My best thing of 2015 (brace yourself for a shock) was the musical Hamilton. Not a full week after I whined to my friends that I feared there would never be another musical that made me feel the way Wicked and Rent made me feel, and maybe my feelings about those musicals (and the others I love) were just a function of youthful emoness, lo there came Hamilton into my life. If you haven’t listened to the cast recording yet, find a way to do it. Then come back and tell me how much you loved it. Please and thank you.

In books, I’ve picked out a few faves for the year. Some of these I’ve talked about ad nauseam already, so bear with me.

Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson, was the first webcomic I read for my “Read More Webcomics” resolution of 2015 (which went brilliantly for me, if you are wondering). Also probably my most-recommended book of 2015.

How It Went Down, by Kekla Magoon, has been inexplicably overlooked, and I cannot understand why. In addition to being painfully topical, it’s also a beautifully written, thoughtful look at some of the issues that arise when a black child is suddenly dead and nobody can understand why. I can’t say enough about this book and this author. Check it out.

And now for a total change of pace, I loved Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, when I didn’t remotely expect to. It’s witty and tender, and full of characters you just want to see succeed.

Congo, by David van Reybrouck, laid out the history of a huge, messy country in a way that was perpetually readable and relied as much as possible on the testimony and memories of the Congolese people themselves. If historians like David van Reybrouck could write histories of all the African nations, I’d be done with my Africa reading project in just a few years.

Touch, by Claire North, kept me up late trying to guess what was going to happen next. At least one book a year reminds me why I love reading so much, and Touch was that book for me this year.

Predictably, Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, has arrived on my best-of this year. I didn’t review it in this space because it was hard to feel that I had anything to add about this book, after so many glowing reviews have emerged of it. I’ve admired Coates’s writing for years for its measured insights and unwillingness to rely on easy answers. Between the World and Me is a tragic, beautiful, necessary book.

The Scorpion Rules, by Erin Bow, did absolutely none of the things I expected it to do. It was a perpetual surprise, and it’s made me excited to see what Erin Bow will do next with this world.

As with the Coates book, I don’t feel I have anything super valuable to add about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which has basked in plenty of accolades already and doesn’t need my additional input. However, I will say that I had no expectation of liking this book and only read it so I could get to Bring Up the Bodies, which I also didn’t especially expect to like. But there you go. Life is full of surprises.

Finally, a shout-out to 1796 Broadway, a monster of an epistolary fanfic which, like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries in its time, kept me up late on several occasions where I kept saying “oh I’ll just do one more and then I’ll go to bed.” Ha, ha, Jenny. You know that’s not what’s really going to happen.

In statistics, female authors were far more heavily represented in my reading than male, and I continue to be fine with that.

I read 18% of my books because I was familiar with the authors from previous books I’d read of theirs, while another 45% of my book recommendations came from you lovely people! If that number seems low, please note that many of the books in the “author fondness” category became favorites of mine due to your unfailing advocacy. So actually I got closer to 53% of my books from bloggers. Another 15% I picked up based on professional reviews; 6% were books I spotted in publishers’ catalogs or that publishers pitched to me; and a small sliver, 3%, were books I picked up randomly at the library.

84% of everything I read came from the library. Lovely, lovely library, please never change. I cherish you so much. I borrowed two books from friends, owned eight, read seven online (from apps like Marvel Now and Comixology), and read fifteen in ARC format (either ebooks or physical). About a fourth (27%) of my reads were ebooks, and the rest were physical books. That is how I roll when subways and purse heavinesses are not a consideration.

I read less SFF this year than I think is typical for me, only 26%, whereas fiction-not-otherwise-classified accounted for 30% of my reading. Actually, that seems okay. Maybe I’d like to read slightly more SFF than ungenre fiction, but those percentages seem fine. 10% of my reading was comics, which I’d like to see go up a bit in the new year, and 14% was nonfiction, which rocks. I read more books in translation this year, seventeen, than I’ve probably ever read in a year before.

My goal for 2015 was to read no more than 65% white authors, and no more than 60% American authors. These stats are probably a little off, because I couldn’t always find interviews where the author self-identifies as one ethnicity or nationality over another, but anyway, employing US census categories, I ended up with 44% authors of color, and 50% authors hailing from countries other than America. I read books by authors from 38 different countries, and it was glorious.

How was your reading year? Did you meet your goals? Did you read anything of exceptional wonderfulness?

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I would like to choose Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, but I already chose it for something in this Month of Faves. However, I want you to, when you picture me reading Funny Girl for the first time (a thing I am sure you are all constantly imagining), imagine that I spend the entire time saying, “REALLY. REALLY.” Because that is what happened.

Instead of that, I choose two debut novels that were so remarkably assured and thoughtful that it seemed unlikely these were, in fact, debut novels. These are the wonderfully-titled Make Your Home among Strangers and the awarded-and-accoladed The Turner House. I got both these recommendations from Stacia Brown, who writes on the Act Four blog for the Washington Post, and I will now take sweetly like a lamb any further book recommendations she may want to issue.

And I also choose Elizabeth Eldredge’s book Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960. I know you are thinking that a history book with discourse in the title sounds unbearably dry and tedious, and I am sympathetic to your position. However, in actuality, that book was great, and Lesotho is a baller nation. Perhaps as a function of my low expectations for a history book with discourse in the title, I loved it maybe the best of my four Africa reading project books so far this year.

(Nah. The Congo book was better. But I knew the Congo book was going to be good. That one got rave reviews in the academic journals, and it was highly recommended by another of the writers for the Washington Post‘s Act Four blog, Alyssa Rosenberg.)

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Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl is one for me! I’ve never liked Nick Hornby before, but Funny Girl made me feel happy all way through.

The Turner House, Angela Flournoy. So, so assured for a debut novel, and it managed to make me love it despite being constantly compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom I do not care for. Way to go, Angela Flournoy.

The Wicked + the Divine, by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. Shitdamn with this series from Image Comics. It’s about celebrity and myths and family, and it’s a murder mystery where you know whodunnit, and I’ve never read anything like this comic before.

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates. I’m stealing this one from Andi, and I hope she won’t mind! It’s as beautifully written and devastatingly honest as you’ve heard from everyone.

What books have you read this year that deserved all the hype they’re getting?

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If Nick Hornby were a woman no one would give him two seconds of their time, but I suppose that is not Nick Hornby’s fault. As much as I want to like him, his books leave me feeling vaguely unfulfilled, like below-average vegetarian sushi.

Ahahahahaha, that Past Jenny, what a bitch. But — yeah, that’s about how I would describe my feelings about Nick Hornby up until I started reading Funny Girl. I had previously read Juliet, Naked, A Long Way Down, and How to Be Good, and while they didn’t make me laugh or even smile very often, they did make me feel the kind of anxiety you get when you are at the office and you can’t remember if you turned the oven off before you left home.

My expectations for Funny Girl were, therefore, on the low side. The premise appealed: It’s about two writers, two actors, and a producer who create a madly popular sitcom in 1960s Britain, and how they work to keep it funny and relevant, and how it ultimately comes to an end, as all things must.

And then! To my utter surprise! And perhaps as a function of having lowered my expectations very, very low indeed! I loved reading Funny Girl. I laughed out loud at a couple of places, and I was nearly always beaming as I read. I wanted it to keep happening and happening, and I felt glum when my bus reached work and I had to put the book down. Once I had finished, I went back and read several scenes over again, just because I had loved them so much and wanted to be living in them a second time. Here’s a bit where they’re all standing around and coming up with the idea for the show:

“Barbara and Jim. So how did they end up together?

“He knocked her up,” said Clive.

“I think you’ll find he didn’t,” said Sophie firmly.

“I don’t think it would go down so well upstairs either,” said Dennis.

“Oh, here we go,” said Bill.

Bill and Tony loved Dennis, and not just because he loved them. He was clever, and he was enthusiastic, and he was endlessly encouraging. But he was a Corporation man to the tips of his brown suede boots, and his playfulness tended to disappear if he thought that the future of the BBC, or his own future within it, was under any threat, real or imagined.

“O.D. would go for it.”

O.D., or Other Dennis, as he was known only in their very small circle, was Dennis Main Wilson, another BBC comedy producer, much more experienced and successful than T.D.– This Dennis. When Tony and Bill were bored, or felt that they weren’t getting anywhere with an idea, they would drop the possibility of Other Dennis into the conversation, and spend a few minutes painting an idyllic word-picture of what their working life would be like with him.

“Say what you like about O.D., but he’ll always go in to bat for his writers,” said Bill, mock-wistfully.

Funny Girl is generous to its characters in a way that I didn’t see (maybe I missed it?) in Hornby’s other books. Though minor characters come and go throughout the book, the central five all enjoy being around each other, and so the reader enjoys being around them too. They change and grow, and some of them grow out of each other, but the shared affection stays.

It’s just a lovely, lovely book, and I’m really glad I gave Nick Hornby another chance. Doesn’t mean I’ll want to reconsider the ones I’ve read so far, but I’d be willing to give future projects of his a go.

Postscript: Your mileage may vary, but I didn’t care for the last section of the book, which jumped forward in time by a few decades. When I read the book again, I maybe won’t read that bit. I’ll cordon off the last fifty pages. That’s a thing I do sometimes.

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