My 2015? Speaking personally I'm glad to see the back of it, but let's talk about books... 
 THE YEAR IN FICTION - THE GOOD STUFF 
 I got round to a few famous books which delighted me and some that were more like shoving your hand in a toaster or finding yourself in that pothole in The Descent which I will come to in a moment. Love goes out to No Country for Old Men and As I Lay Dying, they were great; the 1001 books list gave me The Life and Death of Harriet Frean and also The Charwoman's Daughter (neither of which I would have come across in a million years (okay, maybe after 600,000 years) so all the 1001 Books haters can go and.... Make their own list); and Things by Georges Perec was more like an essay/memoir than fiction but at least I have read one thing by M. Perec. 
 The Whites was a good solid Richard Price police procedural 
 I was stunned by This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Tadeusz Borowski), as I knew I would be & had been putting off reading it for years because I knew it would be tough tough tough. 
 Troubles by J G Farrell - I thought this was going to be worthy and earnest - all about the Irish troubles (you know - boring) - it was nothing like that, it was a HOOT and totally totally delightful (this was the "lost Booker Prize winner") 
 London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins from 1945 - the find of the year, a real treasure - also one which daunted me to begin with, at 730 pages - but it's fast & soapy & lovely and as English as it's possible to get 
 A reread of Breakfast at Tiffany's got me in the mood to read a big biography of Capote, called Capote, then watch Capote the movie, then watch Infamous, the other movie about the exact same thing as Capote, i.e. the creation of In Cold Blood. Both movies excellent, and the biography was almost brilliant. 
 Coming in at the end of the year was Booker shortlisted The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota - very impressive, completely depressing. 
 And a surprising - nay, shocking - book of short stories I LOVED called I Love Dollars by Wen Zhu which had been on my (real life) shelf for some years, so those unread books you already have might be just the thing you're looking for! 
 There were extremely-only-okay novels which as usual came wreathed with gushes from The Pope, Bruce Springsteen, Philip Roth and Stephen Hawking and even more important people in other words the usual suspicious overpraise - these were 
 The First Bad Man by Miranda July (you can skip it but you must see her movie Me and You and Everyone we Know which is the real deal) 
 Dept of Speculation (Jenny Offill) - was like an x-ray of an actual novel 
 The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink (no, Nell Zink is not the Second Coming) 
 Girl at War by Sara Novic (people other than me will love this one) 
 Did you ever have a Family by Bill Clegg (well.... It wasn't bad, you know, but I really don't want to be hoodwinked into reading not bad novels - I know, my own fault) 
 THE YEAR IN FICTION - THE REALLY BAD STUFF 
 Sometimes you just find yourself in the wrong novel. You have to wonder how you got here. And you have to reach for your scimitar like Michonne in The Walking Dead and chop out a few jugular veins. 
 All my Puny Sorrows (Miriam Toews) was mawkish 
 Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann) was after a brilliant opening really boring - no more we was poor but we was happy/unhappy growing up stories please 
 A Question of Upbringing was the first volume of A Dance to the Music of Time and the last one also for me - readable and occasionally faintly amusing but tedious and politically disgusting too 
 The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes)- interesting title since it was the nonsense of the ending which made me hate it 
 The Rehearsal (Eleanor Catton) was a like a dance of the seven veils with schoolgirls, sounds like illicit fun until you read it 
 Speedboat (Renata Adler) - this gets the big heavy praise? Well who put the Benzedrine in all those critics' Ovaltine? It was shite! 
 The Last September (Elizabeth Bowen) - unreadable 
 The Adventures of Augie March - defeated me, it was too loud and too monotone. I admire it, you know, because you have to, but from a safe distance. 
 In the Light of what we Know (Zia Haider Rahman) - tendentious, ponderous, elephantine, porcupine, turpentine 
 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Safran Foer) - well I did a parody of this which people liked so the experience wasn't all bad. 
 The Naked and the Dead (Mailer) - unreadably macho 
 Housekeeping (Robinson) - I drowned in all the plangent prose and they still haven't found my bloated corpse but when they do they will find a note attached "Marilynne Robinson done it". She has armies of fans. Probably the same people who like Tree of Life & Melancholia. 
 WHAT ELSE 
 I shall not bore you with the music, true crime and pop theology books I read but most of those were solid or excellent - standout was One of Us (the Anders Breivik story) by Asne Seierstad. And a great graphic novel : The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel about which I have been urging all & sundry to read & getting some funny looks too - people don't seem to believe me that a 500 page soap opera about some rad-fem lesbians in the 90s and 00s is going to be a classic read. But they are wrong! It is! 
 Finally, it was a year of rediscovering the voyeuristic pleasures of reading biography - I slurped up the following : Hiding Man - Donald Barthelme; Norman Mailer; Pauline Kael; Saul Bellow; Philip Larkin; and Capote. Now I know a lot of stuff I did not know in 2014. The world is a wicked place. But it can be quite amusing too if you squinch up your eyes and bend your neck a bit.