The Japanese have a word for the pile of books on your nightstand. “Tsundoku” refers to two things: the act of buying and never reading books, and to those on your bookcase you’ve been meaning to get to, but in actuality probably will never crack open. We’re all guilty of it. Whereas movies and music are immediate and largely passive experiences, books require investment. They require time, and silence, and the staving off of the stream of anxious habits and tired thoughts you carry around all day.
The fact is, books necessitate a quietness of mind and focus, two things that smartphones have been waging a battle against, especially in 2015, the most recent year of the Internet age. View the following list as a new set of weapons against tsundoku — a curation of writing that stands up to the corrosion of attention spans and the shallowness of social media. (How ironic that a quick list hopes to pull you away from an Internet full of quick lists.) Now without further ado, here they are, in no particular order: GP’s favorite books of 2015.
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The Sellout
Cutting Racial Satire: In Beatty’s fourth novel, he tells the biting, satiric story of a young man in California who goes all the way to the Supreme Court in an effort to reinstate slavery and segregate the local high school. Named one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review.
By: Paul Beatty
Length: 304 pages
Published: March 3, 2015
