It’s that time of year! As in, the end of the year. As in, it’s almost time for everyone to knowingly shake their heads as they write out a check and say, “Can you believe it’s 2016 already.”
Well, I can. Because time is marching forward and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
We can, however, amuse ourselves with stuff, like books. So here are the top five books I’ve read in 2015, in no particular order. These aren’t books that necessarily came out in 2015, they’re just books I read in 2015.
A Gentleman In The Streets, Alisha Rai This interracial romance turned a ton of romance tropes on their head. There’s a kinky billionaire–the heroine. There’s a stepbrother hero–who didn’t meet the heroine until they were both adults. There’s realistic family drama that anchors the more fantastic elements–including a subplot with a reality television show, as well as the heroine’s infamous orgies–and just really rounds out the whole story. This book was hot, the characters’ motivations were always understandable (though not entirely likable), and the pages just flew by.
Asking For It, Lilah Pace This book is definitely not for everyone, so if you decide to check it out, DO NOT IGNORE THE TRIGGER WARNINGS IN THE FORWARD. The book is about a woman struggling to reconcile her rape fantasies with her real life, and navigating the conflict between her sexual and emotional needs. At its heart, the book is a love story between two severely traumatized people, and the hero, Jonah Marks, is one of the hottest fictional guys I’ve read in a while.
The Royal We, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan The authors own the popular celebrity gossip and fashion blog Go Fug Yourself, on which certain British royals are a frequent subject. So it makes sense that Morgan and Cocks would write a New Adult novel that’s a fictionalized–but highly recognizable–tale of a common girl’s romance with a handsome prince. Yes, the book is basically AU RPF (alternate universe/real person fic) about Prince William and Kate Middleton, but that was part of its weird charm. And it is a weird book, but ultimately addictively readable.
Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher I can’t believe it took me this long to read her book, but in 2015, I’ve read it twice. Carrie Fisher is like the eccentric aunt who tells you more than you probably want to hear, and when you describe her to other people, they don’t believe she exists. Though I’ve recommended it to people struggling with mental illness (Fisher writes candidly about her bipolar disorder and electroconvulsive therapy), it doesn’t read as advocacy. It’s just that eccentric aunt telling you stories about her weird, funny, sometimes very sad life.
Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography, Fred Schruers Come on. You had to know at least something about Mr. Joel will be included in this list. If you’re not a Billy Joel fan, this book is probably not going to interest you, but if you are, this biography is fantastic. As you read along from before Mr. Joel’s birth–Schruers devotes a lot of pages to explaining how Mr. Joel’s life was ultimately shaped by his grandparents’ flight from the Holocaust–to his life as it was earlier this century, you feel like you’ve learned more about the man, yet understand him a lot less than you did before you went in.
What are the best books you read in 2015? This entire post is a shameless call for recommendations, as I’m doing the POPSUGAR Reading Challenge in 2016, as an effort to boost me out of the reading funk I’ve been in for a long time.
In no particular order:
Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On
both of Jandy Nelsons’ books (I’ll Give you the Sun and The Sky is Everywhere)
Ruthie Knox’s The Dark Space
Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
I also re-read Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name: Verity and Melina Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road, which remained tremendous.
And honorable mention to Elle Kennedy’s Off-Campus series, which is 100% catnip for me.
My father-in-law got me a copy of Such Sweet Sorrow (from my wishlist), so that will be one of my 2016 reads!
In 2015, one of my favorites was A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev, and I had a long blog post planned that never got written about how it does right many of the things 50 shades does terribly wrong (jaded handsome billionaire hero with abusive childhood that affects his love life/ poor, innocent virginal college student heroine /side romance with heroine bff/roommate, etc). It was silly and lovely and fun!
Well, this is fun!
FAVORITE BOOKS I READ THIS YEAR (I dunno about “best” books, that makes my head hurt) (numbered, but the order has no significance):
1. Whispers Under Ground, by Ben Aaronovitch — really fun urban fantasy set in London. This is the third book in the series, but I think it’s my favorite, followed by or tied with the first book, Rivers of London/Midnight Riot (apparently it was released in the UK/US with different names?)
2. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr — I wasn’t thrilled by the ending, but 90% of this book is pure magic.
3. The Seventh Bride, by T. Kingfisher — really delightful retelling of Bluebeard. I love T. Kingfisher (actually Ursula Vernon) because her characters are so sensible.
4. It’s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons You’re Single, by Sara Eckel — displaying my biases here, but this book was so compassionate that it made me cry a couple times.
5. Ulysses, by James Joyce. I spent a whole month reading it (well, listening to it, I got an audiobook.) I can’t exactly say I recommend it, because it was a pain in the ass to get through the parts where you’re trapped in Stephen Daedalus’s brain, but it was fun and often funny and just. . . interesting and intricate, and it kept me engrossed just by thinking about how the whole mess was put together.
In no particular order!
The Goose Girl, by Shannon Hale
Okay this one is number one for a reason. It’s a deeply poetic, deeply empathetic retelling of a fairy tale I’d always found a little incomprehensible. It’s a bit simple in ways, but I found that actually really suited the atmosphere, and the heroine’s growth is wonderful.
Princess Academy, by Shannon Hale
Not as affecting as The Goose Girl, but very engaging. Another very dynamic heroine, with a great focus on her place in her community and the community as a whole. It also has some nice subversions (the conclusion has a nice twist, and a princess academy is, in fact, NOT a pleasant experience). Lots of bonding between girls!
Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China, edited by Jack Chen and David Schaberg
Very interesting collection of essays on gossip as recorded in history and literati life through all the eras of Imperial China. Really worthwhile for anyone interested in Chinese history, anecdotes and urban legend, and even literature. Some of the essays would also probably be interesting to anyone interested in what “history” gets recorded and why.
Cruel Beauty, by Rosamund Hodge
I have a thing for fairy tale retellings. This one is Beauty and the Beast, with an interesting mix of different cultural elements (a lot of Greco-Roman stuff) and some aspects of other folktales thrown in for good measure. There are a few annoying things in the narrative (the worst easily being the point where the heroine makes an important discover that is then forgotten for plot’s sake), but the central characters and their relationships are truly human and compelling.
Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett
It’s my favorite book I reread it ever year it counts
(Honorable mention: Rae Carson’s Walk on Earth a Stranger. Interesting historical fiction with a touch of fantasy, that balances a number of tricky subjects in a way that, to me, seemed sensitive without making the heroine a contemporary transplant (others may disagree). The characters are excellent, especially the way the women are revealed to be very three-dimensional and come to bond. But it’s pretty episodic, and it’s one of those books I’m not entirely comfortable evaluating before the rest of the trilogy is published.)
Faust in Copenhagen, by Gino Segre
It’s a lovely little piece of nonfiction that shares a side of the discoverers of quantum physics that we don’t usually see, using a Faust parody they did at one of their big meetings as a metaphor for what happened to them all during World War II. It doesn’t go into as much detail about the parody as I’d have liked, but it’s a good overview and it mentions some physicists we don’t normally see in these books. The personal relationships are fascinating– they *all* knew each other back then, and most of them were friends.
Uncertainty– Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science, by David Lindley.
This is another one that mixes accessible discussion of quantum physics with discussion of the personal relationships of the physicists. It’s aiming for a broad coverage, so we get to hear a little about what all the major players were doing. (And more about Bohr, because we always get to hear more about Bohr in these books.)
…yeah, I think my partner (who wants to be a physicist) is affecting my reading habits, but it actually is utterly *fascinating* and wonderful, both the physics and the relationships. They called it “boy physics” because it was mostly discovered by men in their early twenties.
Here’s one that’s not physics:
The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King
He wrote this one for Hard Case Crimes, and it’s this little very Maine mystery, where the two old newspapermen send an “unsolved mystery” guy from the mainland away empty-handed, and then proceed to tell their unsolved mystery to their new intern. They spin it out, detail by detail, starting with a body that turned up on the beach and going into all the investigation they did trying to figure out who he was, and King really captures the feeling of old-and-has-seen-everything-but-this-still-made-no-sense. This one actually is a *mystery*, too; it’s none of that supernatural horror stuff he usually does. But he’s still as excellent a writer as ever.
To be honest, I’ve spent most of the year trying to read books in Spanish, because I’m intent on becoming fluent. I read two of Isabele Allende’s young adult novels (La ciudad de las bestias, El Reino del Dragón de Oro), a Spanish translation of The DaVinci Code and The Clan of the Cave Bear, also in Spanish.
I did diverge from those brain-breaking attempts by reading some Ken Follett (Fall of Giants) and Stephen King’s 11/22/63.
I’d also like to read more in 2016; I still haven’t read Diana Gabaldon’s last Outlander book…
Woo! Book recs! I always email my mom when i finish a good one.
Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco, and sequel The Suffering.
Weight of Feathers
Jade Dragon Mountain by Elsa Hart
Code Name Verity
Ocean at the end of the Lane
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Ready Player One
Swagger by Carl Deuker (basketball is a huge theme in case i got the title wrong)
The selection series by Kiera Cass
Girl of Fire and Thorns
In A Dark Dark Wood
Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica
The Boss by Abigail Barnett, aka Jenny Trout 🙂
Those are the ones i liked that i remember off the top of my head. Some, i really want to buy.
Hmm, of the books I read this year, the ones I liked the most were:
Dear Committee Members (Julie Schumacher)
Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)
Radio Iris (Anne-Marie Kinney)
Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates)
The Orange Eats Creeps (Grace Krilanovich)
A Brief History of Seven Killings (Marlon James)
I know this is SUPER late, but Anna Karenina.
I Was a Teenage Katima-Victim by Will Ferguson. I actually read this some… 15 years ago, my aunt loaned it to me and it was out of print for so long I completely forgot about it until I randomly discovered it in a bookstore. It’s about the author’s real experiences in Katimavic, a program that sent groups of teenagers across Canada to do miscellaneous community service. Alternating between crying from laughter and crying from the bittersweetness, this book is always close at hand for me.
The only other new thing i’ve read (haven’t had much money for books this year) maybe doesn’t count as it’s something of a webcomic, but for any fans of kinky LGBT romance and comics AND good writing, I highly recommend Sunstone by Stjepan Sejic (who also does Witchblade and has worked on a ton of popular comics). It’s roughly about two girls who become sex friends out of a mutual desperation to find someone else into BDSM, who slowly fall in love. Weirdly enough, although the author makes absolutely no attempt to hide the happy ending (right from the first page almost), it’s still full of suspense about what will happen next and keeps me on the edge of my seat. Probably because I love the characters so much. SO MUCH you guys. I’ve been buying the books because they are amazing.
Books I rated 5 stars which I read in 2015 (regardless of when they were published):
Jenna Black – Resistance (Replica, #2)
Cassandra Rose Clarke – The Mad Scientist’s Daughter
Megan Abbott – The End of Everything
Robert C. O’Brien – Z for Zachariah
Andy Weir – The Martian
Jennifer Lynn Barnes – The Fixer (The Fixer, #1)
So…NOT Grey or Apolonia? I’m shocked!
Hi Jenny! I did the PopSugar challenge this year, and here’s some of my favorites 🙂 —
1.Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. Good lord, this book was beautiful. Absolutely 100% my favorite book that I read this year.
2. Buffalo Lockjaw, by Greg Ames. It’s set in my hometown, and for a Rustbelter who felt particularly homesick it was a great read.
3. Juliet’s Nurse, by Lois Leveen. One of the better retellings of Romeo & Juliet, from a very different perspective.
4. The Original 1982, by Lori Carson. ‘What might have been’ imagined by a woman who chose a music career over having a baby, without the saccharine sweetness of a Hallmark movie.
5. A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley. King Lear set in mid-1990s Iowa, and it is about ten times more riveting than you think.
6. Only Ever Yours, by Louise O’Neill. This book is like if ‘Mean Girls’ and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ had a baby, and I mean that in the best possible way. One note: for as much of a spot-on look at modern femininity/feminism/sexism/toxic masculinity/etc. as this is, it can be suuuuuuper triggery when it starts talking about eating disorders and distorted body image. I had to put the book down once before I could come back to it. It’s a great book, and I don’t regret reading it, but I just want to let you know in case anyone else might have trouble.
7. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender. A girl wakes up on her 7th birthday and realizes, without any sense of sarcasm whatsoever, that she can literally eat feelings.
8. Salvage, by Alexandra Duncan. One of the best YA Sci-Fi stories I’ve read in a while.
SALVAGE was great! (I gave it 4 stars.) Hopefully I’ll acquire the companion, SOUND, in 2016 🙂
I’m just finishing The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett. I got it for Christmas and I’ve loved it so far. I’ve been reading the Discworld books since I was a young teenager so it’s bittersweet to be reading the last one now.
I’ve also really enjoyed:
Wolf Winter by Celia Ekback – set in 18th Century Sweden it’s part murder mystery, part supernatural thriller with a bit of social commentary about the power of the Church and the crown.
Periodic Table by Primo Levi, the holocaust survivor who published memoirs about his time in Auschwitz. He was a chemist before and after the war and Periodic Table is a collection of short stories/memories, using different elements in the periodic table as a framing device. In places it feels more like poetry than anything else.
Anansie Boys by Neil Gaiman, follow up to American Gods that tells the story of the God Anansie’s sons as they learn about being both human and part God.
Well, after seeing it recced during all that ‘Save The Peals’ kerfuffle, I finally got around to reading ‘Noughts and Crosses’, which is a much better version of a race-flipped society – of course, it helps that Malorie Blackman is a WOC and knows what she’s talking about. I also read and enjoyed The Three Musketeers. It was a bit more rapey than I expected (I do not recall Dogtanian ever being such a douchebag!) but it was also a lot funnier than I expected as well. Next year I intend to read more books from both of those series and also plough through Pretty Little Liars because I read the first one and now I want to know who A is (please don’t spoil me on this, everyone!).
Looooved The Royal We!
Best book I read was Nightengale by Kristin Hannah. Such a great book about two French sisters during the German occupation of WW2.
I also liked Girl on the Train.
I have a 3 month old that hates sleep so I can’t remember what else I’ve read this year….
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson is an excellent book about growing up as a black girl in the sixties and seventies. Highly recommended, even if you’re usually not into poetry.
The Story of the Stone (also known as Dreams of Red Chambers) by Cao Xueqin. I didn’t finish it yet, because it’s extremely long, but I still need to include it, because it’s great.
A Perfect Vacuum by Stanisław Lem. It’s a collection of reviews of books that don’t actually exist. Instead of writing the entire books themselves, he just pretended they already had been written and wrote reviews of them instead. (And yeah, obviously Borges did it first; it’s still worth checking out.)
The Tales of Ensign Stål by Johan Ludvig Runeberg. Finnish poetry from the first half of the 19th century. Best war poetry I ever read.
And perhaps the best book I read all year: The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi. It’s a collection of stories about the village priest Don Camillo and his perpetual enemy, the Communist Mayor Peppone. It’s the kind of warm stories I love, and I cannot recommend the book strongly enough.
Hi Katsuro,
May I ask you where did you get your copy of Runeberg’s poem? I am searching high and Low and cant find it!
TIA
These are all the ones I liked enough to recommend to my siblings:
Lila Bowen – Wake of Vultures – has a really interestingly different heroine
Becky Chambers – The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
Cixin Liu – The Three Body Problem – it’s relatively hard SF, set mainly in China – first of a trilogy, and I really liked this one although I am finding number 2 a bit harder going
Natural history of dragons: a memoir by Lady Trent By Brennan, Marie – really fun read, and the sequel is also good
Best of all possible worlds By Lord, Karen
Throne of the Crescent Moon By Ahmed, Saladin
A Soldier’s duty: theirs not to reason why By Johnson, Jean
God save the queen By Locke, Kate
I’ve been in the mood to only read books with black women in them, but here’s the ones I liked best in no particular order. They also are mostly dystopian or post apocalyptic.
The Occasional Diamond Thief by J.A. McLachlan
Orleans by Sherri L. Smith
Listened to The Handmaid’s Tale for the 5th time. I just cry the entire time.
Started London Falling by Paul Cornell
Ms. Marvel
Storm
I did the POPSUGAR Reading Challenge of 2015 and these were my favourite books:
The mysteries of Pittsburgh – Michael Chabon (wry and cute)
The story of Edgar Sawtelle – David Wroblewski (heartbreaking; though I feel it does go off the rails a bit towards the end)
The chocolate war (& Beyond the chocolate war) – Robert Cormier (I wish this was a movie: it would be disturbing but beautiful and awesome)
A visit from the good squad – Jennifer Egan (vibrant; pretty unique)
A girls’ guide to hunting and fishing – Melissa Bank (I love her way with words; deliciously witty)
Wicked – Gregory Maguire (so lovely and entertaining)
Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy – John Le Carre (tense and intricate)
I am Pelgrim – Terry Hayes (a really good spy novel)
The long walk – Stephen King (devastating)
The history of love – Nicole Krauss (gorgeous and surprisingly funny)
In no particular order:
The Quick by Lauren Owen
Troublemaker by Leah Remini (I read this in one sitting. It’s far better than it should be.)
All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen
Everyday Life in Medieval London by Toni Mount
An Abundance of Katherines by John Green