Happy New Year! Here’s a list of my favorite books and games of 2015. The items within each category category aren’t ranked; they’re chronological.
I challenged myself to do the Book Riot 2015 Read Harder Challenge this year. I was off to a good start, but life got in the way and I wasn’t quite able to complete the challenge. I came pretty close, though! Assuming I finish the book I’m currently reading, I only missed two tasks.
I also read a handful of books beyond those I used in the challenge:
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman (2015)
A young girl’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters that make the girl realize their shared fairy tale world wasn’t just fantasy.
I loved A Man Called Ove, so I was excited to read Fredrik Backman’s next novel. I liked it a lot, but it wasn’t quite as good as Ove. I loved the eccentric grandmother and how the girl looked everything up on Wikipedia and loved Harry Potter. Britt-Marie drove me nuts and reminded me of Professor Umbridge. I don’t think the make-believe Land of Almost-Awake worked well for me, though.
The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling (2008)
A collection of five short fairy tales for wizarding children, Tales is a part of the Harry Potter world that includes commentary from Albus Dumbledore.
I bought Tales when it was published, a year after the last Harry Potter novel came out, but I never read it until now. It is super short (only about 100 pages, double-spaced with large margins). The stories are fine, but nothing special, and I didn’t really care for the Dumbledore commentary. That said, it was still a nice addition to the Harry Potter world and I thought it was pretty awesome that Rowling did the hand-drawn illustrations and that the profits went to charity.
Move Brad the Bardbarian around the battlefield, dodging enemy attacks while your units fight for you.
Bardbarian is a fun and simple casual game. It is very polished with great art and goofy characters. I played it on my computer, but it would probably be a great mobile game, too.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)
The lives of five characters are transformed during Biafra’s struggle for independence from Nigeria during the 1960s.
While it was interesting to read about something I knew little about, I felt like I had to power through this book. I liked the beginning, but it fell flat. I wasn’t engaged and it seemed… shallow. Maybe it would have been a better book if it had been condensed.
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (2013)
An unlikely teenage romance between two misfits: Eleanor (the overweight girl with flaming red hair and strange clothes) and Park (the comic-book-loving half-Korean boy).
Eleanor and Park and terribly awkward, endearing characters and their story is sweet and tragic. I liked it, but I wasn’t blown away by it either.
Learn to survive on an island full of dinosaurs. Hunt creatures, gather resources, craft items, and build structures. You can also tame, breed, and ride dinosaurs in this open world sandbox game.
ARK is an Early Access Game, but it already feels like a complete game. It has a huge community of players, gets updated very frequently, and can keep you entertained for hours upon hours. There is even an alternate play mode called Survival of the Fittest, which is essentially The Hunger Games in a world with dinosaurs.
My biggest complaints are that it is a resource hog (the developers are actively working on improving the game’s performance) and that the world is a fixed map and not destructible (not a big deal, but it would be nice).
I was really skeptical about ARK at first, but it’s a lot of fun. Highly recommended!
$29.99 on Steam (Early Access)
Wool by Hugh Howey (2011)
The first in a series of dystopian novellas, Wool is about the sheriff of a large subterranean city called the Silo. People in the Silo can only view the outside world on a screen that shows a live feed from the cameras outside. Since the air outside is toxic, leaving the Silo is a death sentence for the criminals sent out to clean the cameras.
Wool is short, but well-developed. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered, so I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith (2011)
With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence.
(Summary taken from Goodreads)
I read Life on Mars to fulfill the “collection of poetry” task of the Book Riot 2015 Read Harder Challenge. I decided that if I had to read poetry, picking a collection called Life on Mars would be a good choice. Unfortunately, Life on Mars didn’t do anything to improve my, erm, fondness for poetry. It did win the Pulitzer Prize, though.