It’s that time again: this is the ninth January in a row (got a streak going here) in which I post a discussion of the books I read and the movies I saw in the past year and also attempt some kind of evaluation of these works.

In 2015, I read 50 books and saw 15 movies; those numbers are very close to the year before.  Again, I read almost twice as much fiction as non-fiction, 32 to 18. Fiction genres ranged from the standard novel to sci-fi/fantasy to mystery/thriller.  The non-fiction books included history, linguistics, biography/memoir, social and environmental science.  This year I won’t attempt a finer breakdown than this.

As happened last year, the number of movies I watched was way below my previous seven-year average of 49, but that was again because I spent a lot of time watching downloaded TV shows.  The movies I watched included the genres of biopic, comedy, adventure, animated, and domestic drama.

As in the past few years, I could not pick a top five or six titles as Best of, even though that’s what these posts are supposed to be about, so this year I’m again doing something a bit different for both books and movies.

For movies, because there were so few, I picked my all-around favorite, which was Boyhood.  I agree that Director Richard Linklater achieved something remarkable in filming with the same actors over the course of 12 years.  Although in one respect, his movie is just another domestic drama, I believe it nudges viewers to ponder larger questions, such as the one posed by critic Matt Zoller Seitz:

Is the traditional domestic arrangement–a wife, a husband and kids living in the same house–really desirable for every person, and genuinely good for society, or does it inflict distress on those whose personalities and desires cannot function within it?

As runners-up in the film category, I chose City of God and Mad Max Fury Road. The Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles was hailed as a major new talent with the release of Cidade de Deus in 2002, a depiction of life in a Rio favela, as seen through the eyes of one of its residents; it reminded me in some ways of the Italian neorealist film experiments of the 1940s. Thirty years ago, I watched the first three Mad Max films, but only really cared for Mad Max II. But Mad Max IV did not disappoint, with its deeply feminist heroine and director George Miller’s frenzied vision of a post-apocalyptic world.

For books, I decided I would simply highlight the books I was surprised that I enjoyed or was moved by.  Insofar as I read a number of well-known or even classic works, one would expect them to be good or even outstanding, so these didn’t necessarily make my highly idiosyncratic list.  So even if this post is supposed to be “Best of,” the books list, alphabetically by title below, is not that.  I’m not sure there’s a common theme, though I did notice that six of the eight books are by women writers.

• At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen – swashbuckling adventure set in the South American jungle with hallucinatory prose portraying missionaries and mercenaries at their destructive worst
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt – probably my most conventional choice (Pulitzer Prize for the author, sales in the millions), though I became a fierce partisan not of the ostensible hero Theo but of Boris, the precocious outcast
• Graceling by Kristin Cashore – fantasy novel with a girl assassin (yes!) who is a genuine heroine
• Invisible Mountain by Carolina DeRobertis – three generations of women in turbulent Uruguay, of all places
• The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri – fraught mother-daughter relationship in a Bengali-American family
• Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox – another look at the struggle to decode Minoan Linear B, with a focus on Alice Kober instead of Arthur Evans and Michael Ventris
• TransAlantic by Colum McCann – four generations of Irish-American women, Lily, Emily, Lottie, and Hannah
• Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson – also a conventional choice I suppose (the author is a prize-winning journalist), but Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster tell compelling stories of their migrations out of the Jim Crow South into Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles

Click here for the complete lists.  Enjoy, and I welcome your comments.