Even more exciting (and wildly popular) than my 2014 List of Lists was my post on the Best of the Best. It was the books that appeared most frequently on all of the lists I listed. So before I have to write the words ‘best of the best’ and ‘list of lists’ again, here it is, the 2015 Commonly-Agreed-by-the-People-Who-Publish-Best-of-2015-Book-Lists-in-November top 32 books to add to your To-Be-Read stack.
Books that made three lists –
1. In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar
2. The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard
3. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
4. Girl Waits With Gun by Amy Stewart
5. Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
6. Honeydew by Edith Pearlman
7. The Mare by Mary Gaitskill
8. My Struggle: Book Four by Karl Ove Knausgaard
9. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie
10. The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams
11. Ghettoside by Jill Leovy
Books that made four lists –
12. The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray
13. The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
14. The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli
15. Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea
16. The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
17. Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan
18. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
19. Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson
Books that made five lists –
20. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
21. City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg
22. A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
Books that made six lists –
23. Delicious Foods by James Hannaham
24. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
25. The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Books that made seven lists –
26. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
27. The Green Road by Anne Enright
28. Purity by Jonathan Franzen
Books that made eight or more lists –
29. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
30. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
31. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
32. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
I’ve only read two of these. I own another seven of them. They’ll be read in 2016 as part of my only-reading-from-what-I-already-own resolution.