I'm writing this 2022 post here in 2026, four years late. For the last four years I've been tracking all of the books I've read, so that I can share them here on my blog for the readers that have commented how much they enjoy these lists. Sadly, I've let those same readers down, because I haven't kept current with the lists themselves and publishing them. That ends today, as I'm working to get caught back up with 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 lists. I have them, I just haven't done the posts. Here they come!

A huge motivator for reading books and completing them is the program that my wife and I accomplished twice in 2020, twice again in 2021, and twice more in 2022: 75hard. The task of reading "10 pages" a day will make short work of any book (a 300 page book a month for example). I augment this physical reading with my Audible subscription and at 90-minutes a day of working out, I'm averaging a book every two weeks while on the program. Sadly, as I'm writing this in 2026, I can tell you that our "Season 6" in 2022 was the last time we did 75 Hard, so my book reading took a hit.

In my 2021 What I've Read article, I set a goal of 30 books for 2022. How'd I do? Well, in 2022 it looks like I got through 21 books. Fell a bit short, but still almost 2 books a month! Since I already know what I read in 2023 (hint, it fell off a cliff), I'm not going to be making predictions until I get caught up. One thing I've noticed, when I look back, is that you have to make time for reading, if you don't, you just won't read that much, and that's clearly what happened to be over the years. The mechanism I was using to dramatically increase my reading stopped happening, so I stopped reading as much. It's something I miss and something I'm going to get back to, for myself.

What was my breakdown of genres for the year?

In reviewing the books I read this year I found I read 21 titles. That's down about 23% over 2021 and they were broken down in the following broad genres:

Entertainment - 47%
Non-fiction - 20%
Computing - 0%
Biographies - 0%
Self-improvement - 33%

Books I've completed in 2022:

January

  • Leaders Eat Last (Audible) – Simon Sinek examines why some teams and organizations are built on trust while others are driven by fear and self-interest. Using examples from the military, business, and government, he argues that the best leaders prioritize the well-being of their people above their own, and that this "Circle of Safety" is what separates high-performing cultures from toxic ones.

February

  • Leviathan Falls (The Expanse Book 9) (Kindle) – The final book in The Expanse series. With the Laconian Empire collapsing and the alien force that destroyed the gate builders now actively targeting humanity, the crew of the Rocinante must navigate the endgame of a conflict that spans thirteen hundred solar systems. It brings closure to storylines that have been building across the entire series.

March

  • The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, Book 3) (Kindle) – The concluding volume of John Scalzi's Interdependency trilogy. The Flow — the extradimensional pathway that makes interstellar travel possible — is collapsing faster than predicted, threatening to strand billions of people on worlds that cannot sustain themselves. Emperox Grayland II races to save as many as she can while fighting political opposition from those who refuse to accept the reality in front of them.
  • Dead Shift - The Rho Agenda Inception (Book 3) (Kindle) – The third book in Richard Phillips' Rho Agenda Inception series. The NSA's top hacker is abducted and a covert military team is sent to recover him. The plot weaves together cyberwarfare, geopolitics, and an emerging artificial superintelligence that threatens to destabilize global infrastructure.
  • What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (Audible) – A conversation-format book between Oprah Winfrey and psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry exploring how early childhood trauma shapes behavior and mental health throughout life. The central argument is that reframing the question from "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" changes how we understand and respond to people struggling with addiction, anxiety, and other conditions.

April

  • Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen (Audible) – Dan Heath looks at why people and organizations default to reactive problem-solving rather than addressing root causes. Using a wide range of case studies — from crime reduction to healthcare to education — he examines the structural, psychological, and organizational barriers that keep us from acting on problems before they escalate.
  • Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (Audible) – A detailed history of ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern internet. It covers the researchers, engineers, and government officials at DARPA and MIT who designed and built the first packet-switched network in the 1960s and '70s, tracing the decisions — technical and political — that shaped how the internet works today.
  • Deep Blue (Doc Ford 23) (Kindle) – Doc Ford is pulled back into his covert government work when an American ISIS operative is identified through a hostage execution video. The mission takes Ford from Sanibel Island into international waters and foreign territory, with his marine biology cover providing access that intelligence agencies cannot.

May

  • Mangrove Lightning (Doc Ford 24) (Kindle) – A charter fishing captain approaches Doc Ford with an unusual problem — members of his family have been suffering a string of violent incidents he believes are connected to a 1925 murder his ancestors were involved in. Ford and Tomlinson investigate, tracing the trail from the Florida Keys to Tallahassee while themselves becoming targets.

August

  • The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation, Book 1) (Kindle) – The first book in Richard Phillips' Rho Agenda Assimilation trilogy, picking up after the events of the Inception series. Jennifer Smythe steals an alien vessel and escapes through a wormhole to avoid a Kasari invasion of Earth, while her family back home faces a planet increasingly falling under alien influence.
  • The Altreian Enigma (Rho Agenda Assimilation, Book 2) (Kindle) – Mark and Heather Smythe have stopped the immediate Kasari threat but Earth's new world government continues pursuing contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. The story expands to introduce the Altreians, another alien species with their own complicated relationship to the Kasari Collective.
  • How to Win Friends & Influence People (Audible) – Dale Carnegie's 1936 guide to interpersonal effectiveness, originally written for salespeople but broadly applicable. It covers practical techniques for making people feel valued, handling disagreements without creating enemies, and influencing others through genuine interest rather than manipulation. Dated in some examples but the core principles hold up.

September

  • Cryptonomicon (Audible) – A book that was gifted to me by a close friend and roommate from college, it took me this long to read it, and I'm glad I did. Thanks Brad! Neal Stephenson's novel runs two parallel storylines — one following Allied codebreakers and mathematicians during World War II, including a fictionalized Alan Turing, and one following their descendants in the late 1990s building a data haven in Southeast Asia. Cryptography, mathematics, and information theory are woven throughout. It's long, dense, and rewarding.

October

  • The Infinite Game (Audible) – Simon Sinek draws on philosopher James Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games to analyze leadership and business strategy. Finite games have defined rules, players, and endpoints — infinite games do not. He argues that companies get into trouble when they treat inherently infinite competitions like business as if they were finite, optimizing for short-term wins at the expense of long-term survival.
  • Predictably Irrational (Revised and Expanded Edition) (Kindle) – Behavioral economist Dan Ariely presents research showing that human decision-making is systematically irrational in predictable, repeatable ways. Through experiments covering pricing psychology, the influence of "free," relativity in decision-making, and the cost of social norms, he builds a case that standard economic models of rational actors don't reflect how people actually behave.
  • How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question (Audible) – Michael Schur, the creator of The Good Place, wrote this as an accessible introduction to moral philosophy. It covers the major ethical frameworks — consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, contractualism — using everyday scenarios to explain how each school of thought would approach common dilemmas. Genuinely funny and a good entry point into philosophical ethics without an academic background.
  • The Meridian Ascent (Rho Agenda Assimilation, Book 3) (Kindle) – The concluding volume of the Rho Agenda Assimilation trilogy. The altered humans and Earth's resistance fighters make their final push against the Kasari Collective. It wraps up the major story threads that have run across both the Inception and Assimilation series.
  • You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters (Audible) – Journalist Kate Murphy examines the decline of genuine listening in modern life. Drawing on interviews with a wide range of people — from a CIA analyst to a hairdresser to a mortician — she explores why people struggle to listen, what's lost when they don't, and what it actually takes to pay attention to another person in a meaningful way.
  • Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Kindle) – Malcolm Gladwell looks at the psychology of rapid, unconscious decision-making — what he calls "thin-slicing." The book examines situations where snap judgments outperform careful deliberation, as well as cases where instincts fail catastrophically. It draws on research from psychology, marketing, and military strategy to map out when to trust your gut and when not to.

November

  • Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (Audible) – Organizational psychologist Adam Grant categorizes people as givers, takers, or matchers based on how they approach reciprocity in professional relationships. His research at Wharton found that givers occupy both the top and bottom of success metrics — and the book examines what separates the ones who thrive from the ones who get taken advantage of.

December

  • Captiva (Doc Ford Book 4) (Kindle) – A conflict between commercial net fishermen and recreational sport fishermen on Florida's Gulf Coast escalates into arson and murder. Doc Ford gets drawn in when the dispute connects to interests reaching beyond Florida's waters. Typical of the series in its strong sense of place and the Florida marine environment.

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