From the Top 10 Archives - Jen's 10 Favorite Books of 2015

Since I started this blog, I've been periodically looking back at my old top 10 favorite book lists, starting with 1999 when I first started compiling a list each year and working my way up towards the present.   If you don't remember the details, these are lists I made contemporaneously at the end of the respective years, made up of books I read in that particular year, not necessarily books published that year.  I started out sharing these lists with just a small group of people, and over the years started sharing with more and more people, and through more and more different means, including this blog!  One of my first posts on the blog was my top 10 books of 2017, so after today's post that means I have just one more to go!  (Unless I keep this blog going for so many more years that enough time goes by that I want to look back on 2017 and after, ha ha.)

Here's my list from 2015, in alphabetical order by author's last name:

The Visitors - Sally Beauman
The One That Got Away - Bethany Chase
The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah
The Last Camellia - Sarah Jio
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
The Lake House - Kate Morton
The Children's Crusade - Ann Packer
The Midnight Rose - Lucinda Riley
Who Do You Love? - Jennifer Weiner
Walking on Trampolines - Frances Whiting

For more random details about these books, keep reading!
How Does This List Hold Up Over Time?

What a list!  I'm kind of swooning over this one, so many good books that I have recommended to people many times.  I gave four of these books 5 stars at the time - The One That Got Away, Station, Eleven, The Lake House, and The Midnight Rose.  I don't think I could even pick a favorite from those, they are all SO great!  Given that this list is books from just 4 years ago, I remember all the books, and am not really surprised to see any of them on there, but The Children's Crusade is perhaps least memorable several years later.

Genres

This list tilts heavily towards historical fiction, with 5 books in that genre - The Visitors, The Nightingale, The Last Camellia, The Lake House, and The Midnight Rose.  There are 3 books that I would categorize as either chick lit or contemporary women's fiction - The One That Got Away, Who Do You Love, and Walking on Trampolines.  Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic/dystopian novel, and The Children's Crusade I would classify as literary fiction.

Popularity

The most read of these books on Goodreads is The Nightingale, with almost 536,000 ratings, which doesn't surprise me since I feel like everyone I knew read it.  The least read was Walking on Trampolines, with 1,951 ratings.

Other Random Stuff

Once again, the most read book on Goodreads is also the highest rated - The Nightingale, with an impressive average rating of 4.57.  This time the lowest rated does not match up with the least read though - the lowest rated is The Children's Crusade with an average rating of 3.52.

This was Kate Morton's 3rd time on my list, following The House at Riverton in 2009 and The Forgotten Garden in 2010 (and she subsequently would appear for a 4th time on my list in 2018).  It's also the 3rd time on the list for Jennifer Weiner, following Good in Bed in 2002 and Little Earthquakes in 2004.  It's the second appearance for Ann Packer following The Dive From Clausen's Pier in 2003.  And this list really is full of some of my favorite authors - some who I loved for years before 2015, and some who I discovered that year.  Kate Morton, Jennifer Weiner, and Bethany Chase are all must read authors for me whose work I am fully caught up on, while Lucinda Riley, Sarah Jio, and Ann Packer are all authors whose new books I consider must reads while still trying to catch up on their previous books.

The Nightingale won the Goodreads Choice Award for historical fiction in 2015.  No other real winners of any significance.

I read a paperback of The Last Camellia passed on to me by my BBFF (book best friend forever) Sarah, and the rest I'm pretty sure were all read on my kindle.

Three of these books were free copies from Netgalley - The One That Got Away, The Children's Crusade, and Walking on Trampolines.  Children's Crusade I definitely would have read anyway because I already was a fan of Ann Packer, but pretty sure I requested the other two randomly.  These days I'm trying to cut down on requesting random books from Netgalley because I have such a backlog of books to read, but this is a good reminder that I have found some amazing favorites that way!

Station Eleven I read with my book club.  The Midnight Rose I read with the aforementioned Sarah for our two person book club GCBC - it introduced both of us to Lucinda Riley who has become one of our favorite authors.

This was a list of mostly recent books - 6 were published in 2015, 3 in 2014, and just 1 in 2013.

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Note that I'll give all these posts the tag "Top 10," so you should be able to click on the label  "Top 10" at the bottom of the post and see all my other Top 10 posts.  And if you just want to see all my old Top 10 lists now without waiting, you can also click through to my Goodreads profile - I have a separate shelf for each of my old lists.