Literary critics give their takes on the best of books of 2022

Gilbert Cruz:

I sure do.

The first is a book called "Stay True" by a gentleman called Hua Hsu. Hua is a writer for "The New Yorker" magazine. And stay true is a memoir. It's a memoir of growing up as the child of Taiwanese immigrants in California, but it's also the memoir of going to Berkeley in the mid-1990s.

He becomes friends with the son of Japanese American immigrants, a boy named Kenton, who he first thinks is sort of this very simple frat boy, but then grows to learn it's much more complicated than he first suspected. It's a book about grief. It's a book about youth and nostalgia.

There's so much that it's packed into such a small — such a small amount of pages. It's quite wonderful.

The second is called "An Immense World." Ed Yong is a writer for "The Atlantic" magazine. Some might know him for his wonderful stories over the past three years on coronavirus. But this is a book about animals.

And it's specifically about the ways that animals perceive the world and how those perceptions are different from the way that humans see the world. And whether you like animals or not, it was just endlessly fascinating.

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