My favourite book I read this year was “The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard” by Arthur Conan Doyle, a book of picaresque short stories about a French officer in the Napoleonic Wars. They were very funny and there wasn’t a dud in the lot (which is practically unheard of for a collection of short stories, in my experience).
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. I had no idea where it was headed, and I stayed entertained the whole time.
I also did like Station Eleven…
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.
Yay! I got that for Christmas, but haven’t gotten to it yet.
I read the Martian in 2015, but for reasons that matter to literally nobody, I just finished both Ancillary Justice and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in the last week.
I’m not going to pick one, I just want everybody to know that I’m happy.
Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse, by James L. Swanson. (2010) The author presents a heavily detailed account of both events, switching between the two.
Out of the 7 books I gave 5 stars on Goodreads, only 3 were new to me this year. I’ll rule out the previous reads (because that bores me) and declare it was the YA novel Real Live Boyfriends: Yes. Boyfriends, Plural. If My Life Weren’t Complicated, I Wouldn’t Be Ruby Oliver, by E Lockhart.
(Runner up, and easier to recommend because it’s not YA!, was Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, by Cordelia Fine.)
A tough one. Since I have to pick just one, though, I guess it has to be Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell. The stories that make up this novel are so varied, compelling and well imagined that it’s hard to believe the same guy wrote each one of them. A brilliant book! His best one, IMO.
I didn’t read it in 2015, but yes, agreed on all counts.
If I had to pick just one book, I think it’d be The End of All Things by John Scalzi, a collection of four interlinked stories in his Old Man’s War series. “The Life of the Mind,” the first, is the most deliciously satisfying revenge story I’ve ever read.
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. Published in 2008, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until this year. Couldn’t put it down.
If you want to share your Top Ten for last year, see here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?f=13
Hurrah! Another Peake Freak gets on the bus! Go right on to Gormenghast…it’s even better.
My top book of the year was Kingsley Amis’s LUCKY JIM – often called the best British comic novel of the 20th century, a century which also contained ALL the novels of Waugh and Wodehouse – which I’ve started several times over the past 20 years but never got past chapter two. The secret is that…it starts getting funny AFTER chapter two!
Excellent book, and it set me off on an Amis spree. ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN was wonderful, and I’ve just started GIRL, 20. You keep coming across passages of writing so delightful you simply have to read them out loud to your increasingly irritated spouse.
Woo hoo, you’ve been indoctrinated! I have no doubt that at some point in the near future you will find yourself - in a private moment - pulling a face of some kind, and perhaps even giving it a humorous name. I’m still doing it 20 years after the first time I read it.
I read the entire Longmire series by Craig Johnson, which was terrific, but to comply with the OP rules, I’m going to say it would be **:
The Boys in the Boat**, by Daniel James Brown; the story of the young men who competed in rowing in the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany. Even though you know how it turns out, the final race is a real heart-pounder. The back stories on everyone involved are fascinating, as are the stories of the years leading up to the Olympic tryouts. Crewing in those days drew crowds in the many thousands and was easily as popular as football is today.
Adam Smith - “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” aka The Wealth of Nations
Something I’d always meant to read but finally got around to it early last year.
The Toll Gate, by Georgette Heyer