endorsements. (I am quirky enough to require myself to read a book in full before interviewing the author or writing a blurb.)
I'm being asked about favorites so here are a few:
The Man who Could Move Clouds. Ingrid Rojas Contreras' luminous memoir of life with a Colombian family who dream together and for whom everyday existence is magical realism. Here you greet someone by asking what they dreamed. You see the future in your dreams and you talk to the dead. I also recommend her novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree.
Favorite Fiction Series of 2022
The Slough House series by Mick Herron. I started with Slow Horses and then devoured the next seven novels in the series in rapid succession. Herron has reinvented the genre of espionage fiction and its vocabulary with his wickedly funny stories of a bunch of failed spies dumped by MI5 in an oubliette who still get amazing things done.
Favorite Scifi Read in 2022
The Peripheral by William Gibson. The excellent screen adaptation of this novel of time loops and body-hopping sent me back to the book and then through more of Gibson's oeuvre: back to Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, on to Agency and Zero History.
Favorite History Read in 2022
Hypatia of Alexandria by Maria Dzielska. Elegant, exact scholarship threading fact and fiction in giving us what is really a group biography of the great woman philosopher and her circle, including the "Bishop of Dreams", Synesius of Cyrene.
Favorite Earth Wisdom Read in 2022
Mirrors in the Earth by Asia Suler. A beautiful book by a poet of consciousness that shows us not only that the world is our mirror but that the world is looking at us, and invites us to heal by aligning with Earth cycles of regeneration.
Favorite Science Book Read in 2022
The Simulated Multiverse by Rizwan Virk. With his previous book, The Simulation Hypothesis, Riz challenges us to think hard about the realities we inhabit and whether - if we are living in a simulation - we can become programmers as well as players.
Favorite Esoterica Read in 2022
Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate's Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature by Sarah Iles Johnston. Here we meet Hekate not only as the goddess of witches and the threefold Lady of the Ways, but as the benign creatrix and mediator of the philosophers, ensouling the cosmos and personifying the border zone between the divine and human worlds.
Favorite Art Book Read in 2022
Tolkien, Maker of Middle Earth edited by Catherine McIlwaine. A glorious guide to Tolkien's visual imagination, expressed through drawing, painting, cartography and calligraphy, and how it helped generate and guide the books.
Favorite Books on Dreaming Read in 2022
La Femme qui ne se souvenait plus de ses rêves by Florence Lautredou. What a treat to have this gracile, very human novel from one of our dream teachers, who shows us, memorably, how the core techniques of Active Dreaming can heal individual lives and heal group dynamics. I hope to see an English language edition for those who can't or won't read in French.
A Study in Dreams by Mary Arnold-Forster. If I read this 1921 classic before last year, it certainly didn't have the effect it had on me in 2022. A marvelous personal account by an Edwardian society lady of learning to fly in her dreams - and where that took her.
Favorite Books Re-Read in 2022
The Book of Life trilogy by Deborah Harkness. Watching the screen adaptation A Discovery of Witches sent me back. As so often I much prefer the novels.
A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Faerie by Verlyn Flieger. An excellent study of Tolkien's experiences and theories of dream travel across time and between worlds. I went on to read Flieger's charming fantasy A Pig Tale and found that, like Tolkien, she is a profound scholar who can trip lightly over the bridge to Faerie.
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