My favourite books of 2015

Here’s Part I of my Best of 2015 list, with Part II, memoirs only, to follow. Get to a bookstore and blow the budget. You’re very welcome. Little Black Classics At more than 5 kilograms, this set of 80 tiny black-covered paperback classics boxed up by Penguin is the size of one giant baby. I bought the collection after dropping Simon Schama’s The Face of Britain (1.5 kg) on my actual face while reading in bed, and since I don’t read on screens at nightfall, Penguin’s 50-pagers suit me. For those short of nightmares, try Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and Herman Melville’s The Maldive Shark, for catastrophists Samuel Pepys’ The Great Fire of London, for economists Leo Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need?, for depressive realists Ryunsoke Akutagawa’s The Life of a Stupid Man and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and for the easily aroused, we have C.P. Cavafy’s Remember, Body . . .There are assiduous Greeks and Romans — hey Sappho, hey Catullus — and the prolific Anon has written terrific poetry. This gorgeous battering ram of books is a great way to lure a dullard teenager into reading.

Quote: “If marriage was the slow lifelong acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.” From The Reckoning, by Edith Wharton. Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia by Peter Pomerantsev The amount of pain Russians can endure is apparently limitless. Pomerantsev, who spent years working in Russia’s nouveau propaganda-info-drama TV world, sums up a surreal nation. “Over the last 20 years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized that they are illusions, that everything is PR,” the last three words being his short form for dashed democratic hopes. Russian women see prostitution as a career choice, TV news is manic and slanted, and primitive sects seize beautiful young girls and drive them to their deaths. It’s a “civilizational break.” The English hide their garbage in garden sheds, Pomerantsev writes, but the Russians toss it on their balconies for all to see. Stare and gasp. The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood Atwood’s latest work of speculative fiction takes place in a lousy future with a jobless couple living in their car and trying to maintain hygiene standards. Oh Stan. Oh Charmaine. A corporation called Consilience offers them a great deal: lifetime job, six months a year as “civilians,” six months in prison cells, sounds fair enough. The complication is sexual desire, which inserts itself into a sinister workplace where disappearing staff are under constant surveillance and the corporate business model is surgically implanting people with love. Atwood has invented the world’s worst job and made it sound cozily depraved. This is The Handmaid’s Tale, but funny. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson The British author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, has always been a hero of mine — he does investigative work while laughing — but this series of studies of mass online bullying is stellar. Minor crimes of phrasing on Twitter can ruin the lives of unsuspecting people who are targeted by the mob, meaning “us.” What kind of online hell have we unthinkingly built? Ronson’s writing is lucid, analytical, conversational and above all, compassionate. It’s a modern book on ye olde human decency. Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies, by Alexandra Harris Our climate is changing — thank you, Industrial Revolution — in a way that will not suit the human body. How odd to be told by this highly perceptive English writer that highly perceptive English writers didn’t particularly notice the weather, not until quite recently. Outdoors meant working for survival. So English literature has basically been about the great indoors, where it was warm and smoky. At what point did writers look up and find a subject? Weatherland is a riveting book about how humans began noticing weather at the same time as they began to make it intolerably awful. It is completely original and catnip for ironists. Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, by Johann Hari “Most people want to get mildly intoxicated,” explains Johann Hari, the accomplished British investigative journalist. “Prohibition always narrows the market to the most potent possible substance.” And we punish them for this human drive, but why? Like pointless wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the war on drugs has been a catastrophe, yet governments are hooked and blow billions. Hari studies the history of intoxication and policing, drug war victims (Billie Holiday, for one), cartels, economics, addiction, harm reduction and legalization (or “drama reduction”). I was opposed to drug legalization. Hari’s book changed my mind. hmallick@thestar.ca