My year in books…
What I Loved:
Fiction:
Half of a Yellow Sun –Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Vintage Canada, 2007)
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James (Modern Library
A Very Long Engagement – Sébastien Japrisot (Plume, 1994)
Beatrice & Virgil – Yann Martel (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2010)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Random House, 2010)
The Quick – Lauren Owen (McClelland & Stewart, 2014)
A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki (Penguin, 2013)
The Road Back by Erich Maria Remarque (Fawcett Columbine, 1958)
Non-Fiction:
We Should All Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Anchor Books, 2014)
Confessions – St. Augustine (J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1949)
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering – Timothy Keller (Dutton, 2013)
Every Good Endeavor – Timothy Keller (Riverhead Books, 2012)
Jesus Among Other Gods – Ravi Zacharias (Thomas Nelson, 2000)
What I Did Not Love: (because hate is a strong word)
The Effects of Light – Miranda Beverly-Whittemore (Warner Books, 2005)
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2001)
The Book of Someday – Dianne Dixon (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2013)
A Million Little Pieces – James Frey (Anchor Books, 2003)
The Bishop’s Man – Linden MacIntyre (Vintage Canada, 2009)
What I Didn’t Finish Reading:
Collected Stories – Peter Carey (Vintage Canada, 1999)
Raised from the Ground by Jose Saramago
Eight Stories – Dylan Thomas
In Pharaoh’s Army – Tobias Wolff
And the Rest…
Fiction:
Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)
The Brooklyn Follies – Paul Auster (Picador, 2009)
The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes (Vintage Canada, 2012)
King – John Berger (Pantheon Books, 1999)
The Bone Sharps – Tim Bowling (Gaspereau Press, 2007)
Amnesia – Peter Carey (Knopf, 2015)
Parrot & Olivier in America by Peter Carey (Knopf, 2009)
Jack Maggs – Peter Carey (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)
If I Fall, If I Die – Michael Christie (McClelland & Stewart, 2015)
Abroad – Katie Crouch (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2014)
The Enchanted – Rene Denfeld (HarperCollins, 2014)
All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr (Scribner, 2014)
A Northern Light – Jennifer Donnelly (Harcourt, 2003)
A Star Called Henry – Roddy Doyle (Vintage Canada, 2000)
Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn (Anchor Books, 2001)
Requiem for a Nun – William Faulkner (Penguin, 1961)
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (Vintage, 1994)
Sointula – Bill Gaston (Raincoast Books, 2005)
Death Benefits – Sarah N. Harvey (Orca Book Publishers, 2010)
Grace River – Rebecca Hendry (Brindle & Glass, 2009)
The World Before Us – Aislinn Hunter (Doubleday Canada, 2014)
The Navigator of New York – Wayne Johnston (Vintage Canada, 2002)
The Woefield Poultry Collective – Susan Juby (Harper Collins, 2011)
Burial Rites – Hannah Kent (Little, Brown, & Company, 2013)
Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler (Scribner, 1968)
Immortality – Milan Kundera (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991)
The Red Notebook – Antoine Laurain (Gallic Books, 2015)
The Other Side of the Bridge – Mary Lawson (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)
The Joys of Love – Madeleine L’Engle (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2008)
Small Island by Andrea Levy (Review, 2004)
Remembrance – Alistair MacLeod (McClelland & Stewart, 2012)
No Great Mischief – Alistair MacLeod (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000)
The Emperor’s Children – Claire Messud (Vintage Books, 2007)
Dancer – Colum McCann (Phoenix, 2003)
The Birth House – Ami McKay (Vintage Canada, 2006)
The People’s Act of Love – James Meek (Harper Perennial, 2005)
The Curse of the Viking Grave – Farley Mowat (McClelland & Stewart, 1966)
The Sorrow of War – Bao Ninh (Riverhead Books, 1993)
Emberton – Peter Norman (Douglas & McIntyre, 2014)
Going After Cacciato – Tim O’Brien (Broadway Books, 1999)
The Tenderness of Wolves – Stef Penney (Penguin Canada, 2006)
Among the Ten Thousand Things – Julie Pierpont (Random House, 2015)
The Mistress of Nothing – Kate Pullinger (McArthur & Company, 2009)
Ten Thousand Lovers – Edeet Ravel (Review Books, 2003)
When Everything Feels Like the Movies – Raziel Reid (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014)
Home – Marilynne Robinson (Harper Perennial, 2008)
Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach (Algonquin Books, 2012)
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
White Teeth – Zadie Smith (Penguin Books, 2001)
The Lotus Eaters – Tatjana Soli (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011)
The Pearl – John Steinbeck (Penguin Books, 2000)
The Flying Troutmans – Miriam Toews (Vintage Canada, 2008)
Ru – Kim Thúy (translated from the French by Sheila Fischman) (Vintage Canada, 2015)
The Assassin’s Song by M.G. Vassanji (Knopf, 2007)
The Sword in the Stone – T.H. White (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939)
Many Dimensions – Charles Williams (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970)
Short Story Collections:
The Thing Around Your Neck – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Vintage Canada, 2010)
Dreamtigers – Jorge Luis Borges (translated from the Spanish by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland) (E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver (Vintage Books Edition, 1989)
Fortune Smiles – Adam Johnson (Random House, 2015)
What I Want to Tell Goes Like This – Matt Rader (Nightwood Editions, 2014)
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger (Bantam Books, 1964)
The First Person and Other Stories by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, 2008)
Daddy Lenin and Other Stories – Guy Vanderhaeghe (McClelland & Stewart, 2015)
Non-Fiction:
Love Wins – Rob Bell (HarperOne, 2011)
The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Touchstone, 1995)
Crazy Love – Francis Chan (Gale Cengage Learning, 2007)
The Everlasting Man – G.K. Chesterton
Great Expectations – edited by Dede Crane and Lisa Moore (House of Anansi Press, 2008)
My Secret Sister – Helen Edwards & Jenny Lee Smith (Pan Books, 2013)
Rapture Practice – Aaron Hartzler (Little, Brown and Company, 2013)
Pragmatism – William James (Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, 2007)
The Cougar Lady – Rosella Leslie (Caitlin Press, 2014)
The Doc’s Side – Eric Paetkau (Harbour Publishing, 2011)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollan (Penguin Books, 2006)
Beijing Confidential – Jan Wong (Doubleday Canada, 2007)
What’s So Amazing About Grace? – Philip Yancey (Zondervan Publishing House, 1997)
What Pearl Read:
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott (The Children’s Press, 1974)
Good Wives – Louisa May Alcott (Puffin Classics,1988)
Danny the Champion of the World – Roald Dahl (Puffin, 1998)
Fantastic Mr. Fox – Roald Dahl (Puffin, 1998)
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis
The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis
The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis
The Giver – Lois Lowry (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993)
The Gammage Cup – Carol Kendall (A Voyager Book, 1969)
Secrets at Sea – Richard Peck (Dial Books, 2011)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret – Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press, 2007)
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson (Grosset & Dunlap, 1965)
The Mysterious Benedict Society – Trenton Lee Stewart (Little, Brown & Company, 2008)
Farmer Giles of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien (George Allen & Unwin, 1973)
Roverandom – J.R.R. Tolkien (HarperCollinsPublishers, 2002)
The Talent Thief – Alex Williams (MacMillan Children’s Books, 2007)
The Stats:
I don’t choose my books with any sort of quota in mind so I find it interesting to see what patterns emerge looking back over a year.
Books Read: 116 (The 4 left unfinished are not included in this. I did include the books I read with Pearl, most of which were re-reads for me.)
35% of the books I read in 2015 were written by women.
Which means 65% were written by men. In years past these numbers have been much closer so I was a little disappointed to see men dominate my list.
19% of the books I read were written by Canadians. That’s not a bad percentage but I always strive for more.
I reviewed 20 of the books I read this year. (I’ve linked to the reviews in the titles.) Not a lot but not bad considering I basically gave up on writing reviews from February to August.
8% of the books I read were translated from a language other than English. This is a category I’d like to work on in 2016. I’d like to read more writing from outside the English-speaking world.
10% of my reading came in the format of short stories. I’m pretty happy with that. I don’t include literary journals in my reading tallies so I did read more short stories than this list represents. (Not that I read many literary journals this year. That’s another thing I’d like to increase in 2016.)
82% of my reading was fiction and 18% was non-fiction. No surprise there. Fiction dominates my reading list. That’s not something that’s going to change. Of the non-fiction I read, 45% was theological or religious based. I was actually surprised it wasn’t higher but I’m glad to see there was some variety there.
Pearl read 20 books. She’s brilliant.
Want to take a look at what I’ve read in past years?
What was the best book you read in 2015?
Karissa Reads Books 
Gosh, you’ve had a great reading year! I’m a bit worried that Pearl is already better read than me, though… Looking forward to hearing what you’re both reading in 2016 – Happy New Year!
I wouldn’t worry too much – as Pearl becomes more interested in books, her tastes have become less literary 🙂 We’ll see if she and I manage to read as much in 2016! Happy New Year to you!
[…] it is, the complete list! While I will likely never again reach the reading heights of 2015, this was a good year, book-wise. Hope it was the same for […]