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My Favorite Books of 2015

This year was a doozy. Through the website Goodreads, I undertook a challenge to read 75 books from January 1st, 2015 - December 31st, 2015. By October 2nd, I had finished my goal of 75 books and by the end of 2015 had read 88 books! By comparison, I read 49 books in 2014. This year is among the most literary years I’ve ever had.

Goodreads allowed me to track the types of books I was reading as well and about 25% of the total books I read for this year were general adult fiction. An additional 20% were nonfiction and 20% graphic novels or comics.

Some of my other read genres include fantasy, children’s (usually fiction), memoir, science fiction, and horror. 

I think next year I might lower my goal a little so that I can be more particular about the books that I read. Picking up a book to meet a quota is not really my idea of the right reason to pick up a book. I thoroughly enjoyed this challenge, however, and I am excited to see where 2016′s book adventure takes me!

So here’s my list of the Top Books I read this year, in no particular order. Enjoy!

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson (Science-Fiction)

Seveneves is a doorstopper. But don’t let that stop you from picking it up. Though it was the longest book I read this year at over 800 pages, I read it rather quickly because of the suspense and pacing of the narrative. Neal Stephenson is one of the foremost adult Science-Fiction writers of our time as the creator of seminal SF works Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, and Seveneves does not disappoint. The ambitious narrative spans 5,000 years from a time near our own to 5,000 years in the future. Stephenson has obviously done intensive research on the practicalities of life in spacecraft and technical research on robotic equipment and spacecraft invention, propulsion, and maintenance, and still manages to create distinctive, heroic, and fallible characters that the reader becomes invested in. Stephenson imagines a world where humanity faces its single greatest obstacle to date, and somehow emerges on the other side, changed but still recognizably human, flaws and all. Seveneves is simultaneously terrifying and inspiring, and if you’re anything like me it will keep you up late at night, flying through huge sections of this massive tome.  

Wonder (featuring The Julian Chapter)- R.J. Palacio (Children’s Fiction)

This book is amazing. It is considered children’s fiction, but it is a good read for adults as well. The main character of the narrative, Auggie, was born with a facial abnormality. This has caused him to be home-schooled for much of his childhood, but as he gets older, Auggie finally decides to try to enter school with other children. This inevitably leads to bullying and truly tests the character of not only Auggie, but also the other children in the story and the parents and siblings involved. While Auggie’s situation may not be exactly what most children experience, Palacio manages to universalize his feelings and struggles so that it feels so familiar to many readers who remember those challenging grade school days. If you read this book, READ THE EDITION WITH THE JULIAN CHAPTER INCLUDED! (or, even better, pick up Auggie & Me, a collection of 3 short stories including the Julian Chapter.) I cannot stress this enough. Wonder is a complete book but is so much more enhanced with the addition of this extra content from Palacio. This little bit of extra content includes a backstory of the main antagonist and gives the book a lot more dimension. Wonder is a book that helps you feel a little bit more at home in your own skin, and simultaneously reminds you that we are all human and have our imperfections.

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline (Science-Fiction)

I read this one as an audiobook which was narrated by Wil Wheaton. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Wheaton’s narration, considering Wesley Crusher is my least favorite Star Trek TNG character. Wheaton, however, was the PERFECT choice to narrate this book by Cline that honors nerd culture. It is part The Matrix (or Snow Crash), part Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, part any John Hughes film from the 80s, and all reference to traditionally nerdy games, movies, television, characters, and music. Despite including so much information on each of these niches, Cline somehow still created an engaging plot that had me wishing Wheaton would talk faster so I could get to the next scene. There’s a love story, robots, harrowing escapes, and epic boss battles. It was a “disc-changer” AKA a “page-turner.” I also read Cline’s Armada, and while I enjoyed Ready Player One more, Armada was a nice follow-up novel. Nerds unite!

Hand To Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America - Linda Tirado (Non-fiction)

Tirado’s book pissed me off. I read this as an audiobook and Tirado herself narrates it. Listening to Tirado get upset all over again while reading her book inflames my own rage at living as working poor for a good portion of my adult life. Tirado describes her experiences navigating the maze of bureaucracy, her terrible jobs and worse bosses, and all of the sacrifices she and her husband have had to make over the years just to approximate a life together. She describes what the rich do not want to believe: you can work--hard, and still be poor. Tirado’s rage describes what we should all be feeling knowing that the “American Dream” is still touted as a possibility but is unattainable for those living below the poverty line.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures - Phoebe Gloeckner (Graphic novel)

This book is intense. So many of these tales of life growing up as a teenage girl rang true for me. The main character, Minnie, who is based on Gloeckner herself, navigates a world that refuses to protect young women. Minnie, only fifteen years old, ends up having an affair with her mom’s boyfriend, who is thirty-five. The older man and supposed “family-friend” takes Minnie’s virginity and further complicates an already confusing period in a young person’s life. Minnie has no relationship with her father, her mother is an alcoholic and drug addict, she has very little or no self-esteem, and finds that the only way to maintain people’s attention is to sleep with them. This book is told as a series of diary entries spanning the course of a year in a teenage girl’s life and is interspersed with some absolutely striking illustrations by Gloeckner. While perhaps not a traditional coming-of-age story, it provides the sordid and frightening truths of what it is like to be a fifteen year old girl in a woman’s body but lacking the experience and understanding of adult situations and relationships. Also this has been made into a movie and I am looking forward to seeing how it has been adapted to film.

Here’s some other websites for Best Books of 2015:

Goodreads Choice Awards 

Buzzfeed Best Sci-Fi 2015

Buzzfeed Best Loved Books 2015

New York Times Top Books of 2015

Library Reads Librarian’s Favorites of 2015

Follow me on Goodreads !

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Top 5 Books I Read in 2014

Here are the Top 5 Books I read in 2014 in no particular order. All of these books can be found at your local library!

Belzhar (2014) by Meg Wolitzer

(Teen Fantasy Fiction)

This is the story of a teenage girl who ends up at a special school for emotionally damaged or emotionally unstable teenagers after the loss of her boyfriend. When she gets drafted into the mysterious and exclusive Special Topics in English class, she is anything but thrilled that she’ll have to spend her days reading The Bell Jar to complete the coursework. Jamaica or “Jam” would much rather be lying in bed dreaming that her boyfriend is still alive. But strange things begin to happen to her and the four other troubled teens in the Special Topics in English class as they write journal entries in curious red leather volumes. Journaling becomes a way of working through the most traumatic events in their lives and the successful completion of the journal could be the only way to save them. Wolitzer’s description of the depression accompanying loss (especially when one is also a teen when the loss occurs) is on point. At times the prose was such an accurate depiction of depression I found it painful to read and had to put it down. She also writes about the defensive quality of human emotion and how we are able to so thoroughly deny painful events in our lives that our memories of them are nearly hallucinations which I found to be a very intriguing concept. I devoured Wolitzer’s novel with all of its sadness and loss and came through on the other side with a new appreciation for Plath’s famous novel.

The Martian (2012/2014) by Andy Weir

(Science Fiction)

Astronaut Mark Watney of the Mars mission Ares 3 is left for dead while the rest of his crewmates head back to Earth. His intelligence and resourcefulness must help him survive on the desolate rust planet until he can send a message to Earth to let them know that he is still alive. That may not be enough, unfortunately, because travel from Earth to Mars can take months to a year, and his supplies are running perilously low. His fortitude in the face of complete isolation and nearly insurmountable odds is commendable and his dry sense of humor imbues a seemingly hopeless situation with a lightheartedness that will make you chuckle even as he burns hydrazine rocket fuel inside of his primary source of shelter. The debut novel from computer programmer and self-proclaimed space nerd, Andy Weir,The Martian is sure to impress for its technical accuracy and straightforward science. I recommend this to any of my science-minded friends and to anyone who wonders why math is important: math saves Watney’s life on more than one occasion. This book is being made into a film in 2015 directed by Ridley Scott. The fast-paced format of Watney’s log entries interspersed with the scenes set back on Earth and on the craft that houses the crewmates that left Watney behind will make for a thrilling film. I’m looking forward to it. Mark Watney is my hero.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood

(Dystopian Fiction)

This dystopian novel takes place in an alternate timeline where humans have trouble breeding viable offspring due to disease and pollution. This, along with political and religious upheaval, creates a caste system in which any fertile women in a lower caste end up as “handmaids” which is a fancy term for brood mares. They are required to perform a bizarre sexual ritual with the politically powerful men and their wives to try to get pregnant. Handmaids are cut off from the outside world and basically locked up in a room until it is time to procreate. What is really interesting about this story is that Offred, the main character, was not born into this life. She remembers a time before the revolution in which she had a husband and daughter. She tried to escape to Canada when the new political party took power. Now, she only has her memories of her former life to sustain her while she rots: unable to read, unable to leave, unable to take charge of her own body, unable to change her destiny. Wow. What took me so long to read this book? I absolutely loved it, but at times it infuriated me and made me feel so oppressed I wanted to scream at someone. I guess that’s just how good Atwood is. You go, Atwood.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory (2014) by Caitlin Doughty

(Memoir/Nonfiction)

Caitlin Doughty has done everything morbid that I always thought my teen goth self would grow up to do. For a while at the end of high school and at the beginning of college I wanted to be a medical examiner. After nearly failing my freshman math class, I changed to English, but I still retain a morbid curiosity surrounding death and dying. Doughty explores and satisfies my curiosity. She writes this memoir of her life working at a crematory and as a mortician in California. Her anecdotes of the first time she burned a body in the ovens or shaved a dead man are darkly humorous. Doughty’s explorations of the concept of death in the modern psyche brings up many poignant issues in our death-phobic society. The organization she created of funerary professionals called The Order of the Good Death aims to revolutionize how society looks at death and inspire new rituals and practices to help us think outside the pine box (wink). As someone who is interested in natural burials and facing death-fears, I found this to be a really enthralling read. So enthralling I read it in two days and still keep up with The Order’s website for anything new and interesting.

The Dud Avocado (1958) by Elaine Dundy

(Fiction)

Dundy’s book is the story of a young American woman named Sally Jay Gorce who travels to Paris hoping to escape her boring American life amid the city of lights. She finds beauty, class, suave gentlemen, and parties but also finds recklessness, destitution, betrayal, and the underbelly of Paris’s young artist culture. Sally Jay is likable even when she does some pretty awful things and you can’t help but root for her even though she seems to be getting absolutely nowhere. This, more than anything, is a book about growing up, and is primarily a book about growing up as a woman when you don’t want to do what everyone has told you. Sally Jay faces adversity, makes mistakes, and flings herself headlong into life the way most people never get the courage to do. The character of Sally Jay is remarkably like Capote’s Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s though in Dundy’s book we, the reader, get the benefit of knowing what’s going on inside the young woman’s head, whereas in Capote’s novella the story of Golightly is told from her neighbor and admirer’s point of view. Sally Jay is likable and relatable, especially to any young woman who has ever rebelled out of desire to experience life to the fullest.

Other Best Books of 2014 Lists:

https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fiction-books-2014

http://www.buzzfeed.com/isaacfitzgerald/books-we-loved-in-2014?bffbbooks#.ytYlokwooM

http://www.columbuslibrary.org/reads/robin-reads-blog

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George R.R. Martin wisdom

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For the birds

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Top Five Books I Read in 2013 (In no particular order)

All these books and more available at your local library!

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn’s acerbic and gritty writing style has really won me over. I read this first, and then Sharp Objects and then Gone Girl and then was upset when I couldn’t find any more novels by her. Dark Places was definitely my favorite. I have an affinity for true crime and this novel presents itself as a thrilling account of a woman rehashing the events surrounding her family’s murder when she was only a child, and realizing that maybe it didn’t happen the way she always thought it did. The main character, Libby Day, is distinctly unlikable in so many ways, but understandably so after everything she has been through. Libby is sometimes nihilistic, suicidal, and self-destructive, and at other times she fights tooth and nail to survive. I grew to be intensely in love with her character from the very first sentence of the book: “I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ.” Also being made into a movie in 2014 starring Charlize Theron as Libby Day.

S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst

This book is pretty amazing. But of course, I’m pretty sure that it was written for someone EXACTLY like me. It is made to look like an old library book that two people read and share their thoughts together in the margins to create a second story. Those two people just happen to be students of literature at a university and one of them works in an archive. They study the writing of the mysterious author of the library book and pull apart the codes in the footnotes. In addition to the book itself, the notes in the margins, and the footnotes, there are several inserts which add to the “scrapbook” characteristic of the book. In this way the book contains much more than the story it was initially printed to contain. It is a story of fighting for what is right and realizing the value of love in a world where things are falling apart. I really love the line: “What begins at the water shall end there and what ends there shall once more begin.” Unfortunately, I have a feeling a lot of the ephemera will disappear in the course of the library copies’ lifetimes.  

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

I was surprised by how much I liked this book, and by how much it influenced me. This is the memoir of the author, Cheryl Strayed, as she experiences the death of her mother, divorce, addiction, and abortion and decides to heal herself by hiking a significant portion of the Pacific Crest Trail. The PCT is the sister trail in the west to the eastern Appalachian Trail. The trials she faces on the trail, from heat to cold, from her body failing and then growing in strength, are wonderfully interwoven with the stories of her past that led her to the trail in the first place. It inspired me to find more constructive ways of dealing with my own personal obstacles, and gave me hope that sometimes immersing oneself in the natural world can be just what one needs to move forward by putting things in perspective. Also, it’s being made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, so we’ll see how that goes…

The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell

The book begins: "Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved." Two young sisters in Glasgow, Scotland bury their dead parents in the backyard and try to make it seem as though nothing is wrong. The book is told from each of their points of view so the reader is really able to get inside the heads of the girls. The parents were deadbeats, they were poor and abusive, and the sisters dream of a better life without them—if only they can make it until the oldest sister is of age. What stood out to me most about this book is the psychological impact of neglectful and abusive parenting. A great read but not a “happy” book.

Calling Dr. Laura by Nicole J. Georges

I have really become interested in memoir as a writing form this year—especially graphic memoir. (I’m in the middle of Drinking at the Movies by Julia Wertz right now, which I am absolutely loving, but as I didn’t finish it by the end of 2013 I can’t count it.) Nicole Georges writing style is straightforward and full of her quirky and sometimes humorous take on the events of her life, including her search to find her father and also the process of coming out to her family. I really enjoy her drawing style as well. More than once I read the words in the frame and then paused for another minute or two in order to examine the details of the illustrated scene. I would love to read more of her work. 

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My newest Star Trek cross stitch, given to a friend for Yule (a little early, I know, but I couldn't wait!). Thanks to the book Star Trek Cross-Stitch by John Lohman for the pattern.

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Hope all you kiddies survived Krampusnacht without Krampus snatching you up!

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Women’s restroom at the gay bar 😥

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THIS IS WUT HAPPENED IN DA BIBLE FER REAL:

Jesus and Satan got real drunk one night at a bar. Satan was across the bar, minding his own business when Jesus decided that he didn't want him in the bar anymore. So Jesus says to God, the bartender, "Get that jackass outta here." To which Satan, not wanting to be taken for a sissy, steps over to Jesus and says "why don't you make me leave yourself? Or does your daddy have to do everything for you?"

At this point Jesus got real mad and stood up from his bar stool and looked as though he wanted to fight. 

God then tells them that they should settle this fair and square, like men, and the only way to do this is by having a good ol' fashioned arm wrestling contest. 

That's when this picture was taken. 

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20 GIFs Proving The Original "Total Recall" Is Untoppable

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