My Favorite Books of 2022

I read a lot of great books this year, and as gift-giving time is approaching, I'm offering you a little list of my suggestions. Because a good book can't go bad.

For the anxious performer in your life: The Sleep Revolution, by Arianna Huffington.

In my opinion, this book is perfect for the holiday season. Sleep is one of the most important things we can do to feel good and, of course, to rest. Yet sleep is often one of the first things to take a backseat when we're busy. And we find ourselves completely exhausted at the end of the year.

That was my case last year. And then I read The Sleep Revolution. Very effective. Every time I took it, I wanted to sleep, and that's exactly what I did. Thanks to it, I slept 10-11 hours a night during the vacations. It was great. Now I get as much sleep as I can year-round, because it's anything but a waste of time.

For the fan of the Roaring Twenties: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite books of all time. The movie is okay, but the book is so excellent that I am at a loss for words. I feel sorry for people who haven't read it yet.

For those who are anxious about the future of our planet: The Precipice : Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, by Toby Ord.

Never has a book succeeded so brilliantly in changing my entire outlook on life. And I'm not kidding. It managed to project me both far into the past and far into the future, to scare me while giving me a lot of hope, and to make me feel like I know what's coming while knowing absolutely nothing about it. I myself have given it to several people around me. I think we all need it.

For those who love the fantasy genre : The Mistborn Trilogy, by Brandon Sanderson.

I read this trilogy with my lover, and we had a lot of fun. Brandon Sanderson is a real pro. The story is good, it's easy to read, the characters are charismatic and you can't predict what's going to happen next. Really, hard to go wrong with this one.

For those who want to read a brick: The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt.

This book fascinated me and impressed me like rarely. It's a real page-turner. I could never predict what was coming, and even though it took me three weeks to read it, I found it too short.

Don't be intimidated by its 800 pages or by the fact that it won the Pulitzer Prize. This is a book I recommend to absolutely everyone; a great book, in every sense of the word.

For those who like a well-crafted suspense story: Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch.

I started this post by telling you how much I loved sleeping and how important it was. Well this one made me throw all those considerations out the window. It wasn't just that it was impossible to stop the book because there was never a good time, it was that it didn't felt like stopping. It was very late, but I was not sleepy. I kept going, and going, and going, until the end finished me off like a hammer blow. It was beautiful and profound and I cried. Another great value.

I realize that this list is very Anglophone. My resolution for 2023: read more books in French. (And who knows, maybe even in German?)