2015 – My Year In Books, Courtesy of Goodreads
For reasons that I’m not entirely sure of, I’ve got into the habit of recording the books I read over the course of a year, and setting targets for them on the goodreads.com website.
In 2014, I vowed to read 15 books, and only just met the target. Go me!
For 2015, having only just made the 2014 total, I went for 15 again, but ended up completing 18. Get in.
This is my year in books.
2015 Reading Challenge
Setting an objective at goodreads creates a useful record of exactly what you managed to read over the previous twelve months, and over time will function as an interesting glimpse of your reading habits. Four of the titles were non-fiction, and the rest were novels. Looking back, I can see I went on a massive Game of Thrones jag, with a bunch of popular psychology thrown into the mix. Which makes for a weird combination at the best of times. Anyway, here’s what I read and what I thought of them:
The Sisters Brothers – Patrick DeWitt
I think I bought this in a charity shop as part of a three for a pound deal on paperbacks, having heard that it was good from somewhere. And it is good. It’s a bit like a Cormac McCarthy novel in that it’s set in the American mid-west in the 19th century and is violent but poetically written, all of which is a winning combination for me. As a rather arbitrary measure of its quality, I will mention that I put this in the free book box at work when I finished with it, and it disappeared straight away, leaving all the dog-eared airport thrillers behind, so hopefully someone else will love it too.
The Affair – Lee Child
I’ve found that the Jack Reacher novels are basically all the same, yet I seem to find myself reading at least one of them every year. This is mostly because I pick them up cheap in charity shops or the aforementioned ‘book box’ at work, but mostly because they’re extremely readable, much to the credit of the author, Lee Child. This one, The Affair, is average, most like all the others. Reacher, the mysterious loner, stumbles into a small town and somehow finds himself embroiled in a murder investigation amid some dubious local politics. No doubt it will be the same for the next novel. Like I said, average, but they’ve become familiar to me now, like a cup of tea or browsing TV channels you’re not too interested in watching.
The Big Blowdown – George Pelecanos
I’ve loved Pelecanos’ novels since I discovered he wrote for the TV show The Wire, and The Big Blowdown is great, too. This one is set in post-war DC, following characters who feature in later novels, so it was really good to get a feel for the early days of the Greek Americans, and how his characters came to be. I love his gritty portrayals of urban life, and although this is set in the 30s and 40s, it shows how life doesn’t really change for a lot of people in certain situations. Great stuff.
The $100 Start Up – Chris Guillebeau
This was more of a curiosity read than anything else, and was one of my non-fiction reads of the year. I’ve been browsing Chris Guillebeau’s blog for a while now, so I thought I’d grab a copy of this on Kindle, mostly as an impulse buy. It’s intended as a guide to creating a quick start-up for a company, which I didn’t really have any intention of doing, but reading the case studies was really interesting.
Tequila Sunset – Sam Hawken
I read The Dead Women of Juarez a couple of years ago and really liked it, so I sought out another of Hawken’s novels to see what it was like. I think I preferred the Dead Women to this one, as this is more of a police procedural, taking place almost entirely in Mexico. I liked it, but it did have me wondering where his next novel will take us, as the gangs/drugs/border combo seems kind of run dry in these two novels.
Impact – Adam Baker
I think this is the fourth (and final?) novel in Baker’s zombie apocalypse series, and it’s more of the same, which is good, as they’re well written in a genre that is done to death (get it!). This one is set in the desert after a failed attempt to nuke a secretive location, and Baker’s short punchy writing style carries you along with it, dragging the reader through bulkheads and ripped fuselage away from increasingly sentient zombie-things!
How to Become an Idea Machine & Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth – James Altucher
A bit like the $100 Start Up, I bought this because they were both cheap on Kindle and because I follow the blogs. Of the two, the Idea Machine (written by Claudia Altucher ,with James as co-author), is the more practical, in terms of providing instructions for things you can do straight away. The idea being that everyone should always be writing ideas down, for just about everything, with the intention of over time creating an ‘idea-muscle’ that will work wonders for you. Both books are self-help books really, but they’re engaging enough.
The Martian – Andy Weir
I loved this book. Weirdly enough, it was in a James Altucher book or blog that I first came across it, as he was recommending it himself as an aside in an article I think. The science is pretty full-on at times, but it’s never off-putting, and the opening paragraph is great, setting up the tone of a book written from the perspective of someone left stranded on Mars. I was intrigued about how that would pan out into a full-size novel, but it does develop into more of a movie-plot later, hence the Matt Damon film of the same name. Must go see that, too!
Various Game of Thrones novels
I’m too lazy to list them here, but I went on an almighty binge of George RR Martin novels in an attempt to read the books before the TV series concluded. I just about managed it too, I think I finished the last one on the same day I watched the last episode of season 5. I won’t go into spoilers, but I loved them, despite having to kind of train myself on how to skim read sections once I detected that the writer was about to launch into detailed descriptions of feasts or clothing. Now, like all the other readers of GoT books, I’ll have the TV shows to watch and no books to read, which will be weird.
American Sniper – Chris Kyle
Another heavily discounted and promoted Kindle read. I probably wouldn’t have bought this otherwise, as it’s quite a polarising book. As a memoir of one of the world’s most prolific snipers, it’s interesting reading, but you have to leave your politics behind when reading it, which at times is impossible to do. I thought it could have done with a bit more consideration of the populations of the places he was operating in, but it was almost as if that was getting in the way of the basic politics of the writer.
The Drop – Dennis Lehane
Like Pelecanos, I love Lehane, as he also wrote for The Wire and other great shows. This has been made into a film which is another movie I’ve added to my huge ‘must watch at some point’ list. Sharp, crisp prose is Lehane’s forte, as is the underbelly of American cities, which for me make for a winning formula. I don’t know why, but storylines involving bags of dodgy cash and who wants it back is a great formula for me.
Think Like A Freak – Steven D Levitt
This is a book related to the successful ‘Freakonomics’ podcast, and is full of fascinating insights into how the economics of every day things effects the things we do and the lives we lead. Like ‘why do Nigerian scammers always have such ludicrous text in their scam emails’? This theory alone was worth the read. For more of the same, check out their podcast!
Snowdrops – AD Miller
This book, about a Brit in Moscow, is like a travelogue that details all the reasons you should never go to Moscow. It paints a truly horrible painting of the city and Moscow in general, which is grimly fascinating. It’s fictional, but some of the details are clearly borne from the writer’s time spent there. I’d like to think a lot of it wasn’t true, but given the book’s convincing telling, you never know.
My ‘to read’ pile is still enormous, and my goal to read twenty books this year is on track, but having completed my 2015 reading goal feels good.
Read any of the above books? Got any tips for more productive reading habits?
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