2015 overview

At the beginning of last year I did a recap, basically to assess how my blog's going as a project for me. This is very much the same gist so I've copied-and-pasted most of that one into the intro for this post. Sorry.

   So, this post isn't about a book I've read. However, this whole blog was started about two years ago in an effort to encourage me to read more critically; to retain more of what I read from non-fiction books, to derive more meaningful enjoyment from fiction books, and generally to force me to keep up a regular reading habit in case strangers on the internet got the impression that I was slipping.

   Anyway, with 2015, the sophomore year of Thoughts on Books, behind us and an arguably admirable forty-five books (of massively varying length and intensity) under my belt (a dozen more than 2014), I'm glad to announce that this blog remains a pleasurable habit, one which I will continue into the foreseeable future for all books I finish reading.

   But before I start dumping my reactions from books in 2016 upon you, I'm going to reflect on some of the ones I finished this year, with a handful of books best befitting a series of arbitrarily-selected categories. These will probably just be the ones with the most memorable reading experiences, but I will have distinctly separate reasons for choosing each one. So, here we go:

   (I notice, shortly before publishing this post, that I've included almost two-thirds of the books I've read this year in this list, which is hardly a tightly-disciplined selection, but what can I say, I read some bloomin' good books in 2015 and if they deserve mostly-lengthyish posts each then they certainly deserve a mention at the end of the calendar.)

1. Must-reads for everyone interested in social/political/economic issues:
• The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson
• Bad Samaritans and 23 things they don't tell you about Capitalism both by Ha-Joon Chang
2. Maybe-not-must-reads but interesting books about economicsy-stuff that I wrote proper reviews for a proper blog about:
• Economics of the 1% by John Weeks
• the Economy of the Word by Keith Tribe
3. I learned a load about gender this year, kickstarted by the Equality Illusion by Kat Banyard and also by a philosophy module in feminism; Justice, Gender and the Family by Susan M. Okin and Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine then together convinced me that gender should be more or less abolished, an opinion which had considerable friction with much mainstream Christian thought, and I tried to reach a reasonable conclusion to my gender reading-list after Tim and Kathy Keller's the Meaning of Marriage
4. Some good heart-challenging Christian books:
• the Radical Disciple by John Stott
• Out of the Saltshaker and Into the World by Becca Manley-Pippert
5. And also 3-2-1, which is just a fab intro to Christianity
6. I reread everything by J.D. Salinger and strongly suggest you do too (in any order, but my posts about them are best read in the following order): Raise High the Room Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: an Introduction and For Esmé with Love and Squalor and Franny & Zooey and the Catcher in the Rye
7. Two books based on BBC satirical sitcoms by Armando Iannucci (a very specific but gloriously clever-and-funny category):
• The Thick of It: The Missing DoSAC Files
• I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan
8. Two novels that made me cry a bit in a manly fashion:
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• the Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
9. A genius collection of bittersweet (emphasis on bitter) short stories: Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor
10. And a genius (moreso in my opinion, true genius always has hope at its heart rather than despair) collection of bittersweet (emphasis on sweet) short stories (and essays): the Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan
11. Several children's books that are actually really good:
• Albert Blows a Fuse
• Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth by very-hungry-caterpillar-guy
• The Book With No Pictures by Ryan from The Office
12. And a children's book that actually wasn't great but I just think my post about is quite funny:
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
13. I don't even know, I laughed an enormous amount at this one but would probably not recommend to anyone:
• Boo: the Life of the World's Cutest Dog
14. Just a wonderfully elegantly thought-provoking reading experience, What? by Mark Kurlansky
15. And an unprecedentedly complex genre-defining mind-blowingly epic classic that I owe a re-read, Dune by Frank Herbert

I don't know if you're a regular reader or not, or even if I have any of those, or any readers full-stop, but I hope you enjoy and maybe continue to enjoy my spewage of half-thunk reactions to prose well into the future. [Also, I realised at the beginning of 2015 that in 2014 I'd barely read anything written by non-white-males that year, which was not deliberate but is pretty bad in terms of limiting my intake of human experience and viewpoint. I made more of a conscious effort in 2015 to read things from underprivileged groups who haven't always found it ludicrously easy to make their voices well heard in the publicity of verbage, and will continue to do so in 2016.]

I briefly considered also copy-pasting the unwarrantedly-enthusiastic endnote, which is basically a toast to words, from last year's post. If you want to read it and laugh at me go right ahead, I'm there too.