2022: The year in words

Yes I've done a round up. Don't hate me

I actually hate this song.

In recent years, as the world has turned darker and my own personal life ever more challenging, one of my main sources of solace has been the written word: Words that I write, words of others that I read.

As this lifeline has been ever more essential to my own mental health, so my obsession has grown. I devour one book in order to move on to devour the next. I write one book and I am planning my next before the ink is dry.

I rarely look back. But I do recognise that there is a value in pausing briefly before the next dive into the sea of words. And so here is my recap on the books and articles that made my life richer in 2022:

Let's start with three of the books I enjoyed most this year. As it happens, I reviewed all three of them: Jonathan Freedland's gripping The Escape Artist: The Main Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (the biggest surprise of which was that it demonstrated that there are still extraordinary tales be told about the Holocaust); Michael Hann's captivating and often hilarious Denim and Leather: The Rise and Fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal; and Ian Winwood's Bodies: Life and Death in Music, a devastating and brave account of how the music industry destroys its own. [I should also mention Nick Duerden's Exit Stage Left: The Curious Life of Pop Stars which also came out in 2022 and serves as a great companion to Ian Winwood's book]

Other books I enjoyed this year included Cold Water, Dave Hutchinson's latest contribution to his mind-bending 'fractured Europe' series, Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility and Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Wild Built . I finally read Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and it blew my mind.

As for non-fiction, I loved Jing Tsu's Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China and, like many others, was floored by the originality of David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

As for my own books, the paperback version of The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language came out this year and I had a few more articles published that dug deeper into its themes. I was particularly pleased to have the opportunity to write a more philosophical piece on the pleasures of not understanding languages for Psyche/Aeon. I also got a massive kick from having an article published in Multilingual magazine, which serves the localisation and translation industry.

I published an earth-shattering scoop on my own website when I revealed in November 2022 that The Message had changed. I've never been the same since...

2022 saw the publication of What does a Jew look like?, my collaboration with the photographer Rob Stothard. I was chuffed to see a selection of portraits from the book featured in the Guardian. As with The Babel Message, I enjoyed writing essays and articles fleshing out the themes of the book, including one in New Humanist and one for JewThink.

Incidentally, the most ironic consequence of the coverage of What does a Jew look like? - a book produced to counter the use of stock images of Jews in the media - was that editors seemed to latch on to one of the portraits in particular.

Tilla, the woman in the photo, out the irony in her Private Oy! zine:

Speaking of JewThink (a project I have been involved in as a writer and editor), I loved writing this short memoire about the sensory experience of Jewish community. It started as a challenge when I posted something on Facebook that began 'All my life I have been unable to tolerate the feel of velvet.' A friend joked that it could be the first line of a memoire. Challenge accepted.

While the JewThink article was pretty niche, another personal piece got a lot of attention when it was published in July 2022 in The Guardian. It described how I 'gave up hope' of recovery from ME/CFS, a condition that I have had for nearly 30 years. The article seems to have really resonated and was widely shared. It was illustrated with a photo of me that was taken on the day in 1993 when I was diagnosed with Epstein-Barr, which eventually turned into ME/CS:

A longer review article I had published in the winter 2022 issue of Prospect also discussed what it is to live with fatigue and why rest is not the only thing that people like me need. I was really proud of that one but it hasn't attracted much attention so far. Hey ho...

I spent a large portion of 2022 in a state of furious anger at Boris Johnson and is successors. I had a couple of opinion pieces published in the New Statesman (this one and this one) that discussed the dark transgressive thrills inherent in being Boris Johnson or one of his supporters. Cathartic I guess.

It was a fairly quiet year in terms of my academic writing. I had an article on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism published in the journal conflict and communication online. I was thrilled to see that the collection You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa! The Year's Work on The Room, the Worst Movie Ever Made was finally published, including my essay on the 'lonely authenticity' of Tommy Wiseau. I also worked on co-editing a collection on heavy metal metal and disability, which should be out in the next year or two.

Events meant that I didn't do as much reading of scholarly journals and books as I would ideally have liked to. However, I tracked down and added hundreds of research items on contemporary European Jewish life as part of my job running the European Jewish Research Archive and I do enjoy making this contribution to the field.

Finally, I'd like to highlight a couple of pieces of brilliant long-form journalism from 2022. This article in the New Yorker by Andrew Leland takes the reader inside deaf-blind communities and the emergence of a new kind of touch-based language. Laura Penny's article on 'The Queue' in the days following the death of Queen Elizabeth was widely celebrated at the time and reads today like a dispatch from a different world.

Happy reading.