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The Book Nook Celebrates Sci-Fi and Fantasy (8/25)

Welcome to the Book Nook! The weekly thread for all book nerds on The Avocado. This is the place to talk about books you’re currently reading, discuss genres, ask for recommendations, and post serious literary criticism.

Last week NPR published a list of what they view are the 50 best sci-fi and fantasy books (and book series) of the past decade. I tend to take these lists with a grain of salt for the usual reasons: there’s undoubtedly a great book left out, or something I immensely disliked that’s included. Nevertheless, I thought it would be nice to post the list, as there are plenty of good titles on it. (Note: the list is in no real order, and divided on the NPR site into categories which I didn’t include for brevity’s sake, you can view the categories here).

  • The Imperial Radch Trilogy – Ann Leckie
  • The Dead Djinn Universe (series) – P. Djéli Clarke
  • The Age of Madness Trilogy – Joe Abercrombie
  • The Green Bone Saga – Fonda Lee
  • The Expanse – James S.A. Corey
  • The Daevabad Trilogy – S.A. Chakraborty
  • Teixcalaan (series) – Arkady Martine
  • The Thessaly Trilogy – Jo Walton
  • Shades of Magic Trilogy – V.E. Schwab
  • The Divine Cities Trilogy – Robert Jackson Bennett
  • The Workwood Trilogy – Tade Thompson
  • Black Sun (series) – Rebecca Roanhorse
  • Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
  • Circe – Madeline Miller
  • Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno Garcia
  • The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories – Ken Liu
  • Spinning Silver – Naomi Novik
  • Exhalation (short stories) – Ted Chiang
  • Olondria (series) – Sofia Samatar
  • Her Body and Other Parties (short stories) – Carmen Maria Machado
  • The Buried Giant – Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Radiance – Catheryne M. Valente
  • The Changeling – Victor LaValle
  • Wayfarers (series) – Becky Chambers
  • Binti (series) – Nnedi Okorafor
  • Lady Astronaut (series) – Mary Robinette Kowal
  • Children of Time (duology) – Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Wayward Children (series) – Seanan McGuire
  • The Space Between Worlds – Micaiah Johnson
  • Black Leopard, Red Wolf – Marlon James
  • Southern Reach (series) – Jeff Vandermeer
  • The Echo Wife – Sarah Gailey
  • the Locked Tomb (series) –  Tamsyn Muir
  • Remembrance of Earth’s Past – Liu Cixin
  • Machineries of Empire (series) – Yoon Ha Lee
  • The Broken Earth (series) – N.K. Jemisin
  • Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel
  • This Is How You Lose the Time War – Max Gladstone
  • The Poppy War Trilogy – R.F. Kuang
  • The Masquerade (series) – Seth Dickinson
  • An Unkindness of Ghosts – Rivers Solomon
  • The Bird King – G. Willow Wilson
  • American War – Omar El Akkad
  • Riot Baby – Tochi Onyebuchi
  • On Fragile Waves – E. Lily Yu
  • the Goblin Emperor – Katherine Addison
  • Murderbot (series) – Martha Wells
  • The Interdependency (series) – John Scalzi
  • The Martian – Andy Weir
  • Sorcerer to the Crown/The True Queen – Zen Cho

There’s a few of the Avocado usual suspects (Station Eleven, The Wayfarers series, Piranesi, obviously). Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties is probably my favorite out of all of these (that I read anyway). Highly recommended to anyone who’s looking for some horror stories to read, what with Halloween season coming up soon. Are there titles in this list that you feel deserve more praise? Or any big omissions? Let us know!

I would like this thread to continue to be a NO GIF/YouTube/social media embed zone as much as possible. An occasional exception would be fine with me, but let us use our words as often as possible.