Hey all, I've been seeing a lot of requests for book recommendations. As luck would have it, I read a metric faction of books in 2024, and have a few ideas fresh in my head for you. These are a mix of new and old, and include a range of genres: sci fi, fantasy, literature, nonfiction, mystery and thriller. Hope you find something good:

Top Picks

James - Percival Everett: A short, fast-moving retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the POV of Jim, the slave.

To Shape a Dragon's Breath - Moniqull Blackgoose: A Native American girl finds a dragon egg. When the hatchling imprints on her, she must navigate the strange, lightly steam punk world of the white people who control and regulate all dragons.

Sci-Fi

Orbital - Samantha Harvey: An new, ambient, literary, and very technical account of a day on the ISS, filled with beautiful descriptions of our little home in space.

The Deep Sky - Yume Kitasei: When a bomb goes off on an interstellar mission, the all-assigned-female-at-birth crew has to scramble to find the culprit.

Fantasy

The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle: A giant of the canon. Just read it if you're a fantasy person.

Howl’s Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones: You've seen the movie, but have you read the book? There's a cool twist in the original.

Post-apocalyptic & Dystopian

Parable of the Sower - Octavia E. Butler: A teenaged girl endures a quest across a ruined, future California.

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood: Almost 20 years after reading this for the first time I still found it fresh. Must-read apocalyptic fiction.
The Plot Against America - Philip Roth: Lindbergh defeats FDR and institutes fascism in 1930s America. More timely than ever.

The Fireman - Joe Hill: When a fungus causes people to spontaneously combust, a small group tries to control the power and survive.

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over - Anne de Marcken: A quick, literary zombie story from the zombie's POV.

Literature & Fiction

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry - Fredrik Backman: Charming and hilarious story of a precocious 7 year old girl fulfilling the posthumous wishes of her beloved grandma in Stockholm.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zavin: A video game designer struggles romantically with his colleague and childhood friend.

American Dirt - Jeanine Cummins: A middle class woman flees Acapulco with her son as a migrant after her journalist husband is assassinates by a gang.

The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis: If you liked the show you'll love the original novel.

A Good Family - A. H. Kim: Total page-turner about a woman unravelling the web of intrigue that lands her sister-in-law in prison.

Classics

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner: A brief, grim, and affecting tale of a family fulfilling the dying wish of its matriarch.

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf: I was surprised how accessible I found this story of the people gathered at a family's summer house in Scotland.

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison: A Black man navigates an early HBCU and 1950s Harlem providing a vivid account of post war racial politics.

Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow: A fat, useless Connecticut WASP finds meaning living with an African tribe.

Non-fiction

Man's Search for Meaning - Victor E. Frankl: Part Holocaust survival account, part recipe for maintaining sanity in insane times. Best self-help book ever.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder - David Grann: Gripping, early 1800s tale of shipwreck and escape off the coast of Chile by the author of Killers of the Flower Moon.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI - David Grann: Could not put this down. People are horrible. When Indians struck it rich in 1920s Oklahoma, whites lined up to rob and murder them.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King: Part autobiography, part how-to, this is an uncharacteristically concise book from the horror master.

...and last, I have to plug my own novella, Notes from Star to Star. It's the story of a woman who finds herself alone in space and must unravel the mystery of a strange alien communication.