January 14 - Gonna Get Close To You (Best Books of 2015)

I am really very excited that I have started reading a lot again. I spent a lot of time over break with my nose in books, and my reading list is long - but I am making dents in it. My taste in books is wide ranging, which may not necessarily be reflected on this list, but that might also be because I have spent time reading books I had missed in earlier years. I really like fiction, so that is the list I really will focus on here - although there is one more book from the year that I need to mention, so I will start with that.

Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran pastor in a with a rough background. She started The House for all Sinners and Saints, which really started as a church for people who didn't belong in Denver, Colorado - and she started sharing a little bit more about her self in her book Pastrix - and then she published Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People in 2015 (she has a third book out as well about watching televangelists for 24 hours straight, but I have not been too interested in that). As a devout non-believer (how is that for an oxymoron), I was very surprised to find how much of Accidental Saints resonated with me. The majority of the book is really about grace, which is a concept I really hadn't understood before - but there is some clarity to it now. But for me, there were some very important life lessons in the book, and it had a very profound impact on me this fall. To me, it was the book that connected my head with my heart.

Other non-fiction books I read from 2015 are mainly rock autobiographies, such as Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band, Elvis Costello's great Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, and Duff McKagan's How to Be a Man. I found Kim Gordon to be too busy with name dropping and laced with bitterness towards Thurston Moore to be truly compelling - and while I was expecting the bitterness, it still was a turn-off for me. Yes, what he did were the actions of a scumbag - but I think a little bit more distance to it before publishing it in book form may have changed the view on the earlier years in the relationship. Elvis Costello jumps around, but still weaves a great web of his many ups and downs, focusing more on music than anything else - and I found it refreshing that he didn't go for juicy details, but rather kept it very gentlemanly. Duff McKagan is a great writer whose autobiography It's So Easy and Other Lies is a great rock biography - one of the best I have read - so that I liked How to Be a Man was no surprise.

On a very different note, I am really liking Humble Before The Void: Western Science Meets Tibetan Buddhism by Chris Impey, although I haven't finished it yet. You can add Sindre Kartvedt's DumDumBoys: En Vill En about the Norwegian rock legends in DumDum Boys and the essay collection Supersonic Scientists about Motorpsycho, which is edited by Marius Lien to the list of books of 2015 that I haven't quite completed yet (and there is more I haven't read yet - curse you and your reviews, NPR)

Now, on to the fiction side of things; here are my favorite books of 2015 (that I have read so far)

1. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (originally published in 2013, but in the US in 2015)
2. What She Knew by Gilly Macmillan
3. Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum
4. Blod På Snø (Blood On Snow) by Jo Nesbø
5. Splinter the Silence by Val McDermid

Honorable mention:

• The Harvest Man by Alex Grecian
• The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz

I would like to add, for those wondering, that I did read a book from 2015 that didn't make the list, and that surprised me. I really like Denise Mina, but I did not think that Blood Salt Water was anything special. It was a good enough book not to just put it down before finishing it, but for the first time ever, I really didn't care much about her characters - there wasn't much there. Splinter the Silence was the complete opposite. Val McDermid really shone in her character studies, and the book was a lot more about moving her characters forward than it was about the plot itself. Jo Nesbø was much lighter than he is in his books about Harry Hole, but there was still a darkness and a sadness to the fabulous Blood On Snow.

However, for me, fiction in 2015 was all about women. All top 3 novels were written by women and featured women as leading characters. Anna in Hausfrau is a fish out of water as an American living in Switzerland, although I am not so sure she wouldn't be a fish out of water anywhere. Her life is really a series of events where others make decisions for her - and she just goes along with whatever happens. We hear from conversations with her psychoanalyst - and the questions asked there really help frame the rest of the novel. The one key question she asks her paychoanalyst is, "Not choosing. Is that still a choice?" That to me encapsulates the entire novel, which to me was spellbinding.

Rachel in What She Knew is dealing with the abduction (and possibly murder) of her son. Some of her actions are motivated by what she sees taking charge, but to the surroundings is seen very differently. I see parallels to Gone Girl in some of the more procedural parts of the book, where people are not necessarily acting the way we as the public expect them to, and that creates tension.

And then, finally we have Rachel (again) in The Girl on the Train. She is a mess, which is one of the greatest literary devices I have read. She drinks. A lot. And she is a voyeur in the sense that she finds a couple that she observes on her train ride in to London. And she has a hard time getting over her ex leaving her for another woman (same as with Rachel in What She Knew). And, most importantly, as a reader, you can't trust her (don't worry, these are not spoilers - I wouldn't do that).

Thinking about Rachel in The Girl on the Train, there is only one song that really fits, in my eyes - but I have two versions of it to share. The song is Gonna Get Close To You and it was initially written and recorded by Dalbello from her great album whomanfoursays (1984), but I discovered it when it was covered by Queensrÿche on their Rage for Order (1986). The song changes quite dramatically based on the male or female point of view, so I included both here...