February is upon us and we have been scouring the new book releases to find those books we’re most excited about.
Check out this list of books we can’t wait to read in February, and let us know which ones you’re excited about (and which ones we may have missed)!
Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.
As the new decade approached, many websites published lists of the “Best Books of the Decade.” The novel Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill appeared on a LOT of those lists. Curious, I read it to see what all the fuss was about. It is freaking great!
But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.
Leigh Bardugo’s latest book Ninth House is by every measure a success, and it’s easy to see why.
In Ninth House, Alex Stern begins her new life as a student at Yale University. But with her background, and her ability, she’s not like the other students. In Ninth House we explore, through Alex, a blend of the real and the unreal as she learns about Yale’s exclusive clubs and their influence, their dealings with magic and ritual and power.
a paper star that has been unfolded and refolded
into a tiny unicorn but the unicorn remembers a time
when it was a star and an earlier time when it was part of
a book and sometimes the unicorn dreams of the time before
it was a book when it was a tree and the time even longer
before that when it was a different sort of star
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern is the 200th book I’ve read since I started keeping track of that sort of thing on Goodreads. The Starless Sea turned out to be a great thematic selection for that #200 spot because it is a celebration of reading and stories.
What is it about?
Some chapters are composed of myths and legends about love, about fate and time, about the moon and a man, with bees and keys and stars and owls and swords and rabbits and pirates and doorways and books. Other chapters follow a grad student who, after discovering a book in a library in which he is a character, goes on a bit of a quest to unlock the origins of that book, to decipher the meanings of the myths and legends contained within, and to find a doorway which he had earlier refused to enter.
This past decade brought change and opportunity, perhaps none more for me than a renewed commitment to reading. It didn’t really start until 2016, when I finally started to see my Goodreads challenge as more than just a perfunctory exercise. I started keeping up with books as they were published, following authors and publishers on their various media, and engaging with book reviewers and reading communities.
The world opened before my eyes.
2016 and 2017 were near miraculous years in genre publishing as far as I’m concerned, but the whole decade was full of beautiful, inspiring stories that continue to push the bounds of what we can, as storytellers, accomplish.That said, here are my top 15 books of the decade (presented in chronological order by publish date).
Happy New Year!
Have you decided to read more books this year? Do you want to explore a variety of genres? Are you interested in what we are adding to our (already hopelessly behind) stack of stuff to read? This post is for you!
At the beginning of every month, we scour the interwebs for info about new book releases. We read a lot of sites for recommendations: Amazon, B&N, other bloggers in our WordPress Feed, NYT, Washington Post, AV Club, Ars Technica, Popular Mechanics, and many many more that google-fu or spam email might provide. We each make lists of the particularly interesting stuff that stands out to us, we talk about them, and we get really excited about the coming month! This year, we’ve decided to share those monthly lists with the public!
Here are the books on our radar screen for January 2020:
I don’t really know what to call this decade. The 2010s? The Teens? The Decade That Provided Solid Evidence We Are Living in the Dark Timeline? Despite not knowing its name, I will absolutely remember this decade for its eventfulness. I made a bunch of new friends. I attended too many funerals, but fortunately attended even more weddings. I started new hobbies and rediscovered old ones. Like reading books.
I was an avid reader as a kid and teen, but I didn’t read very much for a long time. I just didn’t prioritize it. Well, around 2016, searching for ways to spend my spare time in healthier ways, I read some of the books on this list, and I fell in love with reading again.
So here are, in order of publish date, my Top 15 books of the Decade. Maybe they’ll make you fall in love with reading too.
It all happened so slowly, yet so extraordinarily quickly, the change to our parents, to our home, to our lives after they arrived. But that first night, when Birdie appeared on our front step with two large suitcases and a cat in a wicker box, we could never have guessed the impact she would have, the other people she would bring into our lives, that it would all end the way it did.
We thought she had just come to stay for the weekend.
Lisa Jewell’s The Family Upstairs is a fitting read for early winter, for its whipping winds and dropping temperatures, early dark and long, fitful nights. This book will leave you glad for that extra-cozy sweater, blinking out your window into the darkness beyond.
More than anything, Jewell has perfected the art of the “slow build”, as what starts out perfectly normal, patently ordinary, grows more wild and weird and unanswerable until you’re flipping page after page with bated breath, listening for that telltale cough that lets you know you’re not alone.
“God bless the man who first taught the world how to cure olives. He and the man who invented cheese are two unsung pillars of civilization.”
“They were probably women,” muttered Fatima, fanning her face with the sleeve of her robe. “If they were men, we would remember their names.”
The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson is a historical fantasy novel about a concubine, a gay Muslim “sorcerer” (for lack of a better word), and a jinn fleeing the Inquisition after the fall of Granada. It’s good!
It scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it.
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins appears to be an oral history of Daisy Jones and the Six, one of the greatest rock bands of the 1970s. Except it’s not. Daisy Jones and the Six never existed. None of the “interview subjects” ever existed. Daisy Jones and the Six is a completely fictional novel that uses the format of an oral history book to tell a classic tale of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It’s pretty dang great.