Skip to main content

Almost Half of the 2020 GoodReads Choice Awards Winners Are SF/F

A werewolf in a profile position with a full moon in the background.
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 


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 . . . 





Labels:

Comments

  1. Alex J. CavanaughDecember 13, 2020 at 9:22 AM

    I haven't read any of those either. Obviously people were reading to escape reality this year.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Steven Arellano Rose Jr.December 14, 2020 at 7:22 AM

      It'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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least...
3 comments
Read more

Book-To-Movie: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Black Cat'

Credit: Wikimedia Commons It's another fourth Monday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie (BTM), we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. A few years back, we had a BTM for Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat" and its movie adaptation. However, the movie we reviewed was actually a segment in Roger Corman’s anthology film, "Tales of Terror", which features three of Poe's short stories, including "Black Cat". And I'll tell you now, I liked that version far more than the version that we're going to review today which is the 1934 Universal adaptation starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. I like Corman's version better mostly because it stays more faithful to the original short story than Universal's does. However, even though Universal's "Black Cat", directed by Edgar Ulmer, strays (excuse the pun) far from Poe's short stor...
2 comments
Read more

Book-To-Movie: ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’

Both the 1959 and the 2008 movies based on Jules Verne's novel, "Journey to the Center of the Earth", feature terrifying monsters such as the ones here in this illustration from an early edition of the book. Credit: Édouard Riou/ Wikimedia Commons   Warning: This review may contain spoilers. As I said last post , I’ve postponed the month’s Book-To-Movie review from last week to this week. For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. And this weekend’s review is of Jules Verne’s novel, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and its movie adaptations. There have been several movies based on this novel that was originally published in Paris in 1864 (as “Voyage au Centre de la Terre”). However, most of them have been either made for TV or video. Because I believe movies are best when made for the big screen, I am going to review the theatrical films in which there have been two: the 195...
4 comments
Read more