Here are a few of the books that I am most looking forward to reading in 2015. (I will announce some fall books later this spring, after BookExpo.)
Happy reading!
January
- Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (Knopf)
- Jenny Uglow, In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815 (FSG)
February
- Robert Middlekauff, Washington’s Revolution: The Making of America’s First Leader (Knopf)
- John Searle, Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (Oxford University Press)
- Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Schocken)
March
- Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine (Princeton University Press)
- Mario Vargas Llosa, The Discreet Hero: A Novel (FSG)
- Robert Zaretsky, Boswell’s Enlightenment (Harvard University Press)
- Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (Knopf)
- Robert Alter, translator, Strong as Death Is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel (W. W. Norton)
May
- Kirsten Powers, The Silencing (Regnery)—Powers has been an outspoken and visible witness to those on the Left. Her book will likely be more honest than David Shipler’s forthcoming book, Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword (Knopf).
June
- Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society (FSG)
July
- Barton Swaim, The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics (Simon & Schuster)
farther out
- Jan Assmann, The Book of Exodus: A Biography (Princeton University Press)
- George Marsden, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography (Princeton University Press)
- Robert Alter, translator, Isaiah (W. W. Norton)
recent honorable mention
- Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Harvard University Press)
Note & Query 