2015: The Year in Books

2015 has been an interesting year. I’ve been really busy, mostly because of dogs. That and an extended foray into Minecraft from which I only recently returned. Books were on the back burner this year. I only blogged about fifteen of them, but I read forty-two, according to Goodreads. That’s a little shy of my annual fifty-book goal, but it’s not too shabby, either. I got busy and had Other Things to Do. 2016 will probably be the same.

That said, here’s my usual list of all the books I read, not just the ones I blogged about. Bold means I really liked it, italics means I hated it, and plain text means it was reasonably good.

• 10:04
• The Strange Library
• 10% Happier
• The Rithmatist
• The Stand
• Still Life with Woodpecker
• The Martian
• Wolf in White Van
• The Long Home
• Hollow City
• The Neverending Story
• Trigger Warning
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Rabbit, Run
• The Good Earth
• IT
• A Darker Shade of Magic
• Last Things
• Reaper Man
• Sabbath’s Theater
• The Way Inn
• Dolores Claiborne
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
• Rabbit Redux
• The Ice Twins
• The Winter Family
• The Death of Peterson’s Wharf
• Armada
• A Dirty Job
• The Golden Specific
• The Dark Net
• Church of Marvels
• The Talisman
• The Hot Kid
• The Familiar #1: One Rainy Day in May
• Welcome to Night Vale
• The Ice Storm
• Get Jiro!
• Get Jiro! #2: Blood and Sushi
• Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
• Slade House

That’s a good bit of bold! I did pretty well this year despite my lack of reading enthusiasm. But which is my favorite? That one’s a little difficult. This year has been long and stressful, and I hardly remember anything about most of these books. I think I’ll offer a pairing this year of my favorite and one of my my least favorites, as they’re by the same author (and even in the same series!). So? Drumroll, please…

Yep, that’s Rabbit, Run by John Updike. I’d put off reading it for years because I thought it was about basketball, and I was so surprised by how much I liked it!

Which leads me to the first of my least favorite books of 2015:

I hated Rabbit Redux, the next book in the Rabbit Angstrom series, at least as much as I loved Rabbit, Run. It catches up with Harry a few years later, when he gets himself and his kid mixed up with druggy sexcapades, and it’s so extreme that it’s almost unreadable. It’s like DeLillo’s search for new extremes (usually involving the desert), but with moving people into his house with his kid and letting every single thing fall apart. It was painful, and it makes me not want to read any of the rest of the series for fear that Updike will continue to look for new extremes.

And here’s the second. I can’t leave this one out because this might be my least favorite of all time, and I’ve read a lot of books:

You know that movie we all love? Whatever you do, don’t read the book. It’s terrible and will ruin your childhood and possibly your entire life. For a point-by-point breakdown, read my review.

Well, there you have it! Hopefully I’ll be better about reading and reviewing books in 2016, but we’ll see how that goes, as Puppy.