Previously: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
This year I read 135 books. You can view most of them on Goodreads. Each year I blog about my favorite books, an idea I got from the incomparable Aaron Swartz. Here are my...
Top 10 Favorite Books Read in 2015
1) The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion by Chris McCoy. Wonderful. Sensationally verbally clever. A kid just wants to go to prom and his date is abducted by aliens. What follows is a Douglas Adams-esque comic journey through space.
2) All Involved: A Novel of the 1992 LA Riots by Ryan Gattis. Excellent. Utterly 
gripping and masterfully written. A terrific book.
3) Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim. "The Sting" appears to rip off major elements of this book! 
Iceberg Slim was a supremely gifted writer with an amazing ear for dialog and description. It's like reading the best of Kerouac, Ginsberg, or Burroughs.
4) Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness of 
Fate in the Individual by Arthur Schopenhauer. This is just a long essay, but I found it tremendously insightful and it stuck with me. It delves deeply into the idea that people are the authors of their destinies far more than they often realize.
5) Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. Sensational. Truly moving. Experimental for a point - the second person narration creates the perfect feeling of dissociation.
6) All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. This book lived up to the hype. Such strong, gripping, evocative writing. I keep thinking we're going to run out of stories to tell about World War II, but extraordinary tales keep appearing.
7) Jonathan Stroud - The Screaming Staircase, The Whispering Skull, The Hollow 
Boy, The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem's Eye, Ptolemy's Gate, The Ring of Solomon. Just delightful. Really wonderful world-building. The Ring of Solomon might be a perfect book.
8) Bill Bryson - In a Sunburned Country, A Brief History of Nearly Everything, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, A Walk in the Woods, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, One Summer: America 1927, Neither Here Nor There, At Home. Charming wit and self-deprecation. A wonderful writer and fascinating on any topic.
9) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I reread from childhood. Extraordinarily great writing. The protagonist is just so loveable - excellently capturing childhood in the South.
10) The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis. Some moments of true profundity, some moments of great humor and wit, and some moments of unalloyed honesty about the true nature of relationships. Some really beautiful and bittersweet meditations on age, as well. I think this is Amis's parody of "the British novel." It's like an upside down E.M. Forster or Jane Austen.
