For those of you who have been missing my Book Chat posts (which are coming back in the new year in some form!) here is a post for you. I decided to look over all of the books I read for the first time in 2015 and hand out some superlatives. Don’t forget to follow me on Goodreads for up-to-date info on what I’m reading and for my reviews. Drumroll please….

Best Literary Read

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. One of the books I’m including in my 10,000 subscriber giveaway, this book is hauntingly beautiful. It tells the story of a Hollywood star and the people connected to him (though sometimes only by a slender thread) before, during, and after the collapse of civilization. It’s eerie and post-apocalyptic, riveting and elegiac, moving and insightful. I’m not normally drawn to post-apocalyptic stories, but I’m so glad I read this one as its become one of my favorites. This one also wins the award for Most Beautiful Prose.

Fastest Read

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell. This book is just pretty adorable. A love story for the ages, but with real characters in real and difficult situations. Eleanor is the wrong size with the wrong hair and the wrong clothes and most definitely the wrong family. But to Park, she is the magic that holds the sky up. They know it’s destined for disaster. But they also know the real thing when they see it. I was utterly enchanted and read the whole thing in two days. 

Most Fun

Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling). I generally think good mysteries make for fun reads. This one was particularly fun to me because Jonathan and I read it aloud to each other during our long drive to and from Ohio for Thanksgiving. This is the third in Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike mystery series and is my personal favorite. The story begins when Strike’s assistant Robin receives a mysterious package containing a woman’s severed leg. Strike can immediately think of four men from his past who might have had something to do with it. Unraveling the mystery is great fun, though I will warn you that there are some particularly gruesome descriptions of violence towards women that you may want to be aware of if you are sensitive to that type of content. 

Most Surprising

Cinder (The Lunar Chronicles) by Marissa Meyer. This unique twist on the Cinderella story t’s set in a futuristic world where androids are essential to daily life and the moon has been colonized and become the home of a new species known as Lunars. It involves a cyborg/mechanic Cinderella, a handsome prince, and the search for a cure for the plague pandemic that is wiping out Earth’s population. This is not the sort of book I would normally gravitate towards, but it was so fresh and clever and well-done that I was completely enchanted.

Best Fantasy Trilogy

The Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. After finishing my beloved Way of Kings and Words of Radiance I needed more Sanderson in my life so I dove into his well-known Mistborn trilogy. He’s actually written a set of trilogies that all involve the Mistborn world, but I only read the first one which includes Mistborn, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages. I think Sanderson might be my favorite fantasy writer. His characters are complex and compelling and his world-building is top-notch.

Most Likely to Make You Ugly Cry

To be honest, most of the books on this entire list made me ugly cry at some point, but that’s just me. As the category winner I will chose. The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan. This is a memoir about being in the middle place between being a child and being a parent. Corrigan, a mother of 2, is diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 36. As she goes through treatment, she relies heavily on her father who has always made her feel like the most important person in the world. When her father is diagnosed with cancer himself a few months after she is, Corrigan must deal with what it means to move from being the cared-for child to being the caretaker, for her children, for herself, and for her father. It’s very moving.

Book I Wish I’d Written

Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans. My experience with my faith and with the church over the past decade resonates deeply with Evans’ own experiences, and Evans writes poignantly about some of the conclusions I’m also coming to about what it looks like for me to still be a Christian and still participate in the Church in spite of those things. This book is one you can win in my 10,000 subscribers giveaway!

Most Atmospheric

The Lake House by Kate Morton. If there is one thing Kate Morton does well, it is setting. Whenever I take a break from one of her novels I always feel slightly disoriented because I could swear I’ve just been somewhere in the English countryside. This was a more recent read for me, but long-anticipated. Morton fans will not be disappointed in The Lake House which hits all the notes we expect in a Morton novel – an unsolved mystery involving an old house in the English countryside, movement between the past and the present, and shocking family secrets. The ending is satisfying, if maybe a bit too neat, and the writing is irreproachable.

Most Over-Hyped

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. So many people were losing their minds over this book and I just was not impressed. I did pick up a few helpful tips, but overall I found the book to be incredibly repetitive and also pretty weird. While I like to personify my possessions and talk to inanimate objects as much as the next girl, Kondo takes it to another level. She suggests thanking your belongings before getting rid of them and goes so far as to give this advice about storing your out-of-season clothes, “Let them know you care and look forward to wearing them when they are next in season. This kind of ‘communication’ helps your clothes stay vibrant and keeps your relationship with them alive longer.” Too much, Marie. A little too much. Also, I can’t “only keep things which give me joy.” My vacuum cleaner gives me no joy, but still I must keep it. It’s really not as simple as she wants it to be.

Best YA Book{s}

Daughter of Smoke and Bone Trilogy by Laini Taylor. So I confess that I’ve only read two of the three books in this trilogy, but that’s only because right as I finished the second one I got an influx of books I’d put on hold at the library and they all had to read within a few weeks. I will absolutely read the third one ASAP. Because they are intense and incredible. I read the first half of the first one and was like, “Eh…I guess it’s all right. I’ll finish it.” And by the time I got to the end I was like. “Holy hell. I get it.” And the whole second book got better and better. This is a fantasy trilogy, though it is somewhat set in our world. “Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a world free of bloodshed and war.”

The Grisha trilogy by Leigh Bardugo. Alina Starkov is nobody – an orphaned refugee whose never been noticed. Until her best friend’s life is threatened and a dormant power is awakened in her unlike an the world has ever seen. Alina is immediately taken into the Grisha court to study and train under the most powerful Grisha of all, The Darkling. Together he says they can destroy the Shadow Fold that threatens their country. Together they can remake the world. But nothing is as it seems and Alina must learn to see things that have long been hidden, even the things inside her own heart. This trilogy is so brilliant it kills me a little.

Best Books About Faith

An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor. This book is part of my 10,000 subscriber giveaway. This book rejects the divisions so many Christians are intent on making between the secular and the sacred. It made me feel so grounded in my body and to this earth. I especially loved the practical disciplines she suggested for making the world a place of worship. Things as simple as taking a walk or working with your hands, or being still and resting. The thing I loved most about this book was walking away feeling that a simple life could be good and honest and holy and true when so often I feel the drive to be more and do more, even from the church.

 

Accidental Saints: Finding God in all the Wrong People by Nadia Bolz-Weber. I just love Nadia Bolz-Weber and I loved the overall message of this book – that God can and does show up in the most unexpected places and works through people. I don’t think this was a good as her first book as it’s mostly stories illustrating the same basic point, but I still really liked it.

Most Inspiring

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. If you are a creator of some sort, I think this book has value for you. This book explores the paradoxes of the creative life – that creating art is vital to our humanity, and also completely inessential to human existence. That we should commit ourselves seriously to our creative work, and we should always remember that life and death do not hinge on what we do creatively. Most of all, it reminds the reader of why a creative life is a worthwhile life even if you never receive any kind of recognition for your work. Every time I read a section of this book I felt inspired to complete a project or to put myself out there creatively.

Funniest Book

Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I believe Mindy Kaling is my spirit animal. I think she is smart, fun, and funny and I would love to be her friend. Therefore, I loved this book which I read with her voice in my head.

Most Unique

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lesson from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty.  This book of essays about Doughty’s experience as a young woman working in a crematorium was fascinating. In spite of some frank descriptions, she manages to avoid sensationalism and instead brings up questions about the way we as a society treat death and whether there might be a better way. 

Most Disappointing

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This is a sort of dystopian novel along the lines of The Giver but set at an exclusive boarding school in England. Even though there is a first person narrator, I felt disconnected from her and from the other characters to the extent that I didn’t really care that much what happened to them. There was also a moment towards the end that is set up as though it’s a big reveal, but I personally didn’t find the information surprising as I’d assumed it all along. I also found it irritating how extremely non-curious the characters were about the world and their role in it. I know this book is pretty highly acclaimed, but for me it was just OK.

Worst Book

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. I don’t really want to waste space on this ridiculous book, but I will summarize by saying this book was like Twilight for adults, was excessively long, and infuriating. And it’s not well-written. People think that using excessive detailed descriptions makes something well-written. It doesn’t. Don’t waste your time.

Honorable Mentions (books I really enjoyed but don’t have a superlative for)

After You by JoJo Moyes. The sequel to Moyes’ highly acclaimed Me Before You (right up there with The Fault in Our Stars for most ugly-crying episodes while reading) picks up with Louisa Clarke about a year after we left her. I liked this book because it felt like an honest portrayal of what someone in her situation would be going through, and while I got frustrated with Louisa sometimes, I still wanted to know how it all turned out.

 

The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty. I’m just a huge fan of Moriarty’s. I think all of her books are clever and fun. Sophie Honeywell is 39, unmarried, and starting to wonder if she’s missed her opportunity to have a family when she unexpectedly inherits a house from her ex-boyfriend’s Great Aunt Connie – the woman who discovered the Munro baby. This book revolves around the secret of the Munro baby – a (fictional) famous unsolved mystery where the Munro couple mysteriously disappeared from their home with the tea kettle whistling and a warm cake fresh from the oven leaving their 2 week old baby behind. The story takes place far in the future and is centered on the family who raised the baby (now a grandmother herself) and her children and grandchildren who run a family business that capitalizes on the unsolved mystery of the Munro baby.

Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor. Taylor’s story of her call to the Episcopalian priesthood and later her decision to leave the priesthood and become a professor was full of beautiful thoughts about how the world and the church need not be enemies – separate entities that are necessarily opposed to one another. She writes beautifully about the ways she encountered God and grace outside of the church as well as inside it.

I’ve read 63 books so far this year and anticipate finishing 2 -3 more before the end of the year. Click here for a full list of everything I read this year.

Also, don’t forget that my 10,000 subscriber book giveaway is still open until Wednesday. Check out the submission rules here and may the odds be ever in your favor!