This past year has been chock-full of incredible reads, thanks, in part, to highly-anticipated releases from authors such as Harper Lee and John Banville. There have been books about falcons and friendship and everything in between. As always, there are too many good books for even the most avid readers to get through. Thankfully, the holidays are often the perfect time to play catchup.
In an effort to narrow the field for you -- after all, there are only so many books one can get through -- we asked our Post-50 Facebook followers what they believe to be the must-read book of 2015.
Based on what they told us, here are nine books published in 2015 that you might want to add to the pile on your nightstand.
“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.” -- Toni Morrison
“Seveneves offers at once [Stephenson’s] most conventional science-fiction scenario and a superb exploration of his abiding fascination with systems, philosophies and the limits of technology.… Stephenson’s central characters, mostly women, serve as a welcome corrective to science-fiction clichés.” -- Chicago Tribune
“Sentence by sentence, this novel, like [Groff’s] others, is a thoroughbred. Measured by its narrative tricks, however, it is a Trojan horse. Groff’s story of a marriage in which neither partner truly understands the other uses a sophisticated technique to tell its simple story, subverting our expectations with a two-voice counterpoint as meaningful as it is dazzling.” -- Time
“The Mare is worth reading for the plot alone, which is as uplifting as it is gutting. But Gaitskill is more than a gifted story-teller. She is an enchanter, to borrow Nabokov’s description of what makes a good writer a major one. The particular way in which she enchants -- by putting into words the wordless undercurrent of human behavior -- is explicit in The Mare.” -- Hannah Tennant-Moore, The New Republic
“A twisty but controlled epic that merges large and small concerns: loose nukes and absent parents, government surveillance and bad sex, gory murder and fine art . . . [Franzen is] admirably determined to think big and write well about our darkest emotional corners. [Purity is] an expansive, brainy, yet inviting novel that leaves few foibles unexplored.” -- Kirkus Reviews
"An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk. . . . Writing with breathless urgency . . . Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment. Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it's poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre." -- Kirkus Reviews
“Big Magic is a celebration of a creative life…Gilbert’s love of creativity is infectious, and there’s a lot of great advice in this sunny book…Gilbert doesn’t just call for aspiring artists to speak their truth, however daffy that may appear to others; she is showing them how.” -- Washington Post
“Lythcott-Haims presents a convincing vision of overprotected, overparented, overscheduled kids . . . . After presenting the problem in detail (through interviews with college admissions officers, educators, parents, and others), she offers a number of viable solutions . . . . This vigorous text will give parents the backup needed to make essential changes.” -- Publishers Weekly
“A remarkable, laugh-out-loud book . . . Rarely has the subject of elder care produced such droll human comedy, or a heroine quite on the mettlesome order of Betty Baker Hodgman. For as much as the book works on several levels (as a meditation on belonging, as a story of growing up gay and the psychic cost of silence, as metaphor for recovery), it is the strong-willed Betty who shines through." -- The New York Times
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