The Top Books of 2015
In his posthumous book of essays, “And Yet …,” published this year, Christopher Hitchens criticized “the rebarbative notion that people should be more likely to buy and enjoy books at Christmas.” Real readers, after all, consume them all year long. Mr. Hitchens has a valid point, yet the year’s end is a time for summing up, in books as in other things. Hence the lists that follow.
The New York Times has three daily book critics. Because they review different titles, there can be no getting them into a room to vote on a single, unanimous 2015 Top 10 list. But for each there were favorites, and books that stood out from the crowd. In the lists below, we are happy to share them.
The Best in
Culture 2015
Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin present their books roughly in order of preference. Dwight Garner’s list is in alphabetical order, by author.
Janet Maslin stepped down from full-time reviewing this year, but she remains a contributor of reviews to The Times. Look for selections from her recently hired replacement, Jennifer Senior, next year in this space.
Michiko Kakutani
“The Story of the Lost Child” By Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions). This concluding volume to the author’s dazzling Neapolitan quartet spans six decades in the lives of its two unforgettable heroines: Elena, the conscientious good girl, and her best friend, the tempestuous Lila. Their intertwining stories give an indelible portrait of Naples, and an intimate understanding of the women’s daily lives and their efforts to juggle the competing claims of men, children, housework and their own artistic aspirations. We see how time changes (and fails to change) old patterns of love and rivalry, and how their lives are imprinted by success and disappointment and almost unbearable loss. (Read the review.)
“The Whites” By Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Henry Holt and Company). This novel’s title is a not-so-oblique reference to the Ahab-like obsessions that drive a group of New York cops and former cops, who remain haunted by cases they handled in which shameless criminals — their white whales — “walked away untouched by justice.” Mr. Price surrounds his good-hearted, weary-souled hero with an appealing ensemble, and uses his gifts as a writer — his matchless ear for street dialogue, his kinetic prose, his heat-seeking eye — to turn what is essentially a police procedural into an affecting study in character and fate. (Read the review.)
“M Train” By Patti Smith (Alfred A. Knopf). This achingly beautiful memoir is a ballad about love and loss, an elegy for the author’s husband, Fred (Sonic) Smith; her brother, Todd; and her friend Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s an elliptical, almost stream-of-consciousness prose poem that traces Ms. Smith’s many quixotic travels (Reykjavik, Iceland; Mexico City; a small town in northwest French Guiana so she can visit the ruins of a French prison colony) and maps the landscape of her mind. There are ruminations on books and music, on people, places and memories — a requiem for all that she has “lost and cannot find” but can remember in words. (Read the review.)
“Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight” By Margaret Lazarus Dean (Graywolf Press). In this wonderfully evocative book, the author sets out to chronicle “the beauty and the strangeness in the last days of American spaceflight,” and while she overstates the end-times nature of NASA’s future, she writes with the passion of a lifelong lover of space exploration. She conveys, with great energy and verve, the glory and danger of its missions — from Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, on through the final flights of the space shuttle. (Read the review.)
“City on Fire” By Garth Risk Hallberg (Alfred A. Knopf). This 900-plus-page first novel from Mr. Hallberg is a virtual-reality machine that transports us back to the gritty, graffitied New York City of the 1970s, when the Bronx was burning, Son of Sam was on the loose and starving artists could still afford an apartment in Manhattan. Although the multi-stranded plot pivots around the shooting of a suburban teenager in Central Park, the novel is kaleidoscopic, nimbly zooming in and out of myriad characters’ lives while traversing huge swaths of the city with audacity and panache. This is an overstuffed but fleet-footed novel that attests to its young author’s epic ambition and boundless talents. (Read the review.)
“The Meursault Investigation” By Kamel Daoud. Translated by John Cullen (Other Press). This inventive debut novel is an artful reimagining of Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” — told from the perspective of the brother of the nameless Arab murdered by Meursault in that existential classic. It not only makes us reassess Camus’s novel, but also nudges us into a contemplation of Algeria’s history and current religious politics, colonialism and postcolonialism, and the ways language and perspective can radically alter a seemingly simple story and the social and philosophical shadows it casts. (Read the review.)
“The Harder They Come” By T. Coraghessan Boyle (Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers). Arguably the most resonant novel in Mr. Boyle’s long career, this story is at once a gripping tale of a father’s flailing efforts to come to terms with a violent child wanted by the law, and a dynamic meditation on the American frontier ethos and propensity for violence. The novel recapitulates many themes that have preoccupied Mr. Boyle in the past — the hazards of ideological certainty and obsession; and the imperatives and responsibilities of freedom — even as it showcases his virtuosic storytelling talents. (Read the review.)
“Between the World and Me” By Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau).Inspired by James Baldwin’s 1963 classic, “The Fire Next Time,” and addressed to the author’s 14-year-old son, this powerful and timely book is a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today. Mr. Coates writes eloquently about the perils of living in a country where unarmed black men and boys are dying at the hands of police officers — killings that signify larger historical forces at work in a nation where African-Americans were enslaved, their families and bodies broken, and where terrible injustices persist. (Read the review.)
“The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches From an Ancient Landscape” By James Rebanks (Flatiron Books). This captivating book about the author’s small family sheep farm in the Lake District of England is also about continuity and roots and a sense of belonging in an age that’s increasingly about mobility and self-invention. It’s a keenly observed account of the vocation handed down to Mr. Rebanks from his father and grandfather and their ancestors before them, and the seasonal rhythms and rituals that define life on a farm. “We see a thousand shades of green,” he writes, “like the Inuit see different kinds of snow.” (Read the review.)
“Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS” By Joby Warrick (Doubleday). This richly detailed book provides a compelling narrative account of the evolution of the Islamic State (in its various incarnations); the role that American missteps played in fueling its rise; and a sharply drawn portrait of the group’s godfather, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — a small-time thug who found religion and embraced jihad. Two other recent books — “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, and “ISIS: The State of Terror,” by Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger — provide revealing looks at that terror group’s current leadership, its rivalry with Al Qaeda, its modus operandi and its cunning use of social media. (Read the review.)
Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani
Dwight Garner
“The Sellout” By Paul Beatty (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This jubilant satirical novel (it’s about an artisanal watermelon and weed dealer in Los Angeles) is as incisive about race and other issues as the best monologues and interviews of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle. Yet the author also has a delicate literary and historical sensibility. (Read thereview.)
“A Manual for Cleaning Women” By Lucia Berlin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This overdue collection of stories by Ms. Berlin (1936-2004) displays a voice that’s messily alluring and casually droll. She takes us intoRaymond Carver territory: The trajectories are downward, and white-collar existences have gone blue. The sound her prose makes, however, is all her own. (Read the review.)
“Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll” By Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown and Company). Mr. Guralnick is a sensitive biographer who has landed upon a perfect topic in Phillips, the brilliant Memphis producer who, in the 1950s, recorded the earliest work of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Howlin’ Wolf. This is vital American history, smartly and warmly told. (Read the review.)
“James Merrill: Life and Art” By Langdon Hammer (Alfred A. Knopf). This nearly flawless literary biography tells the story of James Merrill, the son of a co-founder of Merrill Lynch, who became one of the 20th century’s most important poets. He also led a big, strange life. (Those Ouija boards!) The historian and the critic in Mr. Hammer are in elegant synchronicity. (Read the review.)
“Negroland: A Memoir” By Margo Jefferson (Pantheon). A sinewy and graceful memoir, from a former book critic for The New York Times, about her childhood in an upper-middle-class black family in Chicago. Her book examines privilege, racial and otherwise, from a hundred angles. (Read thereview.)
“H Is For Hawk” By Helen Macdonald (Grove Press). Ms. Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book, about her attempts to train a goshawk, reminds us that excellent nature writing lays bare the intimacies of the human world as well as of the wild one. The author is a poet as well as a naturalist. This memoir draws blood, in ways that seem curative. (Read thereview.)
“Hold Still: A Memoir With Photographs” By Sally Mann (Little, Brown). Sally Mann, the photographer, has written a weird, intense and uncommonly beautiful memoir. The author has a gift for fine and offbeat declaration. She’s also led a big Southern-bohemian life, rich with incident. Or maybe it only seems rich with incident because of an old maxim that still holds: Stories happen only to people who can tell them. (Read thereview.)
“One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway” By Asne Seierstad (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This is a nonfiction horror story. It moves slowly, inexorably and with tremendous authority. It’s a sober book that smells like fresh construction, a house built from plain, hard facts. You’re forced to bring your own emotion, and it pools beneath Ms. Seierstad’s steady sentences. (Read the review.)
“The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories” By Joy Williams (Alfred A. Knopf). A 50-course, full-tilt tasting menu of misanthropy and guile. This career-spanning collection of Ms. Williams’s stories solidifies her position as a thorny American writer of the first rank. Dire circumstances blend with offbeat wit in Ms. Williams’s work. The mental heat they give off places them at the far end of the Scoville scale, yet they are plump with soul and real feeling. (Read the review.)
“Mislaid” By Nell Zink (Ecco). Ms. Zink’s second novel is a tangled satire about a well-born Southern woman who decides to pass as African-American, and when it came out in May, I gave it a mixed review. But I find that “Mislaid” has stuck with me. Ms. Zink has an interesting mind, and, at its best, “Mislaid” reads like a Donna Tartt novel if Ms. Tartt had taken a night course in sweet brevity. (Read the review.)
Janet Maslin
“The Cartel” By Don Winslow (Alfred A. Knopf). This second half of this novelist’s magnum opus completes a drug war version of “The Godfather,” with all the sweep, intimacy and searing power that implies. Together with “The Power of the Dog” (2005), it’s a brutal, terrifyingly reportorial epic that entwines American law enforcement with Mexican organized crime. “The Cartel” twofer spans 40 years and pulls no punches about its drug lords’ savagery. This great read requires great fortitude. (Read the review.)
“World Gone By” By Dennis Lehane (William Morrow and Company).This haunting book closes out the trilogy that began with “The Given Day,” a hugely ambitious post-World War I novel with shades of “Ragtime,” then moved into bootlegging with its second installment, “Live by Night.” The common thread is the Coughlin family, and this book finds the adroit mob fixer Joe Coughlin at the end of his rope. Here is Joe, delicately poised between this world and the next, in a suspenseful, beautifully constructed book with scenes as stirringly valedictory as a chorus of “Danny Boy.” This is Mr. Lehane at his most sublime. (Read the review.)
“Dylan Goes Electric!” By Elijah Wald (Dey Street Books). Mr. Wald offers an account of Dylanageddon — the night in 1965 when Bob Dylan savaged the acoustic sanctuary of the Newport Folk Festival by making loud, electrified noise. Didn’t we know all that already? No, we did not — at least not quite the way that Mr. Wald sees it, with supremely insightful new eyes. He analyzes the different values embodied by Mr. Dylan, the mercurial genius, and by Pete Seeger, the stern populist; the stubbornness of both; and the irrevocable damage Mr. Dylan’s 35-minute set did to the reputation and body of work Seeger had painstakingly created over a lifetime. A roiling revisionist history. (Read the review.)
“The Girl on the Train” By Paula Hawkins (Riverhead Books). This thriller arrived on Jan. 5. And like “Gone Girl,” which it resembles in sneakiness, it just won’t go away. We’re experiencing a brain drain among mystery writers with devious plotting skills, so when a new one comes along, we really pounce. Ms. Hawkins makes fine use of an unreliable narrator — a hard-drinking woman who delivers observations from a moving train — and knows how to rattle readers. Though it has a few twists too many, her best seller shows no signs of running out of steam. (Read thereview.)
“Look Who’s Back” By Timur Vermes (MacLehose Press). The moment “Mein Kampf” goes back into print in Germany might not seem to be the best time to publish a comic novel with Hitler as the protagonist. But this book is unapologetically hilarious. It tells of a time-traveling Hitler who somehow wakes up in Berlin in 2011 and thinks Germany won World War II. There’s a highly polished sitcom sensibility at work here, but beneath the satire lies a sharp provocation about the creeping return of Hitler’s ideas. Look who’s back, indeed. (Read the review.)
“Frog” By Mo Yan. Translated by Howard Goldblatt (Viking). This Nobel laureate writes a broad, humanizing tale exploring the effects of China’s one-child policy, just as that policy fades into obsolescence. A rich and troubling book, “Frog” describes clashes between prospective parents and government abortionists who truly believe they are doing what is best, not just following orders. Mo Yan’s flights into the dreamlike and surreal, which have prompted comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez, turn what might have been a tragedy into an improbably buoyant fable. (Read thereview.)
“So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” By Jon Ronson (Riverhead Books). Mr. Ronson (“The Men Who Stare at Goats”) has a gift for ratcheting up small, trivial-sounding ideas until they really matter. Here, he takes on one of the most egregious perils of life in the age of social media — the whopping magnification of some gaffe or misstep or downright lie — to the point that it achieves life-wrecking power. He studies incident after incident of public shaming and asks how each starts, how it escalates and how its victims wind up handling it. As ever, he puts himself front and center. But there’s a lot to learn from his funny, insightful look at this red-hot topic. (Read the review.)
“A Little Life” By Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday). Love it or not, this was one of the year’s big books, a dense and hefty drama following a close-knit group of male friends through triumph and adversity. Mostly adversity: The book’s universe revolves around Jude, a mysterious wounded bird who has been hurt so deeply that it takes Ms. Yanagihara 720 pages to explain him. Overwrought but indelible. (Read the review.)
“The Train to Crystal City” By Jan Jarboe Russell (Scribner). The mind-boggling story of America’s only family internment camp during World War II. Ms. Russell mined the memories of Japanese and German children whose families were spirited off to a camp in snake-and-scorpion-rich South Texas to wait out the war. This isn’t an easy story for the author to organize, but her reporting is excellent and her subject relatively unexplored. (Read the review.)
“The Wright Brothers” By David McCullough (Simon & Schuster).Concise, exciting and fact-packed, this look at these pioneers of flight is the veteran historian’s best book in quite a while. Mr. McCullough explains the Wrights with dignified panache and with detail so granular that you may wonder how it was all collected. He explains his methods precisely. The Wrights loved recording that kind of information, so why shouldn’t he? (Read the review.)
The Best in Culture 2015
More highlights from the year, as chosen by our critics:
Movies, Television, Pop Music, Classical Music, Classical Albums, Dance,Theater, Art and Performances
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