![]() |
Credit: Pixabay |
To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page!
We’re well into the Holiday Season and the end of the year is coming. Although this year has been one of the most uncertain and scariest ever, the Holidays always bring hope of some sort. Besides, there’s never such a thing as a totally bad year. All years and eras have something good in them. And one of those good things are the best of something of the year. In this case, many blogs and publications over the internet will bring you a list of the best movies of the year or the best books of the year. On December 8th the book recommendation website, GoodReads, brought us the latter through its annual Choice Awards. The best books of 2020 were selected across 20 categories which ranged from general fiction to general non-fiction, from science fiction and fantasy to memoir and biography. Nearly half of these 20 books were speculative fiction or at least related to it.
So, yours truly has listed below the eight books that were speculative in some sense. There was a ninth book that could be considered science fiction but I didn’t list it because it was mostly a humour comic. As much as I’ve been a big reader of comic books since I was five, with few exceptions this blog mostly discusses prose speculative fiction and its movie and TV adaptations. I did list one book of poetry because, for one, the author of it is a big name in science fiction. For another--you’ll find out when you get to it in the list below.
I myself have not read any of these books but many look really good and I’m going to try to read them over the course of the upcoming year. Although all of the books listed below can be considered speculative in genre--science fiction, fantasy or horror--a few were nominated in other genre categories such as general fiction and romance. So along with the book titles and authors, I’m listing the categories the books were nominated in. You’ll find a synopsis for each book at its link.
8 Speculative Fiction Books From the 2020 GoodReads Awards
- “The Midnight Library”, Matt Haig; GoodReads Choice Awards category: Best Fiction
- “House of Earth and Blood”, Sarah J. Maas; GoodReads Choice Awards category: Best Fantasy
- “From Blood and Ash”, Jennifer Armendrout; GoodReads Choice Awards category: Best Romance
- “To Sleep In a Sea of Stars”, Christopher Paolini; GoodReads Choice Awards category: Best Science Fiction
- “Mexican Gothic”, Silvia Moreno-Garcia; GoodReads Choice Awards category: Best Horror
- “Dearly: New Poems”, Margaret Atwood; GoodReads Choice Awards category: Best Poetry: Well, now you know who the big name science fiction author is. Yes, she is also a poet! The other reason I included this book here even though the poems aren’t necessarily speculative in genre: one of the many themes in this collection is zombies.
- “The Queen of Nothing”, Holly Black; GoodReads Choice Awards category: Best Young Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction
- “The Tower of Nero”, Rick Riordan; GoodReads Choice Awards category: Best Middle Grade and Children’s: The fifth and final book of “The Trials of Apollo” series.
Coming Soon
A special Holiday post and Book-To-Movie review are on their way in about the next week or two. Also, I will be offering sign-ups for an email list that I’m trying to get together for a monthly newsletter. Look out for it here at the Fantastic Site or at my Facebook page.
Have you read any of the above books or to?
Until next time . . .
I haven't read any of those either. Obviously people were reading to escape reality this year.
ReplyDeleteIt's nice to see that more people are reading speculative. I can't blame them for wanting to escape the reality of this year.
Delete