Best Fiction
N.K.Jemison - Broken Earth trilogy
Great building of a post-apocalyptic world with a brilliant narrative structure. The first book is the best, but the rest are pretty darn good too.
Erin Morgenstern - The Starless Sea
Books about books, stories about stories always seem to grab me. Add an underworld filled with intrigue and a delightful mix of real world with fantasy elements? I'm in.
Alix E. Harrow - The Ten Thousand Doors of January
Secret books, secret doors. Where will they lead? Adventure, no doubt.
Jeff Vandermeer - Borne
The common theme to all these books? The fiction I seem to like the most is a world plausibly similar to ours with fantasy or sci-fi elements that twist things so there's always something a bit odd. Borne is the weirdest of the list (that's a compliment) - it deservedly falls into the "new weird" genre.
Susanna Clarke - Piranesi
Quite a change from Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norell. A different subgenre of fantasy, with more psychological, untrustworthy narrator stuff going on here.
Fiction Runners up:
Cixin Liu - Rememberance of Earth's Past trilogy
Scratch that Neal Stephenson-esque hard sci-fi itch while you ponder whether we should do every we can as a planet to avoid detection by aliens.
Nnedi Okorafor - Binti (complete trilogy)
A young woman deserts her isolationist culture to attend the galaxy's premier university. Themes of cultures clashing, family, and change in an imaginative universe.
Best Non-fiction:
Can you tell I like essay collections?Audre Lorde - A Burst of Light
Runner-up by same author: Sister OutsiderA black lesbian feminist journals about her life with cancer. There is a lot to unpack here. The sections on cancer hit on a personal level because of mom. One insight I appreciate from Lorde is that the rejection of oppressed peoples' messages and experiences because of the emotions with which these messages and experiences are communicated perpetuates that oppression. "I can't hear your criticism clearly because it comes with anger" dismisses concerns and reinforces the status quo, but the oppressed have every right to be angry!
James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time
Two letters in the form of essays. The first to Baldwin's nephew focussing on converting anger at how Black's are treated in America into a broader outlook on the African-American experience. The second discusses Baldwin's experience with and rejection of religion, which he finds to be a repressive force in Black communities.
Rebecca Solnit - Men Explain Things To Me
Runner-up by same author: Whose Story Is ThisSolnit's essays are always interesting, well-written, and hard hitting. The anecdote in the title essay is both cringeworthy and laugh out loud funny -- although she doesn't use the term, this essay is credited with giving us the concept of 'mansplaining.'
Best Star Wars books
I read Star Wars books and comics the same way some people read mysteries or romance novels - light reading for relaxation. What I like best is that I've reached a critical mass where I notice many interconnections between stories, even if it's only a character I know from another story showing up for a brief rendez-vous. This gives the Star Wars universe a lot more depth than there is to be found in any given single story and fills in a lot of gaps in the movies.
Alexander Freed - Shadow Fall
This story follows members of Alphabet Squadron, a rag-tag group of fighter pilots fighting for the New Republic as they try to stamp out the remaining vestiges of the Empire followingthe destruction of the second death star.
Kieron Gillen - Doctor Aphra (comic series)
A new character, whose story interweaves with the original trilogy characters. Aphra, an amoral archaeologist-mobster type, will do anything for the next big score, regardless of the consequences (to others, mostly). Her murder droids add comic relief similar to C-3PO AND R2D2, albeit with much darker humour. Aphra isn't good or evil, she's just in it for herself.
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