I read every book I can find most years, because I have little children who are in bed by 7 p.m., and because I live in a small town in Florida with not a whole lot to do, and because I usually find mingling with other humans to be absolutely terrifying. But this year I had one of my reading black holes in the spring, when I just couldn’t sit still long enough to make it through weighty books. It’s an ugly lapse when reading is basically your job. It all got worse this fall when I was on the road and usually too tired to do more than eat cold french fries and glower at my fellow travelers, so what made it into the brainpan was shorter, sharper work, not the elephants and juggernauts of the year. That said, a number of books thrilled me. Here are my 10 favorite books that I read in 2015.
I loved Terrance Hayes’s poetry collection How to Be Drawn, as well as Karen Solie’s collection The Road in Is Not the Same Road Out. My favorite novel was the fourth Elena Ferrante Neapolitan novel, The Story of the Lost Child, but what I really mean is that the fourth book itself is very good, but the entirety of the project is phenomenal, meaty, brain-breaking. These story collections slayed me: Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege, and Colin Barrett’s Young Skins. And I loved four beauts to be published in the U.S. next year, the novels High Dive by Jonathan Lee, The Vegetarian by the South Korean writer Han Kang, and Sudden Death by the Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue, and a beautiful graphic novel by my friend Tom Hart called Rosalie Lightning, which is pure pain made beautiful by art and attention.
More from A Year in Reading 2015
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
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