This week’s top ten Tuesday is “Favorite new-to-me-authors from 2022”. I encountered a lot of authors, but how many will I revisit? Let’s see…

(1) Sean Dietrich. Sean of the South visited my library in December, and I was gifted an autographed copy of his You are my Sunshine. I enjoyed the book well enough, but what sold me on Sean were his blog posts and his podcasts, the latter of which mixes storytelling and southern folk music. I’ve since read one of his novels (The Incredible Winston Browne) and loved it.

And on that note, TUESDAY TEASER INTERRUPTION! featuring a sheriff trying to teach a young man to dance, so he can summon up the nerve to ask the girl he keeps drooling over.

“C’mon,” beckoned the sheriff. “I’m a beautiful woman, Buz.”
Buz squinted and tried to imagine the sheriff as an attractive woman, but it wasn’t working. He wandered toward the sheriff like a pig going to the processing plant. “Okay,” said the sheriff, guiding Buz’s arm. “Now, put this arm around my waist and this one holds my hand.”
“This feels ridiculous,” said Buz. Tommy hollered,
“You should see it from where I’m sitting!”

The Incredible Winston Browne

(2) Damien Lewis. I read a couple of Lewis’ WW2 histories — very pop history stuff, about the derring-do of commandos and the like — and can definitely imagine visiting him again for fun, light reads.

(3) Gore Vidal. Vidal has long been recommended to me by Bill Kauffman as a sharp critic of DC’s empire, and of its treatment of not just the people of the world, but the subjects of the long-fallen American republic.

(4) Blake Crouch (pictured). Holy cow, do I like this guy’s SF. I read three of his titles last year and each of them was on my top ten list.

(5) David Brooks. His The Second Mountain was one of my favorite books for the year, about finding one’s purpose in life.

(6) H.W. Crocker II. I tried Crocker first via his alt-history novel of George Custer, who in Crocker’s book survived Little Bighorn and became a gun for hire in the old west. Quite fun.

(7) Ben Shapiro. Back in….2021, a friend lent me a couple of Shapiro’s works. I was only vaguely aware of him, as I generally avoid TV political commentators as authors, but in the middle of the coronadystopia I was intrigued by the title, The Authoritarian Moment. I’ve since read two more of his works.

(8) Fr. Charles Connor. Connor did a history of Catholicism in colonial America, and it’s part of a trilogy in Catholic-American history that I’ll probably continue when Mount TBR doesn’t loom so high.

(9) J.M. Berger. His Optimal was my first SF read of 2022, and one of the most memorable books I read all year — featuring a comfortable dystopia where human lives are essentially managed by predictive AI. Berger has nonfiction works on extremism, so he’s definitely of further interest.

(10) Peter Kreeft, pictured. Kreeft is a Catholic author I’ve been wanting to try for a while now, and having read his Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell, a dialogue between C.S. Lewis, JFK, and Aldous Huxley around Christmas, I’m game for trying him again.