Book Recommendations of 2017

In the past few years, I have purposed to read more books by female authors. I have thoroughly enjoyed the books I have found and devoured, and today I’d like to share a few of them with you—and ask the rest of you to share recommendations in turn!

Quick warning up front—most of the books I’ve enjoyed recently are science fiction or, perhaps, fantasy. I’ve truly enjoyed entering worlds incredibly different from our own.

N. K. Jemison is hands down one of my favorite authors of all time. Her Dreamblood Duology and her Inheritance Trilogy were utterly fascinating reads. Jemison is a woman of color, and many of her books are written from the perspectives of women of color. Additionally, one of her books is written from the perspective of a woman who is blind. The worlds Jemison creates are rich and real.

Ann Leckie takes a very close second. Leckie’s Ancillary Radch series is nothing short of amazing. Written from the perspective of an artificial intelligence—and in a society without gendered pronouns—Leckie turns so many things on their head that I didn’t want to leave the world she’d created. And along the way, she plays with questions we’ve yet to work out in our own world.

Kat Richardson is just plain fun. I devoured her Greywalker series, which is set in Seattle, and loved the way it played with the past as well as the present. Richardson’s central character, a female detective, walks unbeknownst into a paranormal world of vampires and magical rules, and has to learn to navigate—and solve mysteries in—both worlds, slipping through the grey as she does.

Sara Paretsky reset the scene for women in detective novels when she began writing in the 1980s, and hasn’t stopped since. She is without a doubt the best detective author I have ever read. Her detective character, V. I. Warshawski, is real, raw, and powerful, in both the detective work she does, the world she inhabits, and the relationships she creates.

Naomi Novik is another author I would characterize as fun. When I first started her Temeraire series I wasn’t sure what I’d gotten into. Intelligent dragons in nineteenth century England, being wielded as weapons of war against Napoleon? The premise sounded so ridiculous that I thought I would put it down, but I didn’t, drawn in by the richness of her characters.

How about the rest of you? What books and authors would you recommend? You don’t have to limit yourself to sci-fi or fantasy, or to female authors. What have you been reading, and what have you particularly enjoyed?

With the new year approaching, now is the time to create a reading list for 2018!

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