I read a lot of books in 2015 and tracked them pretty reliably via Goodreads. Whereas last year I claimed to have read 24 books (probably I missed updating Goodreads for a few), this year I logged 74 for a total of about 25,500 pages. I suppose I cheated a little bit, since a whole bunch of those were books I read aloud to the kids, though they weren’t tiny little Golden Books or anything (average page count per book came out to around 345 on the whole), so maybe it wasn’t cheating after all.

Highlights included the Series of Unfortunate Events series (started in late August and finished at the tail end of December) and the Prydain Chronicles series, which were both fun and represented a lot of evening and weekend reading with the kids, which is one of my favorite things to do.

I reread a few books. I had been nervous about rereading Infinite Jest after several years, but it held up for me. I also reread The Recognitions and didn’t love it. I reread some Vonnegut that we had sitting around and had mixed feelings. I accidentally reread some Roth that I had forgotten I had read years ago, and though I didn’t much like the novella I reread, I did wind up enjoying some of the stories that were packaged in the same volume with it.

Part of what boosted my reading stats this year was an effort to participate in the Tournament of Books. I forget how many of the selections I wound up reading, but I believe it was around a dozen, and a few of them pretty lengthy. The ToB introduced me to a rare five-star read in All the Light We Cannot See. I tend to reserve five-star ratings for books that change the way I think about the world or that had some other profound effect on my life. AtLWCS probably didn’t quite do either of these things, but it really was top-notch writing, so I gave it a 5.

I awarded another 5-star rating to Half of a Yellow Sun, which remains the best book I’ve read all year. It taught me things about the world, made me really feel for its characters, made me laugh, and was generally just beautifully written. I’ve recommended it to many people this year.

Although I had heard of Jonathan Lethem, I had never read him before, and late in the year I picked up several of his books and liked them all a lot. I’ll read more of his work for sure. So far, he’s been a consistent 4-star rating for me (meaning that I liked the books a whole lot, even if they didn’t change my life).

I read more genre fiction this year than I’m accustomed to, picking up several sci-fi things (if you include Vonnegut, who sort of straddles literary fiction and sci-fi). Not listed below or accounted for in my stats are a number of the Poirot stories by Agatha Christie and probably a few Sherlock stories as well. I also read a lot more nonfiction than usual, mostly books about teamwork and leadership that I read as I transitioned into a leadership role at work.

Although I’ve striven in general to read a fair number of books by people who are not white men, it’s clear from looking over the list below that I’ve done a pretty poor job. I suppose it makes sense that fiction by white dudes would resonate with me since I am a white dude, but I’d like to continue to read things that offer perspectives from behind a gaze different from my own. My favorite book of the year is after all by a Nigerian woman, so it’s clearly to my benefit to read things by people who are not white dudes.

The table below shows my recorded books for the year, sorted by rating and then by whatever Goodreads chooses as a secondary sorting field. The unrated books at the bottom I think I just forgot to rate (though in the case of the Dara book, I felt like I needed to read it again some time before deciding how I felt about it).