2019 reading!

I wanted to do a top 10, and then I was indecisive, so here's a top 4(ish) of a few categories and a top 10 of fiction books! this is almost entirely in chronological order, so don't take the presented order as indicative of ranking. (I meant it about both enjoying hyping up things I like and rambling a lot, okay. here goes.)

(Zoë, I counted picture books and graphic novels separately! and... really really wished I had kept track of graphic novels, because I know I read more good ones than I remember this year :soy: also I did not know there was a Kyoshi graphic novel and I am psyched about it!!)



Misc. – I didn't track graphic novels or short stories (and regretted it; lesson for 2020!), so I'm not doing full lists, but here are a few I wanted an excuse to recommend (with links to where they can be read or listened to online, where available!):

• On a Sunbeam (Tillie Walden)
  
  in the present, a small crew travels space to repair abandoned buildings; in the past, two girls fall in love at boarding school, only to be abruptly—and, they believe, permanently—separated. when Mia finds out that her new crewmates have a connection to Grace, she asks them for help reaching her again, even if only for the chance to say goodbye properly. gorgeous and at times surreal scenery, people making hard choices about what they want to do and who they want to be, and warmly emotional storytelling with happy endings.
  
  
• Mother Tongues (S. Qiouyi Lu)
  
  a mother decides whether to sell her ability to speak Mandarin to pay for her daughter's education. this made me bawl and I recommend it pretty much unilaterally but especially recommend it if stories about diaspora punch you in the heart.
  
  
• Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn (Merc Fenn Wolfmoor)
  
  a spaceship relearns how to be a person, adopts a family, and struggles between following protocol and doing the right thing. I debated whether to allow myself to rec one author on multiple lists (spoiler alert you'll see Wolfmoor again) but this story made my heart very soft so there.
  
  
• The Ghosts of Europa Will Keep You Trapped in a Prison You Make for Yourself (Matt Dovey)
  
  scientists studying a viral outbreak use "ghosts"—holograms built from captured neural activity—of their fellow scientists to gain insight into what caused their deaths. read this if you have feelings about the tribute holograms. just trust me.
  
  
• Burn the Ships (Alberto Yáñez)
  
  I can break the top four format immediately because this makes four short stories, right? okay cool good, because this story deserves a spot. "Burn the Ships" is about grief, sacrifice, magic, and indigenous rebellion against European invaders, and is heavily informed by Mexican and Jewish history and folklore. this was far and away my favorite piece in Nisi Shawl's New Suns.
  

Nonfiction

• Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts From the First Century to 1969 (eds. Noam Sienna and Judith Plaskow)
  
  exactly what is says on the tin, with introductions to every text that provide some historical context and textual analysis. you can start at the front and read straight through in chronological order, but there are also some suggested reading lists in the back if you want to focus on a specific topic (ex. relationships between women or trans themes). the collection is good; the introductions are fantastic, and kick this to top-of-the-list status.
  
  
• Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (eds. Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane)
  
  an anthology of essays from thirty authors, this is a snapshot of some of the incredible variety of experience in being nonbinary. presentation varies—some pieces are fairly straightforward, some are more artistic; sometimes they discuss gender as a concept directly, sometimes they discuss how being nonbinary intersects with other identities (including class, race/ethnicity, age, and ability), sometimes they're big-picture, sometimes they're snippets of daily life—but they're all autobiographical and sincere. a few of them made me cry a lot, but in a good way.
  
  
• All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism (eds. X. Z. Lydia Brown, E. Ashkenazy, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu)
  
  an anthology organized by the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network, primarily of essays/memoirs but with some poetry, visual art, and prose, covering topics from activism to personal anecdotes about daily life to racism and ableism in educational and medical systems to finding—and, where one can't yet be found, building—community. all of the sixty-one contributors are autistic people of color, and many of the pieces discuss how their experiences with those identities intertwine not only with each other—in, for example, in increased risk of police brutality, white educators dismissing expressions of difficulty as behavioral problems, and how coming from a cultural background othered by the mainstream culture of where you live complicates what neurodiversity looks like for you and how the people around you respond—but also with factors and identities such as gender, other disabilities, orientation, religion, and class. this is a really, really important collection, and has become my first go-to recommendation for people who want to read work about autism by autistic authors.
  
  
• Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (Sabrina Strings)
  
  an examination of the development of anti-fat ideas and how they're intertwined with the history of antiblackness, beauty ideals built around white supremacy, and the construction of race as a concept. this book is definitely academic, but written with thorough enough historical context (at both the big-picture scale and the individual biography scale) to make the material accessible to someone not familiar with any particular person, theory, or time period being discussed. it's a hard read sometimes—be prepared (as you would expect) for extensive discussion of (primarily though not exclusively antiblack) racism and slavery, as well as discussion of fad diets (including extreme restricted eating)—but one with an important topic and a cleanly organized, convincingly presented argument.
  

Picture Books

• From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (Kai Cheng Thom, Wai-Yant Li, Kai Yun Ching)
  
  (yes, the poet Kai Cheng Thom!) a shapeshifting child's mother reassures them that whoever and whatever they are—flower, star, bird, fish, boy, girl, none of the above—and even if other children have trouble understanding them, she will always love and believe in them. whimsical, charming, and emotionally lovely, with softly colored and imaginative art.
  
  
• When Aidan Became a Brother (Kyle Lukoff, Kaylani Juanita)
  
  Aidan, finding out that his parents are expecting a new baby, throws himself into preparing to be a big brother. this is sweet and vibrantly illustrated, and the narration approaches gender with nuance—this was the first place I saw someone nail the feeling of talking about an upcoming baby when you're trans and you know people have to call the kid something but the last thing you want is for a child to feel the way you feel when you're misgendered—but manages to do so in a cheerful and approachable way.
  
  
• Mommy's Khimar (Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow, Ebony Glenn)
  
  a young girl plays with her mother's khimars, making herself a shooting star, a superhero, and a queen with a bright yellow scarf. everything about the narration and illustrations in this book radiates unbridled and unabashed cheer, whether the protagonist is playing alone or interacting with her parents, her grandmother, or the community at her mosque. seriously, pick this up sometime when you just want a reason to smile, I was grinning the whole way through.
  
  
• Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth (Oliver Jeffers) [reread]
  
  a tour book about Earth, its surface and depths and sky and solar system, and the humans and other animals who inhabit it. I ran into this while looking for something for Everly (<3) and now I come back to it every now and then when I need a moment with something heartfelt, gentle, and thoughtful. I just find it a very soothing read? "When I'm not around, you can always ask someone else. You're never alone on Earth." (<3)
  

Poetry – figuring out how to meaningfully review poetry is new to me and is delaying this list, so for now I'm just yanking excerpts of the books' own official blurbs!

• Bright Raft in the Afterweather (Jennifer Elise Foerster)
  
  Foerster takes the reader on a solitary journey to the edges of the continents of mind and time to discover what makes us human. Along the way, the author surveys the intersection between natural landscapes and the urban world, baring parallels to the conflicts between Native American peoples and Western colonizers, and considering how imagination and representation can both destroy and remake our worlds.
  
  
• Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience (eds. Patrice Vecchione, Alyssa Raymond)
  
  With authenticity, integrity, and insight, this collection of poems addresses the many issues confronting first- and second- generation young adult immigrants and refugees, such as cultural and language differences, homesickness, social exclusion, human rights, racism, stereotyping, and questions of identity. Poems by Elizabeth Acevedo, Erika L. Sánchez, Samira Ahmed, Chen Chen, Ocean Vuong, Fatimah Asghar, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Bao Phi, Kaveh Akbar, Hala Alyan, and Ada Limón, among others, encourage readers to honor their roots as well as explore new paths, offering empathy and hope for those who are struggling to overcome discrimination. Many of the struggles immigrant and refugee teens face head-on are also experienced by young people everywhere as they contend with isolation, self-doubt, confusion, and emotional dislocation.
  
  
• Blue Horses Rush in (Luci Tapahonso)
  
  Many of these stories were originally told in Navajo, taking no longer than ten minutes in the telling. "Yet, in recreating them, it is necessary to describe the land, the sky, the light, and other details of time and place," writes Tapahonso. "In this way, I attempt to create and convey the setting for the oral text. In writing, I revisit the place or places concerned and try to bring the reader to them, thereby enabling myself and other Navajos to sojourn mentally and emotionally in our home, Dinétah."
  

Fiction

• So You Want to be a Robot and Other Stories (Merc Fenn Wolfmoor)
  
  (may be found under their previous publishing name, A. Merc Rustad.) collection of speculative fiction short stories ranging from the sort-of-title story about a person falling in love with a robot while trying to learn to become one, to one about a personless shadow navigating an extended metaphor for depression enchanted garden to get to the shadowless sorcerer they fell in love with, to one about the ghost of a dog holding on until she can say goodbye to her dad. they're incredibly varied, but tied together by a sort of whimsical sense of worldbuilding, a belief that people tend to do their best to be good to each other, and Wolfmoor more or less going "I'm a trans autistic author and I'm going to let characters like me have the same types of genre adventures that cis allistic people get to have." this book means a lot to me in ways I have trouble describing other than with a capital-I Important and a lot of waving.
  
  
• Wayfarers (series, of which Record of a Spaceborn Few is the third book) (Becky Chambers)
  
  in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the mismatched crew of the old spaceship the Wayfarer have their internally-chaotic but steady daily life interrupted by a job offer: building a hyperspace tunnel through contested space. in A Closed and Common Orbit, an AI who has recently moved from a spaceship to an artificial human body in a place where AIs are not allowed to be people and a clone who escaped from the factory where she grew up enslaved figure out—apart and together—who they are and what they want out of the lives they're learning to build. in Record of a Spaceborn Few, the descendants of the last humans to leave Earth struggle to decide, in the wake of a disaster that shakes their community, what their heritage means to them and whether to remain in the generation ship that has been their home for centuries. Planet may give some helpful context for the later books, but any of the three can stand alone. read Wayfarers—any of them, all of them—for spaceships, AIs, questions about personhood (for both AI and organic characters) and people deciding who and what they want to be, imaginative worldbuilding (with aliens who aren't just Slightly Weird Humans I Guess), found family in spades, and an outlook that sees daily life as joyful and worth living and people as ultimately inclined toward helping one another.
  
  
• Imperial Radch (series) (Ann Leckie)
  
  a person who is/was/is also a spaceship embarks on a mission to take down an ancient military empire with her own hands. Breq is furious and brave and often harsh and sometimes kind and has an unshakable sense of justice and I'm in love with her. (she also doesn't have any idea how the hell a gender works—literally, the Radchai do not do gender at all and Breq finds the whole idea sort of baffling—which is very relatable.) Ancillary Justice (the first book) shifts between time periods and deals with complicated political machinations, and could have been incredibly confusing, if not for the fact that Leckie is a good enough writer to pull it off.
  
  
• Murderbot (series) (Martha Wells)
  
  anxious self-hacked security bot would really, really love to watch soap operas in peace, but all these dramatic events and some kind of gross ""having feelings about people"" nonsense keep getting in the way. these are novellas, so quick reads (though there's a full-length novel coming this year! heck yeah!), but they also repeatedly socked me in the emotions. read for hating on corporations, a protagonist who gets dragged kicking and screaming into caring about people and being cared about, and the line "And now I knew why I hadn't wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person."
  
  
• A Madness of Angels (Kate Griffin)
  
  Matthew Swift wakes up two years after his own death to find nearly all of his old friends missing or dead and his own supposed murder an unsolved mystery. this isn't a perfect book—there's an uncomfortable strand of ableism re: a specific antagonist's motivations, and the pacing can feel a bit bogged down sometimes—but it's a compelling one. Matthew flickers between first person singular and plural for reasons that become clear partway into the book, the magic system is fascinating and vividly described, and when the adventure gets going it really gets going. the whole book is also an unabashed love letter to the sprawling, tangled, vibrant, messy life inherent to cities, and I love it for that. A Madness of Angels is the first book in a quartet, but since I've only read the first two, I'm specifically recommending the first book instead of the series as a whole—the second was also pretty good, though.
  
  
• This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone)
  
  two women on opposing sides of a sprawling war across time begin to write letters to one another as battlefield taunts and, among other impossible and dangerous feats, end up falling in love. this book is bizarre as hell but equally beautiful, with gorgeous imagery and two protagonists who have done terrible things but want to make the best choices they can with dangerous and vicious powers at their heels. the prose is quite flowery, so if you don't have a lot of patience for that this may not be for you but if you love it you won't want to put it down. also, the afterward made me cry, which is entirely unfair.
  
  
• Broken Earth (series) (N.K. Jemisin)
  
  Essun, an orogene in hiding from the orders who enslave people with her ability to manipulate geological structures and seismic energy, comes home to learn that her husband killed their son and vanished with their daughter, Nassun. as the latest in a millennia-long series of apocalypses begins, Essun sets out from the town where she thought she had finally found safety and built a life to find and protect Nassun. nothing I can say would do justice to how intricate and tightly woven the characterization, worldbuilding, and plot of this series are, but not a piece is out of place and every character is painfully, realistically, beautifully nuanced. this is a series about personal and intergenerational trauma, slavery and empire, the ways family can both anchor and hurt us, legacies and the necessity of facing the ugly parts of your own past, refusing to believe that we can't build a better world, and the incomprehensible scale of geologic time; it is also a series about societal oppression that refuses to use oppression of orogenes as an artificially simple stand-in for racism and features a predominantly black cast (and is written by an author who is herself black). it made my heart ache for characters I thought I could not be convinced to remotely care about and made me angry at characters I loved even as I understood their choices, and I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time. also, it shifts between first, second, and third-person narration, which I just think is really cool.
  
  for kicks, have a couple of my favorite lines from The Stone Sky, the third book:
  
  But for a society build on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.
  
  and
  
  "I think," Hoa says slowly, "that if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back."
  
  
• Planet Earth Is Blue (Nicole Panteleakos)
  
  after her big sister Bridget goes missing, twelve-year-old Nova finds herself alone in a new foster home and school, slowly making new friends and bonding with her foster parents but struggling to make herself understood by teachers who underestimate her abilities because she's autistic and mostly nonspeaking. the biggest thing keeping her spirits up: the upcoming Challenger launch, which Bridget promised they would watch together because they both love space. I read this in a couple hours, cried through half of it, and spent the rest of the week thinking about it.
  
  
• Pet (Akwaeke Emezi)
  
  Jam, a girl growing up in a town that claims to have eradicated monsters, accidentally summons out of her mother's painting a creature who claims to have come to hunt a monster in her best friend's house. if I had to pick a single personal favorite work of fiction I read in 2019, this very well might be it. it's a quick read and definitely accessible to the younger audience it's aimed at, but also a richly layered story; along with the exploration of morality and what it means to do the right thing when a single decision can feel both right and wrong—and in just a couple hundred pages—Pet features dynamic and fully realized relationships among friends, parents, extended family, and community, a protagonist whose marginalized identities (as black and trans and disabled) are important to her characterization but whose story is not about marginalization as tragedy, unquestioned respect for children's maturity and intelligence and self-knowledge, and a gently fantastical setting that makes magic feel as natural as breathing. please read this book.
  
  
• Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy (eds. Derwin Mak, Lucas K. Law)
  
  an anthology of short stories varied in setting and genre and linked in being beautifully written examples of the idea of using speculative fiction to hold up a mirror to the world we live in. in the way that anthologies by multiple authors often are, this will be hit and miss for some people but will also probably have stories that appeal to just about any speculative fiction fan. my personal favorites were "Back to Myan" by Regina Kanyu Wang (a story which broke my heart and pieced it back together with incredible gentleness, about a young woman returning to the planet her people were evacuated from when she was too young to really remember it), "Meridian" by Karin Lowachee (Lowachee's characterization of childhood trauma is painful and raw and just about unparalleled; "Meridian," like her novel Warchild, fucked me entirely up), and "Weaving Silk" by Amanda Sun (about two sisters holding on to one another and scraping together a life in an isolated post-apocalyptic Tokyo after their parents' deaths).

ala WT, these definitely aren't all books that came out in 2019, but they are the ones that i got around to reading!! some of them were rereads (like, i reread inkheart.... i think three times this year?) and others were new to me. i'll list all of them, though didn't necessarily love all of them. i'd def love to cht about any or all of them if anyone wants tho! i'll star all the ones that i liked the most and would highly recommend! ♡ i tend to gravitate towards ya / fantasy novels, so if that's not your taste u can probably skip this list :joy: here's my goodreads as well for anyone interested!

in no particular order:
- winter of ice and iron by rachel neumeier*
- the reader by traci chee
- the wrath and the dawn by renee ahdieh
- a great and terrible beauty by libba bray*
- the cruel prince by holly black
- flame in the mist by renee ahdieh
- the coldest girl in coldtown by holly black*
- call me by your name by andré aicman
- the forgetting by sharon cameron*
- to kill a kingdom by alexandra christo
- alias grace by margaret atwood*
- inkheart by cornelia funke*
- inkspell by cornelia funke*
- inkdeath by cornelia funke
- the bloody chamber and other stories by angela carter*
- dance of thieves by mary e. pearson
- children of blood and bone by tom adeyemi*
- the kiss of deception by mary e. pearson
- the golden compass by phillip pullman*
        (i didn't get to the second two in the series this year, but ive read them a million times and they also deserve         mentions!)
- sky without stars by jessica brody & joanne rendell
- queen of air and darkness by cassandra clare
- six of crows by leigh bardugo*

i thought i was an avid reader in 2019 and then i saw this list. this is truly remarkable, wt. ♡ i wasn't the best with keeping track of what i read in 2019 (a new years resolution now) but i did read more than i usually do, which i am incredibly proud of. here are some stories that completely captivated me. i'd recommend everything on this list if you're into fantasy stories that tell like folklores; most are centered around either greek or russian myths. most of the novels i read also tend to have some sort of fantastical aspect to them and, often, have poetic prose. 

— novels + series

the raven boys by maggie stiefvater*
the dream thieves by maggie stiefvater*
blue lily lily blue by maggie stiefvater*
the raven king by maggie stiefvater* 
call down the hawk by maggie stiefvater* (yet to finish)
serpent and dove by shelby mahurin* 
the song of achilles by madeline miller* 
circe by madeline miller*
deathless by catherynne m. valente* (yet to finish) 
the bell jar by sylvia plath.
the unabridged diaries of sylvia plath by sylvia plath. (yet to finish)
on chesil beach by ian mcewan. 
white oleander by janet fitch. (yet to finish) 
the wolf wilder by katherine rundell.
six of crows by leigh barruco.
shadow and bone by leigh barruco*
siege and storm by leigh barruco* (yet to finish)
on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong*
bloodwitch by susan dennard. (yet to finish)

— short stories

lullaby for a lost world by aliette de bodard*
the waiting stars by aliette de bodard.
variations on an apple by yoon ha lee*
the little prince by antoine de saint-exupéry*
galatea by madeline miller.

— literary magazines

decracine, a gothic literary magazine*
  - (they publish a ton of good online writers! go support them)

— poetry

the witching hour poetry collection by the supernovaclub
crush by richard silken
cadence by ramona meisel
songbreaths by ramona meisel
heartquakes by ramona meisel
once we were by ramona meisel
   - (here's a list of all of ramona's collections - another tumblr poet i cherish)
rhythms of romantic youth by chelsea moon
  - (chelsea is also a tumblr poet i admire - here's her anthologies)
visceral by kavi kshiraj
maelstrom by kavi kshiraj
- (another tumblr poet, their collections are highlighted here)
holy figures by silas r. nathaniel
- (he's a tumblr poet too! his chapbook is here)

most of these are available as free pdfs!

i believe in both supporting the authors and making use of pdfs because not all of us have the resources to buy books or the books we want are not available in our areas. if something in my list catches your eye and you want to read, just hit me up and i'll send you the pdf.