I’ve been waiting all year long for these “Favorite of the year” threads! So I’m not going to waste any time getting started. First up, books!
Here’s the question – Of all the books you read this year, which were your favorite? Note, the book didn’t need to be published in 2015, just that you read it this past year.
If you need even more book inspiration, you can always look back at our/your Your Favorite Books of 2014 and Your Favorite Books of 2013 threads! Or check out the New York Times recently released lists of 100 Notable Books of 2015 and the 10 Best Books of 2015.
Photo courtesy of Little Shop of Stories Facebook page
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton was my favorite book of 2015.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Heartfelt, beautifully written, and crucial.
The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows. Strong second novel by the co-author of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society
The Gold Finch and Between the World and Me
Fast Girl: A Life Spent Running From Madness by Suzy Favor Hamilton
I’m a memoir reader and knew very little about her. It was interesting and sad to see someone like her – a world class athlete, wife, Mom, career woman – become so crippled by her bi-polar disease that she became a high paid prostitute.
Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. We’re still living with the consequences.
Haven’t gotten around to any 2015 books yet, but Between the World and Me is next up in my queue.
Brooklyn (Colm Toibin) and All The Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr) were probably my favorite novels I read this year. Finally got around to The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (Michael Chabon, a fave). I’m in the middle of it and enjoying it very much.
For non-fiction, I liked Risk Savvy: how to make good decisions (Gerd Gigerenzer), which makes the case that too much information can be a bad thing, sometimes.
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein and The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits – three incredible memoirs from 2015.
Heartily seconding Carrie Brownstein’s memoir. Also Station Eleven (gorgeous, just trust me), the Royal We (fun, light, possibly one could categorize it as YA but I’m far from a young adult and loved it), Vitamania (great look into the history of vitamins, the vitamin”industry” and the obsession with fortified food), Over Easy (great graphic memoir), and Yes Please (because Amy Poehler). And for about two months I was REALLY good at the KonMari method after reading the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up…..
Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson
“Car & Driver” 60th Anniversary issue. Technically not a book, but since I march to the beat of a different drummer than most people on this blog (and in Decatur, for that matter) I figured I would throw it out there anyway.
Class of ’65 by Auchmutey. Powerful and wonderful!
I second this plus I enjoyed seeing the author and the protagonist at the DBF.
Here’s the books I’ve enjoyed reading this year: The Passage (because vampires!), The Martian, Ready Player One (old school), Station Eleven, Yiddish Policemen’s Union, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and a re-read of To Kill a Mockingbird. For non-fiction I dove into philosophy, thoroughly enjoying several of Plato’s Dialogues for the first time, Simon Blackburn’s Think, and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. All recommended.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
I do audiobooks, so my favorite listening experience this year may have been A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block. His Matt Scudder stories are always enjoyable but the performance of this one was outstanding. Nick Hornby was as entertaining as always with Funny Girl. And I loved the two Wolf Hall books by Hilary Mantel, once I got past that thing she does with her third person pronouns.
Favorite book of the year Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage–which I technically read in the last days of 2014
Favorite fantasy/sci fi published in 2015:
Uprooted
The Fifth Season
Aurora
Menagerie
Favorite Graphic novels: (that my teens have enjoyed as well and are all available at the library):
Nimona
Ms. Marvel books volumes 1-3
Honorable mentions:
Slade House
The Japanese Lover
The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt), The Dinner (Herman Koch) and Life After Life (Kate Atkinson) were all great. I also enjoyed Too Much Happiness (Alice Munro) and Gulp (Maria Roach). Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Maria Semple) surprised me by how much I enjoyed it – great light read with fun social commentary; Decatur parents might especially enjoy the humor. I also loved Career of Evil (“Robert Galbraith”)- all of the author’s Cormoran Strike detective books are excellent. My husband likes Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities (Kevin Kelly) so much he is gifting copies to friends.
Another good one for Decatur parents is Big Little Lied by Liane Moriarty (as long as they don’t take it too personally)
Ooh, forgot that I read The Dinner at the beginning of the year. Nasty and a page-turner for sure, though I thought it fell a bit flat as satire.
I really liked that The Dinner wasn’t predictable.
Volumes I & II of “Humans of New York” (the series that began on Facebook, but then became a photoblog on Instagram & then two books). They both grabbed my heart.
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah was a fantastic read for me. It tells the story of two French sisters and their father during the German occupation of World War II. It was amazing. Everyone in my extended family who “borrowed” the book could not put it down. Another great 2015 read, although it came out in 2012, was The Street Sweeper, by Elliot Perlman. Set in New York, it is about a man who gets a job as a parolee working as an orderly in a hospital and the strange friendship he builds with an elderly dying cancer patient who was a Holocaust survivor. Two great non-fiction reads for me in 2015, neither actually published in 2015, were The Marshmellow Test (2014), by Walter Mischel, and The Invisible Gorilla (2009), by Christpher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The former book makes me want to develop a curriculum for our high school oriented around David Allen’s Getting Things Done and the lessons of The Marshmellow Test to equip our students with the tools to have self-discipline and organization. The Invisible Gorrilla book is just an amazing read about how wrong we are about so many of our intuitive beliefs about what we actually see, remember and know versus what we think we see, remember and know. (You can google the Gorilla psychology experiment to learn about the test that gives the book its title.) It is fantastic.
Memoirs: Hold Still (Sally Mann) and Girl in the Dark (Anna Lyndsey) – that last one isn’t chronological, and the chart at the end that makes it clear how long she’s been in the dark broke my heart.
SF/Fantasy: The Library at Mount Char (Scott Hawkins, GA author), The Girl with All the Gifts (first time zombies have scared me) and Get in Trouble (Kelly Link).
Also – One Man’s Folly: The Exceptional Houses of Furlow Gatewood (Julia Reed)
Two recent finds, though both were published some years ago are Small Island by Andrea Levy and The Worst Thing I’ve Done by Ursula Hegi. I’m always hard pressed to choose favorites, but both of these were very well written and told stories worth reading.