Issue 20: Best of 2022
Hey there!
2022 is over, January is almost over (one day we’ll get back on a regular posting schedule…one day), and it’s time to spotlight the best stories the old year had to offer. Our two ground rules still apply:
Four entries per person. In order to keep this issue to the usual 1k-2k wordcount, our lists are skimpy, but still hopefully representative of our tastes and reading/viewing experiences last year.
The books and movies covered here need to have been read or watched in 2022, not necessarily published or released in 2022.
Plus something new, just for fun:
The fourth entry of each list will be our picks for our personal favorite essays of the year–Alex picks her favorite of Claudia’s, and Claudia picks her favorite of Alex’s.
Whew! Okay, on to the lists.
Alex’s Top 4
Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin
I read the first of Le Guin’s Annals of the Western Shore series in high school and don’t remember finishing it, which means I didn’t like it all that much.
Rereading, I can see why. Gifts is a dark book that feels worlds away from Le Guin’s better-known Earthsea Cycle, though it shares many of the qualities that make Earthsea my evergreen favorite: meticulously detailed worldbuilding, deeply humane characters, and an eerie, earthy brand of magic. But still, to grossly oversimplify, the Earthsea Cycle is epic fantasy and Gifts is a family tragedy in which magic happens to play a big part. Orrec grows up believing that he’s inherited his father’s ability to kill with a look. As his “gift” spirals out of control he permanently blindfolds himself in order to contain it. The rift this causes between Orrec and his proud, demanding father raises the story to its boiling point. Even if it’s not pleasant watching all that tension simmer, there’s plenty of beauty and love beneath the surface. If I had managed to get to the end my first time around, I would have already known that it sticks the tragic landing but still provides some much-needed hope.
Bones and All by Camille DeAngelis and Bones and All directed by Luca Guadagnino
Bones and All begins with Maren, who devoured her babysitter when she was around three years old. She hasn’t been able to stop since, and as she wanders across America she meets other “eaters,” each with their own set of rules and rituals meant to justify their hunger. Eventually Maren teams up with Lee. He’s a couple years older and a couple degrees more hardened, but the two recognize something beyond shared appetites in each other. Obviously they’re going to fall in love. Obviously it’s going to end tragically. But Bones and All is a road novel/movie, so it’s all about the journey.
It’s easy to write about Bones and All (the novel) and Bones and All (the movie) as a single story, even though they have significant differences. Both are about growing up as much as they’re about first love. Even though Timothée Chalamet is the best-known name attached to the movie, Lee is a supporting character in both versions, a cipher that’s never fully solved because he doesn’t need to be. Whether it’s through the novel’s earnest first-person narration or Taylor Russell’s performance—her Maren is equally earnest, but not quite as naïve—Maren comes alive as a complicated, ravenous drifter struggling to understand what love means when it’s so deeply linked to her most shameful urges.
Call Me By Your Name directed by Luca Guadagnino
I read the novel that this movie is based on, then watched the movie, pretty much solely to combat my post-Bones-and-All funk, so there’s a running theme to these last two entries that I won’t apologize for. Call Me By Your Name shares a couple strands of DNA with Bones and All—a hazy, nostalgic sense of atmosphere; a tender, bittersweet romance—but as an adaptation it differs from its source material enough to warrant its own separate entry.
The movie trims a few dangling subplots, but its major difference lies in perspective. In the novel, the romance between Elio, a seventeen-year-old budding musician living in Italy, and Oliver, the midtwenties grad student his parents host for the summer, is retold in flashbacks. The movie removes the older and lonelier Elio’s narration, making for a less regretful story with an immediacy that feels almost YA. It’s about discovering first love, not looking back on first love, and, even more relevant to the focus of this newsletter, it’s about being a teenager, not remembering the agony and the ecstasy of it all from a distance. It’s deeply felt, deeply sad, and deeply romantic, and pretty much a perfect film.
Favorite Essay: Charlotte Sometimes
I still haven’t gotten around to reading this book myself (sorry!). But reading Claudia’s analysis of the time travel in Charlotte Sometimes—she argues that it’s a device for illustrating the murkiness and uncertainty of selfhood—still has me both super impressed, a little jealous, and very excited to read the book (one of these days). I’ve always thought of time travel as more of a plot device than a tool for character development, but Claudia’s essay demonstrates that it can be both—and that the past and the future are always more closely entwined than we realize.
Claudia’s Top 4
Elizabeth, Elizabeth by Eileen Dunlop
I read thirteen time travel books in 2022. All of them were weird and interesting, and most of them were good. One of the ones that’s been lingering is 1975’s Elizabeth, Elizabeth. (The UK title is Robinsheugh.) Elizabeth Martin is sent to spend the summer with her aunt, a professor of history researching onsite at Robinsheugh, the ancestral home of the Melville family. Elizabeth and her aunt used to be close but aren’t anymore, and, lost in boredom and bitterness, she begins to be pulled back into the body of Elizabeth Melville, an eighteenth-century daughter of the house.
Elizabeth, Elizabeth has a melancholy tone that’s reminiscent of Charlotte Sometimes, but it’s creepier: while the force of history pulls Charlotte back, what’s calling Elizabeth is human, and malevolent. It’s out of print and a bit tricky to find, which is a shame—it shouldn’t be forgotten.
Words of Stone by Kevin Henkes
Blaze is a shy ten-year-old still processing the death of his mother five years ago. The arrival of Joselle next door upends his summer plans and begins to open up his world.
From that description, it’s easy to imagine Joselle as a miniature manic pixie dream girl, but the novel is much more interested in examining how two kids navigate a friendship filled with the potential for hurt. Joselle’s impulsiveness contrasts with Blaze’s caution, but she’s just as capable of self-deception as he is, and has a cruel streak that makes her a well-drawn preteen girl instead of a trope. Despite the complex themes it tackles, Words of Stone never comes across as preachy or depressing, and has a bittersweet summer charm that will stick with me for a long time.
The Midnight Children by Dan Gemeinhart
This one has a lovely, charming cover and a lovely, charming tone that sometimes masks just how weird it is. It’s set in a slaughterhouse town, the titular children roam from place to place parentless with the help of semi-magical powers, and a coffin is made into a boat. If any of that sounds up your alley, you should give it a try. Maybe even check it out if it doesn’t, because The Midnight Children is really, really good.
One of the great pleasures of reading the book is sinking into its off-center world. It has a sweet tone that blends well with its craziness, and a villain who’s both threatening and grimly funny.
Favorite Essay: A Nightmare on Elm Street.
As a very nervous teenager, I stumbled on a plot synopsis of one of the Elm Street movies and was so traumatized that I promised myself I would never, ever watch any of them. I still haven’t managed to shake my revulsion for Freddy Krueger, and Alex’s thoughts on the first entry in the franchise dig into the bleakness and cruelty I picked up on and was so shaken by. Horror is starting to get more of the credit it deserves for exploring deep-set cultural anxieties, but reading a piece that takes a teen slasher seriously will never stop giving me an unexpected thrill.
Whether it’s your first time reading or your first time reading in a while, or if you’ve stuck with this little newsletter for the three (!!!) years we’ve kept it going, thank you so much! Hey, Kid! will be back for a hopefully wonderful 2023.
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia