It’s time again for the list of books that I enjoyed most this year.  As always, only some of these books were published in 2015, but they were all a part of my 2015 experience.

1. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For 

You know me: always on the cutting edge of 30-year-old cultural touchstones. After loving – actually, loving seems like too mild a word – Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, I decided to go back to her early work. I’d seen her collections around in the 90’s, and figured I’d get to them someday. I finally did this summer, in the form of this handy compendium, published in 2008. Dykes to Watch Out For is a hilarious down-to-earth, politically-charged soap opera full of wonderful, familar characters, and was my favourite reading experience of the year.

2. Dept. of Speculation

How can one be an artist, a parent and a spouse without being thwarted at every turn? This little novel poses this question without answering it. It appears on the surface to be the kind of fragmentary prose experiment that I have little truck with these days, but it’s a whole lot more than that. Its interiority is both absorbing and affecting. It’s also funny, and sad.

3. I Kill Giants

Barbara fights monsters. Some of them are real; all of them are real to her. This graphic novel is about a child taking control in any way she can, and eventually reconciling the world outside of her to the world in her mind. I cried a lot.

4. The Folded Clock

I used to read a lot of diaries; I guess this is par for the course for pretentious literary adolescent girls. This book reminded me why, although it’s a far more crafted and self-contained work than the rambling journals of Anais Nin and the other mentally ill writers that I loved when I was younger. Heidi Julavits is the person I imagined I would become, but never did: a beautiful, wry, successful writer who moves between her home in Manhattan, her hometown on the east coast, and international literary events, fixing her critical eye both inward and outward, dwelling in the past while struggling to manage the present. (I also read Women in Clothes this year, a massive project by Julavits, Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton on women’s relationship to fashion and style. I was, in fact, obsessed with it, and it should probably be on this list too, but only one book per author is my rule.)

5. Fangirl

Everyone loved Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park. Everyone loved it so much that I took several stabs at it, finally finished it, and even put it on my course on novels about adolescence, because I knew my students would love it (and they did). I did not love it. I didn’t get the hype. It seemed to me to be a typical yet somehow unconvincing love story, and I didn’t care for any of the characters involved. I did, however, love Fangirl, Rowell’s story of a socially awkward college freshman who writes fanfiction to fill the holes where her mother and twin sister used to be, and to cope with the challenges of caring for her erratic father at a distance, and integrating into a new landscape on her own. It’s a fast and funny read, and Cath, the protagonist, is someone I could both identify with and root for.

6. When Marnie Was There

I was inspired to go back and reread this childhood favourite of mine because of the release of an animated film version by the famed Studio Ghibli, makers of such stunners as Spirited Away. I haven’t seen the film of Marnie yet, but rereading the book – the story of a little girl who is sent away from her foster home to stay with an elderly couple by the sea, and who makes her first real friend, a mysterious poor little rich girl named Marnie who then vanishes – made me both happy and uneasy. It sent me on an extended quest to find a number of my childhood favourites, including some fairly obscure exemplars like The Changeling (still wonderful) and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and me, Elizabeth (didn’t get through it this time.) The upshot: the books I loved when I was a child were all about loneliness, and about how friendship is never what it seems to be.

7. Everything I Never Told You

The favourite child, beautiful Lydia, is found dead in the lake. The family goes to pieces, and then comes out the other side, bruised but renewed. This novel is entrancing: more than just a murder mystery, but with a murder mystery’s relentless forward momentum.

8.  Kill My Mother

I know little about the genres this graphic novel draws upon – pulp, noir, hard-boiled detective stories – but this book is terrific. The drawings are dark yet vibrant, the characters are the most complicated caricatures imaginable, and the story – beginning with a manic teenager with a vendetta against her mother, and winding through Hollywood and the South Pacific, movie sets and World War II island outposts – is riveting.

9. The Girl on the Train

If you follow book stuff at all, you know all about The Girl on the Train, and have probably read it already, so I don’t have to say much. It was called “the next Gone Girl,” and it’s not, but it’s a juicy thriller, and good novel to take with you to while away hours on, say, the train. Rachel watches out the window of the commuter train she takes every day, and constructs stories about the people she sees, one couple in particular. Then she sees some new things, and learns that the woman she’s been watching has disappeared. Thrillery stuff ensues. It’s a good time.

10. Skim

Another reread, another graphic novel. While revising my book list for my course on novels about adolescence, I put up a Facebook plea: “My list is nothing but white people! Please help!” Skim came up, and my first thought was, “Too short,” but then I thought, “That book was amazing; I should reread it,” and, having reread it, I thought, “Every teenager should read this book,” so it went on the course. The story: Kimberly (“Skim”) Keiko Cameron doesn’t feel like she fits anywhere, and is confused by her broken family, her best friend’s growing insistence that she try to be “normal,” and her amorphous attraction to her art teacher, Ms. Archer. When the most popular girl in school, Katie, is dumped by her boyfriend, whose subsequent suicide might be about his homosexuality, she and Skim bond. My students didn’t like it: too dark, too plotless, witchcraft!  You’ll like it, though, I promise.

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What did you read this year that you loved? Tell us below, and happy 2016, reading-wise and otherwise.

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Want to see lists from past years? Here are all my previous Top 10 Books posts on one convenient page.