My 2015 – Listicle

I did one of these back in 2013/2014, but then was busy and (IIRC) frustrated in early January last year and just skipped doing it. In the two years since, I did manage to read some of the books on on the various reading goals, though most of those were last year and not the year before. So it goes.

Five novels I really loved in 2015

• Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher
• Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino
• Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu
• Postmortal, Drew Magary

Three international news stories I’m following going into this year

• Continuing destruction of Syria and wave of refugees crossing Turkey
• Regional power struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran
• Unrest in Turkey about Erdogan’s government and the new Turkish military operations against Kurds

Five books I am particularly looking forward to reading in 2016

• Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
• Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig
• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
• The Plague, Albert Camus
• Tun Huang, Yusashi Inoue

Five books I would like to reread in 2016

• The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis
• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
• Catch 22, Joseph Heller
• Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John Le Carre

Four books I once started, but didn’t finish…that I’d like to give another shot in 2016 [to my shame, I did not read any of these in the two years since the last list]

• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
• Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
• Bleak House, Charles Dickens

Three new-to-me music groups I found in 2015

• Cowboy Mouth
• Old Crow Medicine Show
• The Tallest Man on Earth