Here we are, the last Friday Five of 2022 and on trend with many previous installations of this bookish conversation, what I planned to write about is not what you’ll read today. Last week, as I stared wide-eyed in a fever fugue at the stacks of ARCs next to my desk, I imagined presenting a preview of some of the premier picks for 2023. But reading aspirations be dammed, I was terribly distracted by this nagging feeling that whatever was going to happen at the end of The White Lotus (season two) it WOULD NOT BE GOOD. Plans for reading ahead were abandoned in favor of figuring out how the Lotus crew was going to escape from what seemed to be a dangerous, perhaps even deadly situation fueled on by delusions of grandeur and priviledge. Now how to wrap that into a Friday Five? Well, the way these characters lived their lives was often less than appealing making me think: there has to be more for them, right? What else is there? What comes after this earthly existence both for ourselves but also those left behind? What does life after life look like?

THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA: This Booker Prize winner is one of the trippiest books I've read in a long time and I mean that in the best of ways. The action takes place in Sri Lanka and follows Maali Almeida, a dead photojournalist and his early days in the afterlife. Before learning about his ultimate fate (paradise, damnation, etc.) Almeida has seven moons to try and figure out how he died. The narrative is brilliant and difficult to follow. It laughs boisterously at anyone who thinks they might have life and its after affects figured out. But despite the fact that my technology-damaged attention span wanted to quit, I couldn’t and I’m so glad I didn't. A good project for the long post-holiday winter days.

A HEART THAT WORKS: I am less familiar with actor Rob Delaney than I am with his Catastrophe costar Sharon Horgan who I absolutely adored in Bad Sisters. No matter your familiarity with Delaney’s onscreen persona, I guarantee you won’t be able to put him out of your mind after reading his gorgeously devastating memoir. The topic – his young son dying of a brain tumor – is unquestionably devastating. The quiet generosity that Delaney offers up through lucid prose and truth-telling intimacy about what it means to parent a dying child is absolutely exquisite. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. Meditations on how to go on after a child passes are tangible and ephemeral all in one. Still skeptical? Give a listen to this Morning Edition interview. Or check out the convincing chorus praising Delaney's courage and delivery (Anne Lamott, Lauren Groff, Margaret Atwood, Richard Osman, Eleanor Catton, Laura Zigman, and Mat Johnson among others).

THE HERO OF THIS BOOK: Elizabeth McCracken is one of those writers I find hard to pin down. Her books ricochet from wacky (Bowlaway) to short story brilliance (Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry). In her latest Kirkus-starred, much-lauded novel she offers up what some speculate is a fine work of autofiction. In a mere 180 pages, the narrator travels to London, a city that her recently-passed mother adored. While visiting old haunts, she embarks on an analysis of what made her late mother so complicated and yet so beloved. The reality of selling her mother’s home coupled with musings on how a grown child exists the world without their parents *and* the clear presence of her mother throughout (despite the loss of a physical body) rings true to the idea that even when our bodies leave the world we currently know, our souls remain closely tied to earthly beings. 

THE SPLENDID TICKET: Yes, I bought this one for the cover. And to support McSweeney’s, Dave Eggers righteously rad nonprofit publishing company that pushes out some pretty unique work. I stumbled across this book on our shelves and didn't even look at the synopsis to see whether I'd care for the narrative or not. Fortunately for me judging this book by its cover didn't backfire. On page one, the reader learns that a winning lottery ticket has landed in the hands of Angie and Dean Lee, a couple married in haste and forever bonded by a terribly tragic accident that prematurely claims one of their daughters. As Angie Lee ponders whether the $324 million lottery ticket holds the key to assuaging their grief (hint: it doesn’t), the reader is pulled in headfirst to a story that reads at a rapid clip. Characters in this Texas Hill Country narrative aren't always likable but serve as an interesting platform as they test the question of what relationships can survive in this life and beyond.

PLEASE MAKE ME PRETTY, I DON'T WANT TO DIE: It is fitting that we end with a celebration of poet Tawanda Mulalu who graced us with his presence not once but twice in 2022. At his October reading with the resplendent Aaron Caceydo-Kimura the audience was so captivated, you could hear a pin drop as he and Aaron read words about love and loss. And so it was with great delight that we read Elisa Gabbert's end of year round up of the best poetry of 2022: "Tawanda Mulalu’s PLEASE MAKE ME PRETTY, I DON’T WANT TO DIE would have to be incredible to live up to its title and cover image (Podkowiński’s “Frenzy of Exultations,” in which a naked woman clings in seeming adoration to a totally deranged-looking horse). And it is — a stunningly good book of poems, organized by season, with a fascinating relationship to Sylvia Plath. The second of two poems called “Aria,” for instance, evokes “Ariel” in its title, takes its epigraph from Plath’s “Thalidomide” and gestures in its body at the anxiety (and oppression) of influence: “All my poems are in whiteface. Which makes me clean,/bearable. Is my life viable. This poem/Is not mine.” Mulalu can be Plathian in his extravagance (“The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gases burn/distant like castanets of antebellum teeth”) but can also string the simplest words into memorably great lines: “So, I’m part of this thing where fish learned to walk.” Loss, love, and everything in between. Mulalu is surely a poet to watch.

One of the strange things about being a bookseller is that despite the fact our friends and family know about our love for (dare we say obsession with) books, we find people reluctant to wrap one up and give it as a gift. So this year I asked the staff: what are you buying and squirreling away under the tree to read after a long winter's nap?

—Kirkus, *starred review*

"It. Goes. So. Fast. is a moving and funny account of the deals we cut with ourselves: what we sacrifice, what we gain, and what we really want (which is everything). By holding up a mirror to her own choices, Mary Louise Kelly gives us tremendous insight into how we struggle to be true to ourselves and the people we love, and how we're never going to get it exactly right. This book is the voice of solidarity. It is a gift."

—Katie Couric