2015: My Reading Year in Review

I read 20 books in 2015, a paltry number, half of what I read the year before, and fewer than the number of books I read in each of the years that my babies were born. If I can chalk this up to anything, it would likely be my job. In February of last year I started the first full-time job since Iggy arrived that is as mentally challenging and time-consuming as the work I used to do prior to the baby years. We also moved house in March. It was a busy year, but in the past that hasn’t stopped me reading. 2015 was different. I went into a bookstore in late summer last year and for the first time ever felt sad rather than inspired. I looked longingly at all the books I wanted to read and bought none of them. Picking one up and holding it in my hands, I wondered when I would ever have the time to read it.

As the year ticked over, something changed. I have started 2016 feeling like I have a grasp on my job and a workable routine going with the kids. My resolutions this year are not set down anywhere in writing, but they constitute a vague intention to nourish myself better in the months ahead: intellectually, with books, nutritionally, with food. To take advantage of this feeling of being a little more on top of things by pushing myself again to be the best I can be – to work out, to eat well, to stop drinking mid-week, to write regularly, to keep a neat house, to correspond better with friends.

Already, I have read one book this year and am reading two others. More on this later. For now, let me turn a last time to those books I did manage to read in 2015.

Of the 20 books I read, about four were chick lit read on holiday purely as a means to relax. One was a non-fiction business book, a requirement for my bookclub, and a few others were diverting but not worth dwelling on.

So, the books of note I read last year numbered twelve, and they were:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee – a re-read. One of my favourite books in the world, a sentiment now confirmed as an adult reader.
2. Go Set a Watchman: Harper Lee – a fascinating insight into Lee’s writing process and the genesis of one the great American classic novels.
3. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Alice Munro – a wonderful selection of short stories by one of the very best story-writers, and Canada’s second Nobel Prize winner for literature.
4. This Book Will Save Your Life: A. M. Homes – a cult novel set in L.A., by one of my new favourite authors, in which a day-trader, Richard Novak, remembers through a series of bizarre events what it is to be human and connected to others.
5. Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex – the sweeping multi-generational tale of a family’s emigration from Greece to the United States and the story of the gene that turns narrator Calliope into Cal.
6. A Tale for the Time Being: Ruth Ozeki – a really beautiful story about sixteen-year-old Nao in Tokyo, her Buddhist nun aunt, and Ruth, a Japanese-American novelist living on a remote island in BC. This story wraps together a message in a bottle, quantum physics, Zen Buddhism, environmental consciousness, depression, the dot com crash, Proust, prostitution, theories of time and connectedness, and a little magic realism in a way that is moving rather than overwhelming or absurd.
7. The Girl on the Train: Paula Hawkins – a Hitchockian thriller by a female writer about a bitter young woman suffering from alcoholism in the wake of a seriously abusive relationship, and who is trying to solve a murder no one else realizes has taken place in circumstances where no one will believe anything she says.
8. Station Eleven: Emily St. John Mandel – other than To Kill a Mockingbird, perhaps the best book I read in 2015. This is a literary post-apocalyptic tale in which the story-telling jumps between present-day and a time twenty years after 99.9% of humanity has been wiped out by a pandemic flu. It is the first book in this genre I have read that has left me feeling uplifted, and it is as much about art and relationships as it is about a cataclysmic plague and its aftermath.
9. All the Light We Cannot See: Anthony Doerr – the other contender for best book of 2015, Doerr won the Pulitzer for this novel and deservedly so. A beautiful, moving story about a young blind French girl and a boy in the Hitler Youth during World War II.
10. The History of Love: Nicole Krauss – I have wanted to read this book for several years, and last year I finally got around to it but I made a grievous error: I listened to it as an audio book. The History of Love is an astonishing story about a precocious fourteen-year-old girl trying to find a new husband for her mother, and an old man who wrote a book many years earlier inspired by a girl he loved, and the events that connect these characters. It is made up of many different threads of narrative, and to do justice to it I will need to read it again, in hard copy.
11. Purity: Jonathan Franzen – Franzen’s first book after Freedom, I was desperate to read this but it fell a little flat. At its best, this is a novel about freedom of speech and journalistic integrity and a cult-ish Wikileaks-type project started by an East-German man whose passion for transparency lies in stark contrast with the secrets that lie at his core.
12. The Heart Goes Last: Margaret Atwood – Atwood’s latest is a return to form to her earlier writing. Though the book has Dystopian elements to it, it is unlike the MadAddam series in that the world is still recognizable as ours and the focus of the book is a relationship between husband and wife rather than survival of the human race. Peppered with the sardonic humour and feminist wit that caused me to fall for Atwood’s writing back when I first started reading her in the early ‘90s, this was an enjoyable romp of a book.

Here's to a 2016 with a broader, more diverse reading list and more mental energy to devote to the act of reading.