Book Recommendations
The holidays are coming up and as a writer I should spend some time pointing out that whether you celebrate the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod or not books make wonderful gifts. Of course there are books of mine, including a new one, that I would love for people to read, but I thought with this post that I would suggest some books that I really enjoyed reading in the past year, some from the year before as I am perpetually behind, and a few favorites from all time.
First up are some independents. Small publishers and self publishers don’t have the publicity budgets that large publishers do, so some of these may have escaped your attention, but they are excellent:
Pete Aldin’s werewolf novel Black Marks is excellent and an interesting take on the subgenre. For his scifi he writes as Peter J Aldin: check out Exclusion Zone, a military scifi thriller that is exciting from cover to cover.
And at My Back I Always Hear by Scott Nicolay. I could swear this book came out this year. Apparently it came out in 2022, but it is a wonderful collection of stories all of which left me thinking about them long after reading. This is the sort of fiction I read, then dream about, then find myself lost in thought about for days after putting the book down. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Strange is the Night by S.P. Miskowski: Speaking of books that came out earlier but I thought were more recent… this one came out all the way back in 2017 and I read again in 2023. If you haven’t read Miskowski, you should especially her Skillute Cycle. Her stories are eerie and personal, and the Skillute stories do as fine a job at transporting the reader to a fictional place as I’ve ever read.
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman I loved this book so much and am enjoying the series so much. I don’t know why I was reluctant to start it, but it is hilarious and a blast to read. Reading the rest of the series now, just amazingly funny and fun. I’ve read the first two of these books recently and I can’t wait to get to the rest.
Glass House by Paul Jessup. One of the most interesting and intense haunting stories I’ve ever read. Each chapter is short but so well crafted that it feels like each chapter could be read separately and make for solid flash fiction.
Whenever recommending independently published books, I always recommend the Chuggie series by Brent Kelley. It’s a fantasy series with a god of thirst that’s inspired by Tom Waits.
Fantasy: NK Jemison, I think a case can be made for Jemison being the best living fantasist, or at least in the running along with Neil Gaiman and others. Her Broken Earth series won all the awards and deservedly so. Also her book, The City We Became is one of my favorite novels from recent years.
Legends and Lattes from last year as well as this year’s Bookshops and Bonedust both by Travis Baldree are both wonderful fantasy stories with a timely and important take on the genre. In the first novel, Vivian an orc wants to hang up her sword to open a coffee shop. As the story goes on she has to find non sword means of dealing with issues that in her past would have been solved with less effort via the sword. Bookshops and Bonedust is a prequel, but there too Vivian uses the sword less than one might expect. Both books are a welcome escapism with a message of kindness and understanding.
SciFi: For some fun scifi, check out Tony Peak’s Redshift Runners series. It’s excellent space opera, but also check out Beethoven’s Tenth, which is arguably my favorite time travel story I’ve read, and for some reason not a lot of people have read it.
Espionage: Slow Horses by Mick Herron is I think the best spy series since George Smiley, but it also extremely funny. The character Jackson Lamb is one of the best all time characters in any medium for being capable, funny, and an utter irredeemable bastard.
Comics and Graphic Novels:
Wonder Woman Historia by Kelly Sue DeConnick. This not only had great storytelling, it is one of the most visually interesting books I’ve read ever. I can think of maybe one or two graphic novels that I would rate in the same league.
The Wrong Earth by Tom Peyer. This series is my favorite comic series since Saga. The Wrong Earth begins with two versions of Earth: Earth Alpha and Earth Omega. In Earth Alpha, Dragonflyman and his sidekick Stinger foil the schemes of a campy array of villains. In Earth Omega, Dragonfly combats a grim group of similar but much darker villains. The heroes get switched across worlds and neither world is ready for them. As the series progresses across multiple collections, we learn more about these characters as well as their versions from the other versions of Earth in between alpha and omega.
Collections and Anthologies:
Fantasmagoriana Deluxe from editors Eric Guignard and Leslie Klinger is a treasure trove of story telling in one of the most fantastic looking books I’ve seen. Between it and the Wonder Woman book, this has been a great year for visually appealing books. Fantasmagoriana scratches the itches of both my interests in story telling as well as in European history and literature. Anyone who’s ever been curious as to what Mary Shelley read to inspire her to write Frankenstein or Dr. Polidori read before writing The Vampyre, should check this out.
Non Fiction:
Set The Night On Fire: L.A. In the Sixties by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener: Not only is it a massive history of LA in the 60s, it’s also a good reminder that California once had its own fascist dickbag governor trying to root out his political enemies from the universities. His name was Ronald Reagan, and he was a terrible governor before going on to be a terrible president who would cause more lasting harm to the country and world than any other 20th century president.
Iron and Blood by Peter H Wilson: This is a huge military history of Germany, the German people’s, central Europe, etc, from the late middle ages through to the modern era. I read this initially because I have a book series I’m working on developing set in the early modern era that goes through to WWI. Reading this got me all the more interested and now I’m also thinking I want to write some RPG sourcebooks for those eras as well.
The Big Picture by Sean Carroll and Through A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman are my all time favorite non fiction books. The Big Picture is a book about science and Through a Distant Mirror is a history book about the 14th century. Both books are well written and enjoyable to follow and both cover subject matter that I think is appealing.
Gamebooks: I was lucky enough to get one book from MCDM Studios this year with another on the way. Flee Mortals is their monster book, and it’s frankly better and more useful than the standard Monster Manual and is a great source of inspiration if you’re going to DM D&D, write fantasy, or just sit back and imagine these creatures and the evil that they get up to. I can’t wait for their new game coming soon from this group.
Cookbooks: I hate recipes in cookbooks. Fortunately Thug Kitchen seems to realize this and swears almost as much as I do when I’m cooking, and does so while providing recipes for vegan meals, written by someone who has clearly had to tolerate reading awfully written recipe books before. Vegan Cooking For Two has proved helpful in the last year as well as I’ve had to resist my tendency to cook as though I’m expecting a regiment for dinner (to be fair, I learned to cook from my dad who in turn learned to cook in the army, so portion control isn’t a natural ability for me.)
Whatever you choose to read in the coming year I hope that you enjoy it.
