I read 68 books in 2015, which seems low but doesn’t include anything I didn’t finish completely. Nine of the total were read for a professional obligation of some kind, whether for a review or our best books deliberations or they were written by authors who were appearing on a panel I was moderating.

They included:

• Mystery/suspense/thrillers: 28
• YA: 17
• Memoir: 8
• General fiction/literary fiction: 8
• Nonfiction: 4
• Sf/fantasy: 3

The format breakdown is as follows:

• Library ebook: 26
• Galley/advance reading copy (print): 14
• Galley/advance reading copy (ebook): 13
• Print: 14
• Library print book: 1

The gender breakdown of authors:

• Female: 60
• Male: 7
• Unsure: 1

As far as standout titles, these are ones that give me a particularly warm feeling when I see them on my list:

• All of Louise Penny’s wonderful Inspector Gamache series.
• Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies.
• Dodie Smith’s classic I Capture the Castle.
• Felicia Day and Shonda Rhimes’s terrific memoirs.
• Rachel Hartman’s richly imagined YA titles Seraphina and Shadow Scale.
• Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
• Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
• P.D. James’s The Children of Men.

When I compare the 2015 breakdown to the 2014, the main thing that jumps out at me is that I finished far fewer books this past year than the one before. Otherwise, though, the genre, format, and author gender divisions are about the same. I made some headway in diversifying my reading, but not as much as I’d like—I’d say nine of those 68 titles could qualify as such; more than ten percent, but not yet 20. So my goal for 2016 is for at least 25% of the books I read to have an author or protagonist who is not a straight, white, neurotypical, able-bodied person.

I read 82 books in 2014, which doesn’t include anything that I started but didn’t finish. This is, oh, the seventh or eighth year that I’ve kept track of the titles and dates, but the first year that I’ve made notes about what format I read each title in and how I came by the book. Because my full-time job is book-related, I have access to Netgalley and Edelweiss, through which publishers make available advance e-copies of their titles at their discretion, so most of the titles I read this year were e-galleys.

Format breakdown
e-galley: 29
physical galley: 19
regular physical book (bought, borrowed, or found at the office): 16
regular e-book (bought, free download, or left on the Kindle I inherited when a friend upgraded): 10
library e-book: 7
physical library book: 1

The only surprise to me here is how few physical library books I read. Other years that likely would have been at the top of the list. I’m also a little surprised at how many library e-books there were too, especially since [cough] I spent much of the year over my late-fee limit with the Brooklyn Public Library.

The genre breakdown was hard to do; so many books could easily fall into two or more. I counted Lauren Oliver’s Rooms as general fiction, for example, even though it’s a ghost story since the focus of the book is on relationships and family secrets and whatnot.

Author gender
Female: 65
Male: 13
I’m not sure: 4
Maybe I should try to read more male authors in 2015? (kidding/not kidding) One reading goal I do have, however, is to seek out more authors of color. I haven’t done a count of the 2014 titles to see what that breakdown is, but I know it’s not good.

Genre/subject breakdown
mystery/suspense/thriller: 24
YA: 19
general fiction: 18
memoir: 7
SF/fantasy: 5
nonfiction: 3
romance: 3
self-help: 2

Frankly, I’m stunned that there are so few nonfics on the final list, even if you throw the memoirs into that category too. I actually read a lot of nonfiction, just not so many from start to finish, I guess. And I’m a little surprised at how many general fiction titles there are, though many of those were ones I had to read for LJ‘s best books discussion and voting.

My favorites
These aren’t all 2014 books. Some are older and at least one comes out in 2015, but they’re the ones that make me say oooooh, yeah! I loved that book! when I spot them on the list.
Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh. Hilarious, heartbreaking, perfect.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Caitlin Doughty. Memoir of the author’s time working in a crematory. Fascinating, often funny, occasionally gross, frequently sad.
The Secret Place, Tana French. The latest Dublin Murder Squad book unfolds over the course of a single day at a girls’ school. One of the best depictions of the mysterious, slightly dangerous workings of the minds of teenage girls, maybe ever.
An Untamed State, Roxane Gay. Brutal and beautifully written story about a woman kidnapped and held for ransom in Haiti. Not for the faint of heart or stomach, but when I was reading this book, my first thoughts when I woke up in the morning were of the characters.
Cruel Beauty, Rosamund Hodge. Lovely and absorbing reimagining of the Beauty and the Beast story.
Summer of the Dead, Julia Keller. The third in Keller’s rural West Virginia-set mystery series. A character-driven mystery with a satisfying ending.
How to Build a Girl, Caitlin Moran. Another sharp, finely realized novel about being a teenage girl, this one a lot funnier and dirtier than French’s.
Attachments, Rainbow Rowell. IT guy falls in love with one of the newspaper employees whose emails he’s been hired to monitor. A little dated tech wise, but a pure delight to read, which I did three times in 2014.
Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin. The Happiness Project author’s latest is about how our personalities shape our habit formation and how we can use our self-knowledge to support developing habits that make us happier.
Family Life, Akhil Sharma. There’s a lot of warmth, humor, and sorrow packed into this slim volume.
The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion. Logical-in-the-extreme scientist decides it’s time to marry, develops The Wife Project to find his ideal mate, meets a woman who’s the opposite of everything he thinks he wants. Super charming and funny.

A lot of people I know had a pretty rough 2013, but mine kicked a lot of ass, I have to say. There were the big things, of course,–a new position at work, getting engaged, planning a wedding, and getting married–but plenty of tiny, wonderful moments as well. Finding the exact bias-cut red wool plaid skirt of my dreams for $2 at a North Fork thrift shop, figuring out how to make the best kale salad, getting my first full-size Christmas tree at home.

With everything else that was going on, for the first time in the last decade or so, I read less than a book a week. Still, there were a decent number of good ones and a handful of great ones, the kind that make me practically inarticulate with love when I try to explain why I like them so much (a coworker and I just stared at each other in rapturous incoherence the other day when I asked how she’d liked Fangirl; we just kept saying “it’s so goooooood,” at each other, over and over):

• Among Others, Jo Walton. Boarding school setting: check. Fairies with their own agendas: check. A misfit finding her tribe through a love of books: check. This book is, as Rob would say, very Stephanie-friendly, but I’d put off reading it for a few years because I was afraid it couldn’t live up to the fantastic reviews. Happily, it did.
• Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains, Catriona McPherson. I actually put off reading this for a long time too, but because I’d met the author at a party her publisher had a few years ago and had found her thoroughly charming. I prefer my mysteries dark rather than cozy and hated the idea of not liking the book as much as I’d liked the author. (I don’t know if other people who meet a lot of authors professionally have this hangup, but it’s exhausting.) I was relieved to find that the book is a delight in the vein of Christie and Sayers, and, even better, that there are seven more entries in the series.
• Where’d You Go Bernadette?, Maria Semple. This is an example of marketing and taglines doing a book a disservice. I had picked it up, read the plot summary (woman abandons family, heartbroken daughter goes looking for her), and dismissed it as Lifetime-movie pap. But people whose tastes I trust kept recommending it, and I ended up loving it. Bernadette is a singular, sharply drawn character–smart and frustrated and fascinating and funny.
• Awakening, S.J. Bolton. You know, I put off reading this one for a long time too–maybe that’s the trend of 2013: books I forced myself to read and ended up loving fiercely. I really love Bolton’s Lacey Flint series (the most recent entry, Lost, would have gotten its own entry on this list if this one hadn’t knocked me over the way it did), and often when I love an author’s ongoing series, I tend to not like her stand-alones as much or vice versa. It’s an older book about a wildlife vet with terrible scars on her face who gets reluctantly involved in investigating some murders where poisonous snakes are the weapons. It’s incredibly compelling and creepy–there was a point when I was in bed reading a scene in which the protagonist is exploring an abandoned (OR IS IT?!) house and actually had to put the book down and pick up a book of Simon Doonan essays because I was getting so freaked out. And all she was doing was walking around a house. That’s good writing. Side note: I think Lost is the first book she’ll be publishing using her first name instead of her initials. She wrote about making that change here.
• No One Else Can Have You, Kathleen Hale. This is a 2014 release, but I think it’s going to be available in the next week or so. A good friend in the YA publishing business called me up a month or so ago and told me that I had to read this book immediately and, moreover, that if I didn’t like it, we probably couldn’t be friends anymore. The last book she reacted that strongly to was The Hunger Games, so I found a copy at work, devoured it in a day or two, and have been urging it on people ever since. It’s a perfectly satisfactory mystery novel, but with a weird, super awkward protagonist who is just fantastic. The author writes about writing weird while avoiding manic pixie dream girl tropes here.
• Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park and Fangirl. These are both basically perfect books about being an outsider and making connections and moving outside your comfort zone that also address issues like poverty and being the child of someone with mental illness in a way that manages to be illuminating and nonsaccharine.

The happiest of New Year’s to all of you — here’s to an amazing 2014!

Kim tagged me in one of these Facebook memes that turn up every couple of months. It’s kind of an odd list (separate entries for The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and the Chronicles of Narnia as a whole?), but it’s always fun to check myself against some random list that someone possibly at the BBC might have put together. If nothing else, it’s a good reminder to me to read some freaking Dickens already. And get around to Cloud Atlas while I’m at it. And, say, haven’t I been meaning to read Swallows and Amazons for ages now?

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt. If you decide to do one of these too, let me know!

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9  His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo