delphica took a bunch of mine! Or did I get them from her in the first place?
Anyway. Top three are the first three books of the Lockwood & Company series by Jonathan Stroud. Ghostly mysteries for youngsters, set in a world where only youngsters can detect the ghostly. They remind me of when I was a kid reading the Bellairs books, feeling pure pleasure and so sucked into the story that I could feel myself in snowy woods although it was a summer day.
The Hired Girl
A YA novel about a girl who makes changes in her life, driven partly by the books she loves. She winds up in a better place, with fascinating people, and all along she is questioning herself and learning about other ways of life and getting in trouble…oh! It is riveting. Loved it.
The Country of Ice Cream Star About a dystopian society a few generations after a plague has wiped out nearly everyone. People only live to about age twenty. The heavy dialect nearly threw me off at first, but after I “got” it, I just wanted to go on reading it forever.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: and other lessons from the crematory
Non-fiction. I avoided this for a while because I’ve read several books already about what happens to your body when you die. Eventually I picked this one up and found it to be a standout, humorous and thoughtful. Dang, I wish I worked in a crematorium.
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
Stephen King published two books this year; this is the better one. Short stories, supernatural and otherwise, written by the guy I love. Thank you, Steve!
Paradise Sky
Western about a black cowboy. It’s gory and funny and sad and Joe Lansdale is an awesome storyteller.
I’m down to a bunch of honorable mentions now. I enjoyed several books by Simone St. James, who writes spooky romance novels. I read a couple other goodies from King and Lansdale. Girl On the Train and Cuckoo Song were decent. I read Frankenstein for the first time and liked it. Overall, I read 60 books last year, plus a couple of re-reads. Now I need to go over to the library website and look up some of the stuff y’all posted about…
These I definitely got from you and DZedNConfused talking about them, and I probably cheated because I only listed it as one book on my list but the entire series is fantastic. Sometimes, especially with middle readers, I get that feeling that I would have really loved the book had I read it as a kid, but with this, it was exactly as if I was reading it as a kid.
Hm. I might come back to post a full list, but most of them are difficult to rank; regardless, I know what my number one is: A Prayer for Owen Meany. I’d been meaning to try to “get” John Irving again (I wasn’t a huge fan of Garp), and* Owen Meany* far exceeded my expectations. It might be one of the greatest novels I’ve read ever, on so many levels. It’s heartbreaking, funny, philosophical, down to earth, cynical, idealistic - a true masterpiece. Plus, a kickass opening line.
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - Wilbur Wright is one of my top-five favorite historical figures, and the author does him justice.
Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper - Bitcoin is a complex topic, but this book did a great job explaining its history and technical concepts.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - This novel has its flaws, but as a child of the 80s, I looked past them. Can’t wait to see the movie.
4 The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch - An imaginative, suspenseful fantasy novel whose setting is similar to Renaissance Florence. Loved the characters.
An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson - A well-written account of America’s entry into the African theater of WWII
Quiller by Adam Hall - Quiller’s my favorite fictional character, and this is a great Quiller novel.
The Black Tower by Louis Bayard - Similar to Sherlock Holmes, but set in post-Revolutionary France. Particularly well-written.
Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst - Alan Furst is a great writer, but many of his novels are as boring as dirt. This one was pretty good.
Morte by Robert Repino - An apocalyptic tale centering on a cat searching for a dog? I had to read it. The first 2/3s were great, but then things kind of dragged.
Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey - I enjoyed most of it, but I just got sick of the characters.
Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Exploration of what a ‘good death’ really means and how we want to live out our lives vs. what the medical community tends to do in terminal cases. A must-read for any mortal!
Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. This exploration of one man’s sentencing to death row for a crime he did not commit also takes a wider look at the death penalty, race in conviction / sentencing, and issues with criminal justice generally.
Kean, Sam. The Violinist’s Thumb. This exploration of DNA uses anecdotes beautifully to explore topics like genius, scientific history, and more.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. Gladwell makes an excellent case that even those who seem stupendously gifted or lucky actually have to put in about 10,000 hours to get good at what they do. Very motivational.
Durrell, Gerald. The Aye-aye and I. Durrell’s personal reminiscences of his time in Madagascar wherein he attempts (with others) to find and rescue aye-ayes. Very funny as well as chock-full of aye-aye goodness.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. As a kid who grew up with D’Aulaire’s, I loved reading these mostly Greek (but some Norse) mythological tales. Especially appreciated how Hamilton carefully notes which ancient source(s) she uses for each account.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Charles Ryder, WWI Army captain, looks back at his life in golden England before the first world war through the lens of his involvement with the Catholic but dissolute Flyte family.
Padua, Anthony. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (graphic novel). This exploration of Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the building of the first computer is unique, historical, and imaginative in every way.
Ransome, Arthur. Swallows and Amazons. The Walker children (the Swallows) camp for two weeks on Wild Cat Island and encounter the Amazons (Peggy and Nancy Blackett). Makes you long for the childhood you wish you had, sailing, camping, and finding adventure on your own private island.
Martin, George RR. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I adored the adventures of Dunc and Egg, an hedge knight and his squire-cum-princeling, and the illustrations made it even better.
Bonus read: The Hollow Boy by Jonathan Stroud. I cannot express how much I love the Lockwood & Co books for their daring trio of young ghost-extirpators, the mysteries involved, the alternate ghost-riddled England they inhabit… It’s also beautifully realized and a cracking good read to boot!
Oh, and I read 105 books in 2015. Less than I wanted to!
Most people these days know Martin for Game of Thrones and its offshoots, but the guy can write in virtually every genre. Fevre Dream is a fantastic pre-Civil War vampire tale, and Tuf Voyaging is one of my favorite science fiction books.
I’m seriously late to getting around to this. For the first time, I tracked everything I read over the year. Here are my favorites, in chronological order:
The Magician King, by Lev Grossman. This is the final book in a trilogy about a kid who obsesses about a Narnia-like place and then discovers that it’s real. I thought the 3rd book showed a lot of character development and had a very satisfying ending.
State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. Hard to summarize. It involves characters doing anthropological research in the Amazon. I really enjoy Patchett’s characters and writing.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. Because I turned 42 this year! I still love Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie. This was my favorite book/series of the year. Ancillary Justice is the first of three books in which the protagonist is a 2000 year old AI formerly housed in a battleship, but now restricted to one (mostly) human body.
The Husband’s Secret, by Liane Moriarity. To be honest, I didn’t particularly enjoy this while I was reading it, but it’s stuck with me. (I picked it up because I’d been on such a YA and scifi/fantasy bender that I thought I needed a different genre.) It’s told from the point of view of three different women (none of whom I found particularly sympathetic) and the various crises in their lives that arose from an unsolved murder 20-something years ago.
Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver. I don’t think this is her strongest work by any stretch of the imagination - she really hits you over the head with the central themes of family and culture. However, there were some places where I just had to stop and admire a particular sentence or phrase. She comes up with such lovely metaphors.
Uprooted, by Naomi Novik. This is essentially a fairy tale. There’s nothing particularly new here, but it’s told very well.
I think I have to wrap it up at 9. I had a very busy year at work and didn’t read anywhere near as much as I would like, and when I did it was typically absolute fluff.
