I hope you had a very happy Christmas (if you celebrate it) and a safe and healthy holiday. In this post I’m talking about the best new authors I read this year. If I’ve calculated correctly, I read 58 books in 2021 by authors that were new to me. That’s out of 111 books, so…
This post is about some of my favorite new-to-me authors in 2020 (so far). I focused more on fiction than nonfiction, with a couple of exceptions. I’ve read some excellent nonfiction this year, like Rachel Louise Snyder’s No Visible Bruises and Garrett Graf’s The Only Plane in the Sky, but here I’ve chosen books that…
I love David Mitchell – I love how every book by him is more of an experience than just a read. This book felt like a whirlwind, or a roller coaster. It’s told in nine slightly-interlocking chapters. At first the chapters feel very distinct – a character in one might bump into a character in…
This was a really intense book, at times devastating, but I’m glad I read it. Just know that it isn’t an easy read. It’s the story of two girls who meet in Indravalli, India who meet as teenagers. Both are poor, uneducated, and forced to work to support their families, although even in poverty there’s…
This was actually last week’s topic, but I mainly covered this week’s topic here, so I’m writing about new-to-me authors instead. Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish and is moving next week to That Artsy Reader Girl. In 2017 I read an unusually high number of authors that were new…
2017 gave us a lot of great first novels, and as I’ve written before, first novels are often an author’s best work — maybe because it’s more raw, or maybe because it’s the story the author is most driven to tell. Here are my favorite debut novels read in 2017 (all released in 2017 or…
Last month I read two fantastic books that were the authors’ debut novels (The Hate U Give and The Leavers). That got me thinking about other great first novels I’ve read, which got me to thinking: why are so many authors’ first novels their best ones? I think it’s because there’s a raw, emotional quality…
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is our top ten favorite debut authors. This was an easy one as I’ve read so many great debut novels in the last couple of years (I limited my list to novels, so I didn’t count nonfiction or short stories). I’m anxiously awaiting new work from all of these…
The Book Stop 