Arkady Martine
[isbn]
The most hardcore, creative, complex, compelling world I've had the privilege of inhabiting all year. Mahit travels to the Teixcalaanli empire as ambassador from her tiny independent space station in hopes of keeping the massive, politically hungry neighbor from annexing them, only to somersault into loads of trouble. A phenomenal thought experiment in the tradition of Le Guin or Herbert on the seductive pull of empire, the fraught nature of... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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Nona Fernandez, Natasha Wimmer
[isbn]
Chilean novelist Fernandez weaves her own constellation in this book-length essay that roots her mother's brain scans to the stars, to national grief, to loss and the fragility of memory, and to what is left behind for the living. A slow, deep breath in shimmering prose — one of my faves of the year.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Ling Ma
[isbn]
This collection was so good I wanna kiss Ling Ma on the mouth. A wildly funny and deeply sad string of stories about love and delusion, what we do to maintain our sanity, how we navigate identity horizontally and vertically (e.g. generationally vs. by sameness). As someone who tends to feel very comforted by fantasy, this felt like both a celebration and a warning from someone wiser and further along than me. Dark and delightful.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Fonda Lee
[isbn]
I have no idea how to do justice to this series, dear god Fonda Lee — a rip-roaring world so complex that it feels impossibly real, Lee's series is as heartfelt and complicated as her characters and each book somehow raises the emotional and literal stakes of the last until the last jaw dropping page. Slick, sexy, and smart as hell, perfect for fans of Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy and Ang Lee movies.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Gus Moreno
[isbn]
Deliciously sinister and wistfully written in the crispiest, crunchiest sentences, Moreno kicked this possession tale out of the park. After his wife passes with shocking suddenness under disturbing circumstances, Thiago, numb with grief, finds himself reaching into the dark to look for her...
Recommended by SitaraG
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
[isbn]
Straddling academic expertise and personal memoir, Cottom's sociology-inflected essays are a sucker punch that forgo abstract platitudes in favor of embodied intersectionality. Ranging in subject matter from money and beauty to the elasticity of whiteness, these stories coalesce as a reminder to resist individualist mythologies and instead look toward a future where we must all work together collectively if we're going to survive. Words for your... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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Halberstam, Judith
[isbn]
For the gays, the theys, the horror fanatics, and the monster apologists. Halberstam delivers some truly phenomenal pop culture critique in this volume, which, while at times theoretically dated (stage cough, Freud, stage cough), still turns over some really interesting rocks in accessible and entertaining language. I'm particularly fond of the "bodies that splatter" chapter.
Recommended by SitaraG
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David Benioff
[isbn]
Fans of the Last of Us series may recognize this title as a reference point left by Neil Druckmann in the second game, and it's easy to see Benihoff's influence on Druckmann's writing. City of Thieves is a bruising escapade, whipping the reader from a joke into contemplation into tragedy moment to moment. An extremely effective rumination on survival, suffering, and the absurdity of war.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Alice Hoffman
[isbn]
Like a lot of folks, I grew up with Practical Magic somehow constantly playing on TV somewhere in the house, so I think I went into Hoffman's book with low expectations and unintentionally did myself a favor. Pretty much a total departure from the movie, Hoffman's classic is still just as sweet and sexy — the Owen sisters navigate their supposed magical gifts and outwit complicated familial curses with their love for each other and their... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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Nicola Griffith
[isbn]
Griffith's masterful queer retelling of the Percival Arthurian mythology is the bite sized bonfire story of your dreams. Or mine, at least. Sensual, tactile, dense, and dreamy, I dragged my feet to make it last and immediately added her other books to my TBR.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Han Kang and Deborah Smith
[isbn]
Horror and transformation so often hold hands narratively that change of any kind can seem a shudder inducing, costly affair. Lush, violent, and tense, Han Kang's three-part exploration of one woman's transformation and what it costs her is a grim and bloody fairy tale for those familiar with the high stakes and high price of change.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
[isbn]
This fed and watered my brittle cynic's heart. A desperately romantic and sensual exchange of letters between two inhuman mortal enemies while they wage war on each other as agents for opposing, time-traveling espionage entities. Abstract, poetic, and deeply emotive — peak sapphic yearning.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Leslie Marmon Silko
[isbn]
Timelessly beautiful and tender, Silko's mythos-inflected masterpiece centers Tayo, a traumatized WWII veteran and biracial Pueblo Laguna native who must complete a new kind of ceremony in order to find reconciliation and healing for himself and his community. A profound exploration of identity, healing, the complexity of suffering, and the restorative power of self-forgiveness.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Stephen Graham Jones
[isbn]
The end of this book had me up past one in the morning. A love letter to horror and slashers and survivors, tender and gory and funny and so, so smart. Jones has plucked all the best elements of the genre and catapulted somewhere totally new, with results that are as exciting as they are heartfelt. A book for anyone who has loved horror long enough to see themselves become a protagonist instead of a body in the background. Ridiculously good.
Recommended by SitaraG
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James Baldwin
[isbn]
A masterclass in political discourse that is also one of the most profound treatises on love I've ever read. Baldwin continues to outpace contemporary writers and thinkers on race, American-ness, and the sheer import of our entanglement with and responsibility to other people. Hugely compelling and as contemporary ideologically as it was in 1963 (for real, his speech "Talk to Teachers" from the same year reads with the same urgency as when he... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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Martha Wells
[isbn]
I've read a good chunk of robot books in my day and maybe I'm jumping the gun, but I kinda think this one's just better than the others. Get your AI versus human consciousness conundrum and space espionage fix with all the heart and none of the pretension, courtesy of my new favorite people-adverse roboperson. I was relieved to learn it's a series and I will be devastated when I run out of them. Murderbot! I love you.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Becky Chambers
[isbn]
Becky Chambers' vision of a time when humanity takes its place among a bustling galactic diaspora is so hopeful and funny and gentle that it makes the future look good. Far and away from the technology-and-politics hard scifi of my youth, I was tripping over myself to get to the next book in the series just to keep spending time with her characters. A world worth getting lost in!
Recommended by SitaraG
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T H White
[isbn]
A brief obsession with knights, magic, and the round table led me to White's classic and it delivered on every front. His characters are hilarious, tragic, and romantic, the writing is absolutely beautiful, and his creativity breathes new life into all the old Arthurian stories and mythology. Meditative, lyrical, and so warmly written that I laughed and cried in equal measure. Best in front of a fireplace.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Robin Mckinley
[isbn]
O Robin Mckinley, light of my life! This book fully ruined reality for me at 15 and I've reread it obsessively in dark times ever since. If only life were as simple as stepping into your magically imbued spiritual inheritance and going head to head with a demon king...
Recommended by SitaraG
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Elyn Saks
[isbn]
A shining gem of a book. Elyn Saks's memoir about her experience living with schizophrenia is whip smart and delivered with such clear, brutal intelligence and humor that I could barely put it down after picking it up. While somewhat dated in its language by contemporary standards, I was most struck by what remains relevant when it comes to discourse about mental health — the need to be seen, to retain autonomy, to work with people who allow you... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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Jorge Luis Borges
[isbn]
Borges's writing is as labyrinthian as his themes, and his stories have continued to puzzle and delight me since I first read them a decade ago. Fantastical and magical to the max, his characters traverse hexagonal libraries and impossible theoretical worlds, attempt to understand limitless books and find themselves trapped and devastated by their own astounding powers of memorization. Whether you're interested in Borges's vast influences and... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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Hiroko Oyamada and David Boyd
[isbn]
A delicately sinister contemporary parable, we explore Oyamada's Factory through the eyes of three recent employees with three different class and career aspirations. As our main characters trek around the massive corporate complex and try to figure out the purpose of their borderline ridiculous jobs, Oyamada allows us to watch the factory transform into something organic and hungry, with no regard for what it takes in and homogenizes.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Tamsyn Muir
[isbn]
Ever felt disappointed by God, your job, and your love life? Have I got the series for you. In preparation for Nona, Muir's third installment in the Locked Tomb series, I gotta recommend Harrow. This book is the epitome of getting what you want but not the way you want it, and the aftermath of that experience. A brutal reckoning with what has been, can be, and can't be, all woven together with sexy Catholic guilt, Muir's... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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John Crowley
[isbn]
Crowley's sprawling family saga is fantasy maximalism and it's wonderful. We follow average guy Smokey Barnable as he travels on foot to the Edgewood estate and marries into the odd Drinkwater family. What follows is a miasma of malevolent magical bargains, faerie theosophists, star-crossed lovers, fated tarot readings, dysfunctional family, and the elusive future. Dense, romantic, and tragic by turns, Crowley's beautiful prose is a bonus. A... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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Alice Walker
[isbn]
A phenomenal collection of essays on everything from civil rights and the ethics of nuclear warfare to colorism and the necessity of intersectionality. This text is brimming with at least as much personal wisdom as professional, and Walker's critiques of the academy and the lack of both intersectionality and global perspective in American education systems sounds like it could be pulled straight from contemporary discourse. A call for justice... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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Carmen Maria Machado
[isbn]
I've been circling this book for a while, and wow I'm glad I pulled the trigger on it. One of the most unique memoirs I've ever read, Machado's account of her experience in a queer abusive relationship is brutally vulnerable and meticulously researched. Thoughtful, achingly personal, and somehow funny in spite of the subject matter, Machado resurfaces a veritable archive of hushed queer experience and encourages readers to see queer folks as... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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Garth Nix
[isbn]
Talking, possessed cats! A mysterious prophetic destiny! Magic bells that summon the dead! Nix's darkly hypnotic fantasy trilogy has it all. Follow Sabriel in this first installment of the Old Kingdom series as she claims the title of Abhorsen and crosses over death's threshold in order to save her kingdom and herself — as heartfelt as it is provocative, Nix doesn't shy away from hard questions or what lurks in the dark.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Zen Cho
[isbn]
This collection rocketed to the top of my personal favorites list. Malaysian author Zen Cho's stories crackle with wit, history, and some of the most accurate Malay familial dynamics I've ever seen in writing. An anthology that chronicles myriad exchanges and encounters between the living and dead, Cho brings the spirit world and the Malaysian diaspora's religious and cultural history alive. Tender, sly, and totally magical.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Rachel Ingalls and Rivka Galchen
[isbn]
Sweet and heartbreaking, this pretty novella left me dreamy, weepy, and emotionally confused — think Chopin's The Awakening meets The Shape of Water. For fans of beautiful prose, star-crossed lovers, and tragic romance.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Alessandra Lynch
[isbn]
Lynch's devastating collection pulls no punches, in spite of its delicate prose. A fragmented trauma narrative pieced together from the author's own experiences, Lynch forces the reader into a body that feels alien and uninhabitable after the violence enacted upon it. Daylily struggles to process and verbalize her memories as she attempts to normalize, drifting through her own life as a spectator, by turns overwhelmed by rage, numbness, grief,... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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Ann Weil
[isbn]
Lyrical and mysterious, one of my childhood favorites! Michele's peaceful island life is disrupted when three travelers come to Capri in search of the fabled (and potentially cursed) Blue Grotto. Humorous, warm, and thoughtful, you'll want to seek out the grotto yourself by the end of the book.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever
[isbn]
One of the only cookbooks I own that I've actually used cover to cover. Delicious and practical, Bourdain's opinions aren't subtle, but they do encourage you to cook your meals the way you prefer them, no apologies.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Caitlin Doughty
[isbn]
Known for her "Ask a Mortician" web series, Caitlin Doughty's book about her connection to and experiences in crematoriums is a heartfelt and informative foray into the American funeral industry. Slyly humorous and definitely not for the squeamish, Doughty has a lot of cool things to say about confronting American culture's horror of death and thinking about what a good death means for you.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
[isbn]
Set in the PNW's own Cascade Mountains, Tsing's examination of the Matsutake mushroom trade and its far-reaching affects on trade and currency locally and abroad is at once journalistic, scientific, and socially motivated. A fascinating look at how ecosystems emerge and thrive in spite of capitalist excavation, Tsing helps readers imagine a world where life and humanity coexist and even build new value systems together.
Recommended by SitaraG
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Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker
[isbn]
A must-read for any American (or history enthusiast or pirate fan). Rediker and Linebaugh's history of the revolutionary Atlantic is a portrait of resistance and history from the ground up, and their observations on the creation of American infrastructure, the colonization of the Americas, and the creation of class and racial divides has never been more relevant or applicable to our own social and political landscapes. I can't recommend it highly... (read more)
Recommended by SitaraG
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