After leaving this blog on the side for way too long, I’ve decided to revive it.
Between the end of last year and the beginning of 2023 there were some big changes in my life. In late November I left Germany and came back to the UK, settling in Birmingham, where my partner and I rented a lovely little house to settle with our two cats. In February I started working for Birmingham Museums Trust in Aston Hall, a magnificent 17th-century Jacobean-style mansion which has been a public museum for over 150 years. In the last month I’ve started taking a printmaking course, which I’m enjoying immensely, and each day I’m discovering more of my new city, England’s second largest, meeting people, and making new friends. Life has been good and these changes have had a very positive impact in my life.
Starting my new job at Aston Hall back in February
But also, a part of these changes has been that I’ve had much less time to focus on my freelance writing and cultural communication endeavours, which since 2020 I had been mostly doing in Spanish. In December my podcast, Cuéntame Más (produced by Libreta Negra Mx), came to an end, and in the last six months I’ve been much less active on my social media and haven’t really written much.
So now I’ve decided I want to revive this, my English language blog, as a space to share some thoughts, short texts, impressions, and curiosities I come across in this new stage of my life. If you’ve followed and read me from before, thank you for your interest and if this is your first time here, welcome!
To start this new chapter with, I wanted to share something that I failed to do so last year, but have been doing for a number of years, which is posting a list of what I read during that year as it comes to an end. In 2022 I kept up the good reading pace I started in 2021, reading a total of 29 full books, a good mixture of fiction and nonfiction, some in Spanish, most in English and a few translations too.
Some of the books I read in 2022.
So, without further ado and almost six months late, here’s what I read in 2022:
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
- Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters
- The Night Hawks – Elly Griffiths
- El ajolote. Biología del anfibio más sobresaliente del mundo – Andrés Cota Hiriart y Ana J. Bellido
- Provenance – Ann Leckie
- Una vieja historia de la mierda – Alfredo López Austin y Francisco Toledo
- Flores que no son flores. Filatelia micológica – Eduardo Barajas Mendoza, Luis Eduardo Sánchez Morales, Mónica de Ocampo Cabrera
- Huaco retrato – Gabriela Wiener
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – Olga Tokarczuk
- A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian – Marina Lewycka
- El infinito en un junco – Irene Vallejo
- This Is Happiness – Niall Williams
- The Wedding of Zein – Tayeb Salih
- Mother Night – Kurt Vonnegut
- Tar Baby – Toni Morrison
- El invencible verano de Liliana – Cristina Rivera Garza
- La historia no es la que es, es la que te cuentan – Mikel Herrán
- My Volcano – John Elizabeth Stintzi
- El amante japonés – Isabel Allende
- The Skeleton Road – Val McDermid
- Trascendent Kingdom – Yaa Gyasi
- La tercera mentira – Agota Kristof
- Marcovaldo – Italo Calvino
- The Restraint of the Beast – Magnus Mills
- Restitution. The return of Cultural Artefacts – Alexander Herman
- The Girl on the Landing – Paul Torday
- Starve Acre – Andrew Michael Hurley
- The Distant Echo – Val McDermid
- Second City. Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain – Richard Vinen
Probably my favourite reads where El infinito en un junco by Irene Vallejo (which has been recently translated into English), a fascinating history of books and libraries in Western Antiquity, and El invencible verano de Liliana by Cristina Rivera Garza, a touching, beautiful, and harrowing exploration of the life and feminicide of the author’s sister in Mexico back in the 90s.
Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? And what were your favourite reads of 2022?
Thanks for reading and see you soon!
The Path Is Made By Walking 