FORGET THE BEST BOOKS OF ’15 – THIS TO-READ LIST IS TIMELESS.

Highlights from any year but 2015

So, how many books have you read so far this year?

Kidding! We know it’s only the second week of the year and you may have spent most of the first week trying to figure out how to get your new digital devices to work.

Now, though, it’s time to think about reading goals for the year, and we find that there’s no better way to get motivated for that than to look back at what we loved last year.

We’re also finally freed from that end-of-the-year disease that causes laser-focus on books published in the previous 12 months — because who only reads books from the current year?

Here, our staff shares some favorite recent reads regardless of publication date, and some reading resolutions to go with them.

“The Weird Sisters” by Eleanor Brown (2011)

This tale of three sisters by Eleanor Brown, who lives in Highlands Ranch, has just the right amount of fun and wickedness to balance the questions about family, relationships and purpose. It begins with the daughters of a pre-eminent scholar of Shakespeare running away to home, rather than from it. (Though ... well, no spoilers.) Each sister has her secret, but of course you’ll have to wait for the third act to see how it all pans out. Read it now, because Brown’s next book is out this summer (see below).

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)

Sometimes it takes awhile to get around to the classics. (Cut me some slack, this

book was first published before I was born.) I lost myself in this novel in the same way I’d escape into books when I was a kid, fully absorbed in the beauty, tragedy and humanity of the tale. The repeated family names can get confusing in this magical-realism saga, but it’s still the best book I read in 2015.

Books I’m looking forward to reading in 2016:

• “The Light of Paris” by Eleanor Brown (July 2016)

• “Zero K” by Don DeLillo (May 2016)

• “The Mirror and the Light” by Hilary Mantel (Maybe 2016? It was planned for last year, but didn’t quite make it.)

— Jenn Fields

“Americanah” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)

What I love about being in a book club is you end up reading works you might not have otherwise picked up or known about. That was the case with this novel by a Nigerian author who also wrote “Half of a Yellow Sun.” She tells the story of a young Nigerian woman who comes to the United States for a university education and ends up working and writing a blog about her experience before returning to her native country and her first lover 15 years later. It’s particularly timely with race and identity being front-burner issues in America. The book underscores what it is like to be part of a double minority and how one’s ethnicity affects love, family and everyday relationships.

Looking forward to reading:

• “My Name is Lucy Barton” by Elizabeth Strout (Jan. 2016)

• “Life After Life” (2013) and “A God in Ruins” (2015), both by Kate Atkinson

— Suzanne S. Brown

“Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry (1985)

Sure, it’s an 800-plus-page Western about a cattle drive — I’m not ashamed to admit I hesitated a moment before plucking it from my parents’ bookshelf this past spring — but Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic is the kind of book you’re lucky to encounter a handful of times in your life. Just try not to get swept up in the adventure, romance, friendship and drama of Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae’s last, great journey. I failed, fantastically.

“Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

Dystopian fiction may seem a dime a dozen lately, but don’t let that keep you from this inventive 2014 novel — my favorite bookclub book of 2015. Emily St. John Mandel weaves an incredible tale of the end of the world as we know it and a traveling troupe of performers who live by the words, borrowed from the TV show “Star Trek: Voyager,” “survival is insufficient.”

Looking forward to reading:

• “The Good Lord Bird” by James McBride (2013)

• “The Secret Place” by Tana French (2014)

— Emilie Rusch

“To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee (1960)

No, I didn’t read this American classic on community and judicial racial conflict back in high school, when I technically should have. But that worked out for the best. Reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” just as protests erupted after the U.S. Department of Justice cleared a white Ferguson, Mo., police officer in the shooting of an unarmed black man made Harper Lee’s beautifully written narrative even more poignant. Would white lawyer Atticus Finch’s defense of a black man have been more effective today? It’s a question you can’t help but ask.

“Euphoria,” by Lily King (2014)

Stranded at John F. Kennedy Airport for five hours with no unread book, I chose Lily King’s “Euphoria” from an emergency list of books text messaged by a friend. This tragic, verdant tale of love and obsession is as tangled as the New Guinea jungles in which cultural anthropologists Nell Stone, her husband Fenwick Schuyler and their colleague Andrew Bankson are working, thick with sexual tension and western anxiety. It was an exhilarating read — even without the benefit of knowing much about Margaret Mead and her two husbands, after whom the main characters are modeled.

“The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother,” by James McBride (1995)

This memoir of jazz musician, journalist and novelist James McBride explores identity as defined by choice and community. The story moves fluidly between the perceptions of McBride as he navigates to adulthood from childhood in hard New York City poverty and his mother’s narrative, recounted in her own voice, as she transitions from being the abused daughter of an immigrant Orthodox Jewish rabbi in southeast Virginia to being the mother of 12 black children who finally finds the love of God in the Baptist church.

Looking forward to reading:

• “Infinite Jest,” by David Foster Wallace (1996)

• “The Buried Giant,” by Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)

— Dana Coffield

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” by Charles Yu (2010)

The offbeat, deadpan science fiction crafted here often draws comparisons to Douglas Adams (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”), and that’s not unfair, but what’s on offer here is deeper and more searching than the timeless slapstick goofs of “Guide.”

Yu’s narrator, also named Charles Yu, is a lonely timemachine mechanic with a mysteriously disappeared father, sliding through universes with strange rules, pitying people who don’t understand the limits of time travel.

“The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)

This science-fiction legend is less spacefaring, more space fantasy; less technology, more philosophy. A human ambassador (or missionary?) visits a planet inhabited by people biologically similar to known humans, apart from their anatomy and procreation, and therefore their relationship with gender.

How much that — along with other elements of their enviornment — informs their culture is an ongoing question for the ambassador, whose job it is to draw them into the galaxy’s ever-expanding civilization.

Looking forward to reading:

• “The Secret Lives of Web Pages” by Paul Ford (June 2016) • “They May Not Mean To, But They Do: A Novel” by Cathleen Schine (June 2016) • “Death’s End” by Liu Cixin (August 2016)

— Dave Burdick

“All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr (2014)

Beautiful, even poetic language, glorious imagery in a well-constructed novel that’s an easy read but so rich you don’t want to rush it. It’s too limiting to call Doerr’s creation a war novel. It’s also a romantic, philosophical meditation on time and humanity.

“The Circle” by Dave Eggers (2013)

A tad obvious at times, but this tale of life inside the world’s most powerful Internet company is spot on. Eggers brings humor and valid concerns to matters of privacy, surveillance, corporate greed, ambition and the future of democracy, no less. Read it before the movie comes out this year.

Looking forward to reading:

• “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy (1869) — An eight-hour BBC adaptation of the epic will be simulcast on A&E, Lifetime and History Channel, in four two-hour installments, beginning Jan. 18. If I start reading now, can I beat the telecast?

— Joanne Ostrow

“Creating the Worlds of Star Wars: 365 Days” by John Knoll (2012)

My obsession with behind-thescenes tidbits on the making of the first six “Star Wars” films led me to gorge on this weighty (744 pages!), picture-heavy book, which reads like a general-audience version of my favorite special effects periodical, Cinefex. It also doubled as a tech-minded bit of homework for the December release of “Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens,” and one written by a man deeply in the know, Oscar-nominated Industrial Light & Magic wizard John Knoll.

“The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Chronicles – Art & Design” by Weta Workshop (2014)

Since I can’t seem to get enough production intel on my favorite sci-fi and fantasy films, the extended edition release of “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” in 2015 gave me an excuse to revisit the gorgeously hardbound series of “The Hobbit: Chronicles” books from New Zealand’s Weta Workshop. This one, which covers the final film in Peter Jackson’s recent Middleearth trilogy, delves with improbable and loving detail into the artistic design, sets, costumes, creatures and more in the admittedly disappointing but wildly ambitious 2014 film.

“The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning” by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham (1993)

You don’t have to go through a major life event (as I did) to appreciate the collected and globespanning wisdom in this book, which deploys Hebrew, Greek, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian principles in an attempt to embrace life’s fundamental paradoxes. Those averse to religion also needn’t fear the grab-bag of tales and commentary, which allow for a sort of take-it-or-leave-it freedom of interpretation for virtually any reader.

Looking forward to reading:

• “Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy” by Judd Apatow (2015)

• “Doctor Sleep” by Stephen King (2014)

• “Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film” by Patton Oswalt (2015)

— John Wenzel

“The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation” by David Kamp (2006)

One of the biggest revolutions in recent decades centers around food, and it’s funny to think of a time when sushi was a strange and scary food in America. I couldn’t put this book down — Kamp does a masterful job of storytelling with a colorful cast of outsized characters who crafted the scene we know today. It blends culinary history, food politics, and popular culture in a way that explains the American fascination with the food scene.

Looking forward to reading:

• “All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West” by David Gessner (2015)

• “Thirteen Moons” by Charles Frazier (2007)

• “Arctic Dreams” by Barry Lopez (1986)

— Colleen O’Connor