pagesofjulia

My year-in-review post will be up tomorrow, of course, as usual. But first, as the year ends, I always like to review the very BEST books I read in the last year. As ever, these were not necessarily published in 2015 (although many were).

Those that received a rating of 10:

• Martin Marten, Brian Doyle – fiction
• All Over But the Shoutin’, Rick Bragg – nonfiction
• Things That Are, Amy Leach – nonfiction
• Norman Maclean, edited by Ron McFarland and Hugh Nichols – some of both

Those that received a rating of 9:

• Of Things Gone Astray, Janina Matthewson – fiction
• Travels in Vermeer, Michael White – nonfiction
• Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, Nina MacLaughlin – nonfiction
• The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander – nonfiction
• Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott – nonfiction
• Mislaid, Nell Zink – fiction
• Wondering Who You Are, Sonya Lea – nonfiction
• Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel – fiction (and the only audiobook on this list)
• My Southern Journey, Rick Bragg – nonfiction
• Home Is Burning, Dan Marshall – nonfiction
• Pieces of White Shell, Terry Tempest Williams – nonfiction
• The Tender Bar, JR Moehringer – nonfiction (link to come when my review posts in the new year)

There were, as always, lots of 8’s. I won’t list them all here for fear of exhausting you, although a search on this page for “Rating: 8” should take you there, if you’re that interested. I need to note just a few here, though. Honorable mention goes to Paul Kingsnorth’s strange and singular debut novel, The Wake. I can’t stop thinking about Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain. And, cheers to Rick Bragg, whose name appears twice on the lists above.

What did YOU read this year that’s blown you away?

Filed under: musings | Tagged: best of, best of the year, lists |