Best Books of 2022

End-of-year lists are by nature subjective, and selecting books in this way can be particularly hard. Tens of thousands of titles are published annually in the U.S., and a reader’s time is finite. We can digest only so much. Every publication, every jury making such judgments, has a filter. So this time around, we asked ourselves, as well as our colleagues: What were the books that had particular valence for us at The Atlantic? We looked for those that impressed us with their force of ideas, that drew us in not because of some platonic ideal of greatness, but because they got our brains working and presented fresh angles on the world. In a phrase, they were good to think with.