Best books I read in 2022 (were all research reads)

As I got back into writing this year, my reading habits also changed. A big part of querying is comp titles, the books that you think your book will sell like. And although I am very much a querying novice, I read a lot of comp titles looking for the right one to help me sell a book (never found it). When I wasn't reading for comps, I was often reading for research to either help build the world of a book or see how another author approached the same problem I was wrestling with. Still, these are still great reads and all but one of my favorite books this year started off as researching for my writing.

1) THE BLACKTONGUE THIEF (Christopher Buehlman): I started this as a comp title for a fantasy novel I've written, but I finished it because it's amazing. The world is fascinating, intricate and unique. The main character is irreverent and funny. In short, it made me want to throw my own novel in the trash.

2) QUALITYLAND (Marc-Uwe Kling): This was a potential comp title for a near-future scifi project. It's a Kurt Vonnegut take on social media and e-commerce running our lives. It's hilarious and imaginative vision of what life might be like in twenty years if we don't stop companies from consolidating and/or collecting our data.

3) CIRCE (Madeline Miller): I love Greek myth and this one is like a Marvel movie with cameos by all the most famous heroes. But it's also a great contrarian story about the backwards values those myths promote, told from the perspective of a misunderstood kinda-villain. Not originally a research book but it ended up impacting a Greek-influenced project I'm working on.

4) DARK EMU (Bruce Pascoe): I bought this book purely for research and accidentally sped read it. It's about aboriginal agriculture, specifically written to refute the myth that the aborigine people were simple hunter-gatherers. But the incredible through-line in the book is that people see what they want to see: that the white settlers of Australia ignored the obvious hallmarks of aboriginal civilization because it better fit their own colonization narrative.

5) MISTER MIRACLE (Tom King): Like CIRCE, I didn't start this for research but it still came to influence a project I was working on. This graphic novel explores a minor superhero's mental health, marriage and epic battles in a very down-to-earth manner. It also manages to embrace all the twisted decades of weird comic book continuity. Big Barda is one of my favorite characters of the year.

Maybe the lesson that I should take away from this is that all books have the potential to teach, whether we came to them to learn or not. Of course I also read several books this year that I'm not sure I learned anything from (looking at you, ROBOPOCALYPSE).