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Books

I have loved books all of my life. I read across just about every genre — fantasy, sci-fi, nonfiction, cozy mystery, romance — and I'm always in the middle of a few at once. The following are some of my favorite and recommended reads from the past few years, along with some of the people, sites, and tools I use to find and keep track of what to read next.

Book Websites

News, Reviews & Community

  • Book Riot — Book news, lists, and recommendations across every genre
  • LitHub — Literary news, essays, and excerpts from a wide range of publishers and writers
  • Tor.com / Reactor — SFF news, short fiction, and deep-dive articles from the Tor Books community
  • r/Fantasy — Huge, active community for fantasy recommendations and discussion
  • r/books — General book discussion covering every genre
  • Fantasy Book Review — Reviews and recommendations focused specifically on fantasy
  • Internet Speculative Fiction Database — The definitive SFF bibliography; awards, covers, and publication history

Non-corporate Bookstores

  • Bookshop.org — Physical books & ebooks; proceeds are split with independent bookstores instead of going to a single retailer
  • Powell's Books — Legendary independent bookstore in Portland; physical books and ebooks, new & used
  • Libro.fm — Audiobooks; membership proceeds support the local indie bookstore of your choice
  • Downpour — DRM-free audiobooks, independent of Amazon/Audible
  • Better World Books — Used physical books; funds literacy nonprofits and library programs
  • ThriftBooks — Cheap used physical books, huge selection
  • Weightless Books — DRM-free ebooks, especially strong for SFF short fiction magazines and small presses

Free Books

  • Project Gutenberg — Free ebooks of classic literature; massive archive of public domain books
  • Standard Ebooks — Free, carefully typeset & proofread public domain ebooks; much nicer formatting than most Gutenberg files
  • Open Library — Borrow ebooks from the Internet Archive; one book at a time, like a real library
  • Internet Archive — Massive scanned book collection, including many out-of-print and rare titles
  • HathiTrust — Huge digital library of scanned texts, strong for older & academic works
  • ManyBooks — Free ebook library pulling from Gutenberg and other public domain sources, with better browsing/filtering
  • LibriVox — Free public domain audiobooks read by volunteers; great for classics on the go

Book Videos — okay not books but some fun stuff about books or book adjacent

Nonfiction

Stephen Hawking

  • A Brief History of Time — His landmark 1988 bestseller explaining cosmology, black holes, and the nature of time to a general audience
  • A Briefer History of Time (with Leonard Mlodinow) — A shorter, more accessible rewrite of the original for readers who bounced off the first one
  • The Universe in a Nutshell — Follow-up covering string theory, supergravity, and the search for a unified theory, with heavy use of illustrations
  • The Grand Design (with Leonard Mlodinow) — Argues that M-theory can explain the universe's origin without need of a creator; sparked plenty of debate
  • Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays — A collection of essays and lectures, more personal and less technical than his other work
  • My Brief History — A short memoir covering his life, illness, and career
  • Brief Answers to the Big Questions — Posthumously published; his final thoughts on the universe's biggest open questions

Bruce Schneier

  • Rewiring Democracy — How AI will transform politics, government, and citizenship
  • A Hacker's Mind — How the powerful bend society's rules, and how to bend them back
  • Click Here to Kill Everybody — Internet safety risks in a hyper-connected world of smart devices
  • Data and Goliath — Corporate and government surveillance and the privacy trade-offs we make
  • Liars and Outliers — How society builds and maintains trust across institutions
  • Beyond Fear — Thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world
  • Applied Cryptography — The comprehensive technical survey of cryptographic algorithms and protocols

Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Essays: First & Second Series — Self-Reliance, Nature, and the foundations of American transcendentalism; ideas that hold up

Fiction

Fantasy & Adventure

  • The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny — Ten books split into two arcs: the Corwin Cycle and the Merlin Cycle. Amber is the one true world and everything else — including our Earth — is just a Shadow of it. The royal family can walk through Shadow, shifting reality around them as they travel. Corwin wakes up with no memory and has to piece together who he is while navigating a family full of scheming immortal siblings all after the throne. Great magic system, wild world-building.

  • Earthsea Series by Ursula K. Le Guin — One of the great fantasy worlds; follows wizard Ged across a vast archipelago; quiet, wise storytelling

  • Fablehaven by Brandon Mull — A hidden preserve for mythical creatures; wonderful YA fantasy that doesn't talk down to readers

  • Forgotten Realms / Drizzt Do'Urden by R.A. Salvatore — A dark elf ranger who refuses the cruelty of his society; decades of compelling adventures

  • Celebromancy by Michael R. Underwood — Urban fantasy where fandom and pop culture are the source of magic; clever and fun

  • Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss — Awesome storytelling with a great magic system about an extremely gifted boy growing up. The third and final book is still forthcoming.

  • Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey — Starting with Dragonflight; humans telepathically bonded to dragons defend the planet Pern from deadly falling spores called Thread; blends fantasy trappings with a science fiction core (Pern is a lost human colony)

  • My Vampire System by JKManga — Scifi about a boy being drafted into the military and gaining a unknown power that turns him into a vampire with a video game like UI that he calls up by thinking. It takes place in the larger Talenverse universe in the 26th century. https://my-vampire-system.fandom.com/wiki/My_Vampire_System

Steven Brust

  • Vlad Taltos (17 novels) — High fantasy on the planet Dragaera following Vlad, a human assassin living among a near-immortal aristocratic majority; each book is named after a Dragaeran House and experiments with a different narrative style; one of the great long-running fantasy series

  • Khaavren Romances (5 books) — Set centuries before Vlad's era, written as in-world historical fiction by the fictional scholar Paarfi of Roundwood; a deliberate homage to Alexandre Dumas with elaborate, witty prose

  • The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, The Viscount of Adrilankha trilogy

  • The Incrementalists (co-authored with Skyler White) — Contemporary fantasy about a secret society of people who share memories across reincarnations and nudge history toward the good; The Incrementalists, The Skill of Our Hands

Standalones & Co-authored

  • Freedom & Necessity (with Emma Bull) — Epistolary historical fantasy set in 1840s England; politics, magic, and revolution
  • The Gypsy (with Megan Lindholm) — Mythic fantasy weaving the Romany Gypsy King legend into modern life
  • Brokedown Palace — A Dragaera prequel rooted in Hungarian folklore

Jim Butcher

  • The Dresden Files — Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard and private investigator; noir detective fiction meets magic, 17 books and counting

    • Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril ... through Peace Talks, Battle Ground, Twelve Months (upcoming)

  • Codex Alera — Six-book completed epic blending Roman political intrigue with elemental magic; starts with Furies of Calderon

  • The Cinder Spires — Steampunk airship adventure; The Aeronaut's Windlass and The Olympian Affair

James J. Butcher (Jim Butcher's son)

  • The Unorthodox Chronicles — Urban fantasy set in Boston following Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby, a witch who washed out of the magical law enforcement program, navigating a world split between ordinary "Usuals" and paranormal "Unorthodox" citizens

  • Dead Man's Hand (2022) — Debut; Grimsby's former mentor is murdered and he's the prime suspect

  • Long Past Dues (2023)

  • Cold Iron Task (2025)

  • Grim Folk Tale (2025)

Larry Niven (Solid Science Fiction)

Known Space — The sprawling future-history universe underpinning most of his work; alien species, faster-than-light travel, and big engineering ideas

  • Ringworld — A crew explores an artificial ring-shaped world orbiting a star; Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, Ringworld's Children
  • Fleet of Worlds — Expands Known Space with the Puppeteer civilization; Fleet of Worlds, Juggler of Worlds and more
  • Protector, A Gift from Earth, Neutron Star — Standalone Known Space novels

The Moties (with Jerry Pournelle) — First contact with a deeply alien species that has a dark secret; The Mote in God's Eye, The Gripping Hand

The State — Far-future Earth and the politics of survival; A World Out of Time, The Integral Trees, The Smoke Ring

The Heorot Series (with Jerry Pournelle & Steven Barnes) — Colonists on an alien world face a terrifying predator; The Legacy of Heorot, Beowulf's Children

Collaborations with Jerry Pournelle — Disaster and survival epics: Lucifer's Hammer (comet impact), Footfall (alien invasion)

Kim Harrison — The Hollows

The Hollows (also known as the Rachel Morgan series, 18 books) — Set in an alternate Cincinnati where supernatural beings — witches, vampires, werewolves, pixies — live openly alongside humans after a bioengineered plague called "The Turn" forced them out of hiding. Rachel Morgan is a bounty-hunting witch who leaves the government runner agency and sets up shop with a vampire and a pixy. Urban fantasy crime drama with great world-building, sharp humor, and relationships that evolve across the whole series.

  • Dead Witch Walking through Demon's Bluff (2024) — one long continuous story; best read in order

Naomi Novik

  • A Deadly Education (young adult) — El attends the Scholomance, a school for magically gifted kids with no teachers, no rules other then survive, and monsters lurking around every corner waiting to devour students before they can graduate; dark academy fantasy with sharp wit and a prickly, unforgettable narrator; The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves complete the trilogy

Cozy Mystery & Cozy Fantasy

C.J. Archer

Victorian-era mystery and paranormal fiction; sharp writing, satisfying plots, and supernatural threads woven through historical settings.

  • Glass and Steele (12 books) — India Steele is a watchmaker who unknowingly weaves time magic into her craft; Matt Glass arrives from America with a failing heart, searching for a magical cure; Victorian London mystery with romance and a ticking clock
  • The Ministry of Curiosities (8 books) — Charlie Holloway is an orphaned girl who can communicate with ghosts; she joins a secret government ministry investigating supernatural crimes across Victorian London
  • The Emily Chambers Spirit Medium trilogy — Emily has the gift of speaking with the dead and is drawn into danger when a handsome spirit refuses to cross over
  • The Freak House trilogy — Victorian Gothic; a group of misfits with unusual abilities brought together in a remote estate, each hiding secrets

Odette C. Bell

Prolific space opera and paranormal fiction; fast-paced adventures with strong heroines

Sarah Rosett

Cozy mysteries with well-drawn characters and an eye for the details that make a place feel real

Fun Romances

  • Zodiac Academy series by Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti — Twin sisters find out they're fae royalty and get thrown into a magic school where the four most powerful students immediately decide to make their lives hell. Dark academy vibes, zodiac-based magic powers, enemies-to-lovers romance. Total guilty pleasure series that's hard to put down.

Rebecca Yarros

The Empyrean Series — Set at Basgiath War College where the most gifted riders bond with dragons. High stakes, brutal training, and a romance that runs alongside a war that's bigger than anyone admits. The magic system and world-building get richer with every book.

  • Fourth Wing (2023) — Violet Sorrengail is pushed into the dangerous Rider Quadrant instead of the Scribe Hall; bonds with not one but two dragons
  • Iron Flame (2023) — The secrets uncovered in book one reshape everything; the war and the stakes both escalate
  • Onyx Storm (2025) — The third book; the conflict goes beyond Navarre's borders
  • Untitled Book 4 (September 2025)

Flight & Glory Series — Military romance; emotionally intense stories centered on soldiers, family, and the cost of service

Ruby Darkrose

"Hybrid Emotion Storyteller" — stories paired with music, meant to be felt as much as read. Adult romance and emotionally intense fiction.

  • hyperfollow — Her music and story hub (this pre-dated her website)

  • The Kimberly Series — Longer-form narratives: The Stranger Behind the Mask, The Call of Arabic Desire, The Final Breath

  • Kimberly Short Stories — Standalone short fiction: Craving a Stranger, One Last Tease, Ride the Biker

Sherrilyn Kenyon

  • Dark-Hunter Universe (my favorite of hers) — The sprawling main series; paranormal light romance and urban fantasy featuring immortal warriors, vampires, were-creatures, and dream-hunters protecting humanity; dozens of interconnected novels each centered on a different character's romance

  • The League — Sci-fi romance spanning generations (Nemesis Rising, Nemesis Legacy, Nemesis Dynasty); futuristic worldbuilding with assassins, outlaws, and found family across 14+ novels

  • Chronicles of Nick — YA prequel series (8 books) set in the Dark-Hunter universe, following Nick Gautier's origin story; paranormal coming-of-age set in New Orleans

  • Belador (co-authored with Dianna Love) — Paranormal urban fantasy with magical worldbuilding; first four books co-written

  • Lords of Avalon (as Kinley MacGregor) — Historical paranormal fantasy rooted in Arthurian legend

YouTubers / Podcasters

  • Book Riot Podcast — Wide-ranging book news, reviews, and reading culture
  • What Should I Read Next? — Anne Bogel matches readers to their next favorite book based on what they've loved
  • The Stacks — In-depth literary conversations with authors and readers; thoughtful and wide-ranging
  • Currently Reading — Two friends sharing what they're reading each week; relaxed and honest

Classics

Homer

  • The Iliad — The final weeks of the Trojan War; Achilles' rage, honor, and the brutal cost of glory
  • The Odyssey — Odysseus' decade-long journey home after the war; monsters, gods, and a wife holding off suitors

Thorstein Veblen

  • The Theory of the Leisure Class — The 1899 book that coined "conspicuous consumption"; a sharp, still-relevant look at status, wealth, and wasteful spending

Bram Stoker

  • Dracula — The vampire novel that shaped the genre, told through letters, diary entries, and news clippings

H.G. Wells

  • The Invisible Man — A scientist discovers invisibility and slowly unravels into paranoia and violence; early sci-fi with a sharp look at power and isolation
More places to find me
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