In our January newsletters we asked readers to tell us what they're looking forward to reading in 2022, whether it's hot off the press or found buried in the stacks. Lots of excitement for a wide range of books and genres:

We have to appreciate someone's instant reply of The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen! You can also enjoy this online event offered through our friends at the Boston Athenaeum late last year.

Among those reading the lives of others, picks included Jan Swafford's monumental Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph: A Biography, Walter Isaacson's delightful Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, and Annette Gordon-Reed's award-winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. (You can catch Dr. Gordon-Reed in this event recording, speaking on her most recent book Juneteenth.)

Lots of anticipated fiction, including recent and upcoming titles like Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise (3 people mentioned this one!), Amor Towles' The Lincoln Highway, Jennifer Egan's The Candy House, Diana Gabaldon's Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, and "Louise Penny's latest Inspector Gamache." Patrons are also looking forward to catching up with the last couple of books by Colm Tóibín, Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang, Jessamine Chan's The School for Good Mothers, Free Love: A Novel by Tessa Hadley, Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen, and the upcoming Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk.

Other areas of literature were represented by Melissa Febos' Girlhood: Essays and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver.

As always, our readers embrace a wide range of interests in history and other nonfiction. Some highlights: After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Epoque Through Revolution and War by Helen Rappaport, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 by Harald Jähner, and Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World.

Someone wistfully added, "Hoping Erik Larson is writing another history" - us too!

One reader mentioned Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester - you can catch up with the related event we co-presented with the Athenaeum of Philadelphia here. And two people are looking forward to Carl Bernstein's brand-new memoir Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom - more good news: you can see him at the Library or by livestream (in conversation with Lance Morrow) on February 24!

We always have a core audience for the classics, such as Henry James, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Vladimir Nabokov's Ada; or, Ardor: A Family Chronicle, and Joe Brainard's I Remember. One reader will be enjoying Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days alongside its current television adaptation.

Respondents also mentioned their new year's resolutions to look into the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books and to read more Latin American authors. The person who said "I want to work my way through the 2021 lists of the most-read books of the year" can start with ours right here.

And to whoever just replied that they look forward to reading "Everything" - we see you and we love you. We hope you find "everything" you're looking for this year in our lobby, Children's Library, and stacks.