My Favorite Books of 2019
This year I read 55 books and a lot of graphic novels. Fortunately, most of them were pretty great, which made it even harder to pick out my five favorite. I gravitated towards a lot of fantasy and sci-fi in 2019 as a nice way to escape or even think about a potentially scarier future. My plan to keep reading primarily female authors also paid off.
In no particular order, here’s the list:
The Starless Sea — Erin Morgenstern
Her first book was great, her second was outstanding.
The Future of Another Timeline — Annalee Newitz
It’s wild that two of my favorite books this year came out near the end of the year. Newitz created a fascinating time-travel technology, with an amazing world. Here’s to the Daughters of Harriet.
The Psychology of Time Travel — Kate Mascarenhas
More queer time travel? Hell yes.
Gideon the Ninth — Tamsyn Muir
Lesbian necromancers in space. Ok, there’s a theme to most of these and it’s around queer ladies and space or time-travel. I’m here for it, and so glad the whole zombie thing is over.
Noumenon — Marina J. Lostetter
Multi-generational spaced exploration? Yes, please.
I did more full-fledged reviews for each of these in the link at the start of this post, though as always my book and film reviews are short because I got my fill of analytical book essays in college.
Stand-out comics
- The whole X-Men relaunch! From Powers of X/House of X to the weekly series like X-Force, I’m stoked to be enjoying the X-Men again.
- Paper Girls & Wicked and Divine: These two series finished strong, and I’m excited to read through them again sometime.
- Die! An amazing series that’s just kicking off. This feels like a fresh take on D&D, so I’ll be glad to read more.
- Shirokuma Cafe: the first series I can actually read in Japanese! This feels huge.
Kindle Oasis
This year I read a few physical books, but by and large I read on my Kindle Oasis. In addition to being great for bathtub reading (hi Japan), the one-handed reading makes laying in bed super comfortable. Plus, I’ve found the Kindle to be a pretty solid place to read manga. I still hope that Amazon actually pushes the envelope on these at some point, but until then, I’ll hold onto this one. If you want to think more about ebooks, this is a great essay.
2020
There are quite a few books in my queue for 2020, and I’m especially excited about a new William Gibson novel! I’ll likely travel a bit more, and as I start to finish up my big kanji learning project, I’ll be able to read more in Japanese as well.