- Ricardo Lago Couce
For the past few weeks, we’ve all been looking back on the glories of the past year (or getting Facebook to do it for us) and making lists. Lots and lots of lists. But now 2014 is officially past, we’re a full day into 2015, and it’s time for looking ahead, for making elaborate plans for diet and exercise and cleanliness and all other forms of self-improvement to banish the general sloth—aside from overeating—of the holiday season. Or maybe some people are actually doing those things. I spent a few hours looking through lists of books scheduled to come out this year and have resolved to keep to my slothful ways so I can read as many of them as possible.
In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815 by Jenny Uglow (January) In case you’ve forgotten, 2015 marks the bicentennial of Napoleon‘s final defeat at Waterloo. Here’s one book about the Napoleonic era that doesn’t star l’Empereur.
Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance by Daisy Hay (February) I quite enjoyed Hay’s first book, Young Romantics, a group biography of the second generation of Romantic poets. (And that is saying a great deal, since I consider Lord Byron one of the most obnoxious literary figures of all time.) So I’m looking forward to her take on the odd marriage of the Victorian prime minister and his much older wife.
We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler (February) The publisher’s blurb promises that this novel, a hybrid of the YA and adult ennui genres, really is about pirates, though the pirates troll 21st century San Francisco Bay. Nonetheless. Pirates.
Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser (April) Millhauser’s new collection of short stories promises more of his unique mixture of history and magic.
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough (May) Yes, yes, just in time for Father’s Day, but no historian is better than McCullough at finding the humanity inside Great Men.
