Needopedia

~Because good fiction makes us better humans and these are some of the best.~

	Title	Author	Denise’s summarily poor summaries
1	An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good	Helene Turstein	Oh, dear. “Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and…no qualms about a little murder.”
2	Crownchasers (and the sequel Thronebreakers)	Rebecca Coffindaffer	As soon as I started, I couldn’t put down this YA sci-fi with exactly the female protagonist I want to adventure with.  Great characters, a puzzle-chase, hilarious AI, it has all the things I love about Sanderson’s Starsight series and is still very much its own story.
3	The Diamond Eye	Kate Quinn	Kate Quinn. Again. Why would I be interested in a Russian assassin, even if she’s female? Because Kate Quinn wrote it, and it might be my favorite Quinn novel–which sets an impossibly high bar for her books I haven’t yet read.
4	It Ends with Us	Colleen Hoover	After seeing this author’s name everywhere, I picked up this must-read. Why do we stay with abusers, the author asks to understand her own mother’s life, and are abusers more than their abuse? And what if he’s fun, interesting, and mostly good?
5	Lessons in Chemistry	Bonnie Garmus	Another book that is in everyone’s Top 10 this year. How does a brilliant woman in the 50’s become a chemist? Well, after years of being mocked, dead-ended, assaulted, etc, she falls into having a popular TV cooking show, using chemistry. If I could summarize the book well with one sentence, the book wouldn’t be worth reading, so know that there is much more to it than this.
6	Liar’s Knot	M.A. Carrick	Book 2 of the Rook and Rose trilogy. My perfect escape: a fantasy adventure with a deceptive female character who is uber-competent and creative, and fascinating complex characters who have to create a third way when there only seems two options…it checks all my boxes.
7	The Lincoln Highway	Amor Towles	This sort-of road trip story confounded my expectations at each bend and introduced me to some of the most intriguing characters, even as male teens, that I have read this year. Neighbor Sally is my spirit sister. It was perfectly plotted and prosed.
8	The No Show	Beth O’Leary	My fellow bibliophiles snatch O’Leary books as soon as they are published. Any book that takes me on a journey where I know I’m going, and then completely drops me on my head and makes me read the entire book again–right away–is my drug of choice.
9	Part of Your World	Abby Jimenez	These are not your grandma’s bodice rippers! Jimenez (like Helen Huang) definitely writes meet-cute-and-figure-it-out-from-there novels, but the romance is only a part of it. What are the real obstacles, what emotional baggage must be dealt with, who gives up what, is it worth it, what about careers and families? It is both mundane and impossible and very real.
10	The Rose Code	Kate Quinn	Kate Quinn continues to be my favorite historical fiction writer, though she is more like a time machine. Here, she takes you to the WWII code breakers desperately deciphering Enigma and its Axis siblings. The reader tramps all the way around Britain, and as well as up and down the emotional scale.

Sure, I left out Sullivan’s Farilane, Gaiman’s Good Omens, and Picoult’s Leaving Time, but I (painfully) narrowed down my ten favorite novels that I read in 2022, which gives me a little room for some delightful YA and worthwhile nonfiction:

YA	The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise	Dan Gemeinhart	From the Sasquatch YA list. A young heroine for the ages.  Full of truth bombs and beautiful souls, as a young teen has to make it back to Washington, the only state that her dad won’t drive to.
YA	Pay Attention, Carter Jones	Gary D. Schmidt	Sasquatch YA nominee. I really enjoyed this book about a butler, a middle school cricket team (in NY), a sibling death, and a walk-out jerk father.  Many layers.
YA	What I Carry	Jennifer Longo	Muir was born into foster care and she hopes this is her last placement before turning 18.  However, instead of Seattle where she has been all her life, she is moved to Bainbridge, carrying only what fits in her suitcase, and refusing extra baggage, including relationships. So full of truth bombs, and feelings, and bittersweetness, this is a YA book that gave me all the feels.
NF 1	Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory	Caitlin Doughty	Let’s talk about death. And the death industry. And how much Americans don’t like talking about death. I learned much about what we don’t talk about—and now just want to be composted into a tree.
NF 2	Attack of the Teenage Brain	John Medina	Okay, I needed this perspective of the teenage brain.
NF 3	When Breath Becomes Air	Paul Kalanithi	The rarest of humans (neurosurgeon with degrees in philosophy and English lit) gets the rarest diagnosis and poignantly writes about dying as a young man.
NF 4	Untamed	Glennon Doyle	A third time read, I get something new each time I pick up St. Glennon. She started as a funny mommy-blogger but shifted into a hilarious truth telling warrior. Her spiritual peers are Brene Brown…and perhaps that’s it.
NF 5	How Jesus Became GOD: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee	Bart D. Ehrman	I love new thoughts and perspectives and Ehrman writes a readable scholarship as he details the journey of Jesus from crucified prophet to complicated God.
NF 6	Fuzz: When Nature breaks the law	Mary Roach	How do humans deal when animals are just being animals and it inconveniences, and sometimes endangers, us?
NF 7	Fair Play: A Game Chang-ing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do	Eve Rodsky	What is all the invisible work and why, really, why do women do so much of it? Dig deep, and then deeper. This gave me both words for what I do and a way of thinking about it.
NF 8	Invisible Women	Caroline Criado-Perez	Subtitle: Data bias in a world designed for men. Need I say more?
NF 9	The Persuaders: At the front lines of the fight for hearts, minds, and democracy	Anand Giridharadas	“We meet a leader of Black Lives Matter; a trailblazer in the feminist resistance to Trumpism; white parents at a seminar on raising adopted children of color; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; a team of door knockers with an uncanny formula for changing minds on immigration; an ex-cult member turned QAnon deprogrammer; and, hovering menacingly offstage, Russian operatives clandestinely stoking Americans’ fatalism about one another.”  Ideas burst, my brain explodes…all in a good, aha! way.