I’m still plugging away at year-end wrap-up stuff from 2017, which I was procrastinating on a little during the end-of-year holidays and which has now been delayed by a very nasty head cold and the unfortunate news that our single-income family here is imminently going to be a zero-income family as my partner is losing his job. It’s not great, obviously, and I fully expect this to continue to affect things here at the blog over the next [hopefully not more than a] couple of months, so I’m not making any promises about how much I’ll be reading or what I’ll be writing about. My guess is “not nearly as much as I’d like” on both counts.

However, before 2018 took such a steep and immediate nosedive into horribleness, there was a ton of stuff I was (and, optimistically, still am) very excited to be digging into over the next three months.

Novels

I’m starting to scale back my reading goals and recommendations with the idea of focusing on quality rather than quantity as well as avoiding overwhelming myself with too-long reading lists. At the same time, I’m branching out again, looking to read more broadly, instead of sticking so strictly to sci-fi and fantasy (though, goodness knows, there’s more great stuff coming out in those genres than I can ever realistically read). This year, you’ll be seeing more literary, romance and horror releases, and I’m even going to experiment with reading some YA again after a lengthy break from it.

• Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi – 1/23
  A US edition of a 2013 Iraqi novel. I love Frankenstein retellings of all kinds, and one of my goals for 2018 is to read more translated literature, so this is perfect.
• The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory – 1/30
  I don’t read much romance, but I’ve been seeing this title talked up quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. It sounds fun, and would be a nice change of pace for me.
• The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton – 2/6
  I haven’t been reading much YA over the last year or so, but I’m thinking of checking out a few YA titles in 2018. This is the first one on my list.
• Tempests and Slaughter by Tamora Pierce – 2/6
  I’m not entirely sold on this series about Numair, to be honest, but I expect I will check it out anyway.
• Blood Binds the Pack by Alex Wells – 2/6
• Semiosis by Sue Burke – 2/6
  I’ve been increasingly into serious sci-fi lately, and this character-driven first contact novel is one that I’m very much looking forward to.
• Moonshine by Jasmine Gower – 2/6
  Moonshine sounds a bit like the 2016 novel A Criminal Magic, and that’s not a bad thing.
• Echoes of Understorey by Thoraiya Dyer – 2/13
  Crossroads of Canopy was one of my favorite books of 2017, and it features a marvelously original fantasy world that I am extremely excited to dive back into.
• Pride and Prometheus by John Kessel – 2/13
  Victor Frankenstein meets Mary and Kitty Bennet!
• The Tangled Lands by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell – 2/27
  I have never gotten around to reading anything by Paolo Bacigalupi, but I’ve gotten pretty into Tobias Buckell’s short fiction over the last couple of years, so I figure I will give this novel a try.
• Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi – 3/6
  The description of this book hits pretty much all my favorite YA fantasy trope keywords.
• Impostor Syndrome by Mishell Baker – 3/20
  The third book in the Arcadia Project trilogy. This series has been such a nice surprise, and I am very hyped for this conclusion.

Tor.com Publishing

As I’ve done for the last two years, I’ll continue to read all of Tor.com’s novellas and novels. I still love the novella length best of all for pleasure-reading, and Tor.com still puts out a pretty good selection of material. That said, their line-up for the first quarter of 2018 is fully sixty percent sequels, and with other folks catching on and getting into the novella game, Tor.com is going to need to step things up and start delivering more great standalone novellas in order to keep my full attention. Still, there’s a lot to look forward to this winter.

• Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire – 1/9
• Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor – 1/16
  The third and final volume of Okorafor’s Binti Trilogy.
• The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brook Bolander – 1/23
  Elephants and radium girls!
• The Armored Saint by Myke Cole – 2/20
• Starfire: Memory’s Blade by Spencer Ellsworth – 2/27
  The Starfire series is actually short novels, rather than novellas, and this is the last one, which I’m pretty sad about.
• The Warrior Within by Angus McIntyre – 3/6
• Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson – 3/13
• Stone Mad by Elizabeth Bear – 3/20
  A sequel/companion to her 2015 novel, Karen Memory.
• Void Black Shadow by Corey J. White – 3/27
  I rather liked the first novella in this series, Killing Gravity, so I’m moderately excited for the second.

Magazines

I’ve really gotten into short fiction in the last year or two, especially as a way of finding new-to-me writers and young writers at the beginning of, but I’m slowly coming to terms (more or less, anyway) with the fact that I can’t read everything. Last year, I didn’t come close to reading all the short fiction, especially in magazines, that I intended to at the beginning of the year, so this year my plan is to be less ambitious in my goals but more consistent in sticking to them. To that end, I’m only planning on regularly reading the publications I subscribe to:

• FIYAH Literary Magazine
  If you are any kind of fan of the genre, you owe it to yourself to subscribe to this quarterly publication that celebrates black-written SFF. Just in their first year (2017), they published almost two dozen new writers, an invaluable infusion of new talent to the genre.
• Uncanny
  Even if you don’t subscribe to Uncanny, be sure to keep an eye out for their special People With Disabilities Destroy SF! Issue later this year.
• Apex Magazone

Anthologies and Collections

• Robots vs. Fairies edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe – 1/9
  I loved this pair of editors’ first anthology, 2016’s The Starlit Wood, and their second outing from Saga Press has been among my most anticipated 2018 reads since it was first announced.
• The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror by Mallory Ortberg – 3/13
• Dracula: Rise of the Beast edited by David Thomas Moore
  Five authors imagine Jonathan and Mina Harker’s son piecing together the story of Dracula decades after the events of Bram Stoker’s book.

Comic Books and Graphic Novels

• Saga Vol. 8
• Kim & Kim Vol. 2
• Abbott #1 – 1/24
  A new original comic by Saladin Ahmed!

Nonfiction

In 2017, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to read one nonfiction title per month in the year, and I failed at it, pretty miserably. This year, I’m trying again, but I’m already not off to a great start: in the first three months of 2018, there’s only one nonfiction title that I’m already certain I want to read. Probably, a couple more will pop up, or I’ll revisit some of the titles I didn’t get around to reading last year. We’ll see, I guess.

• So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo – 1/16
  I’m by no means a connoisseur of Ijeoma Oluo’s work, but I remember well her remarkable profile of Rachel Dolezal and I’m interested in this book about race in America.
• Nonfiction I Have On My Nook and Haven’t Read (But Still Might):
  Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve/Ruin Everything by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
  Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein
  Hunger by Roxane Gay
  Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

I know it’s a little bit past the actual beginning of winter, but I think from now on I’m just going to break these seasonal reading lists up into more or less three month time periods and name them for the closest corresponding season. It’s just not practical to try and do a full year’s worth of books that I’m excited about, even in January, especially when there are plenty of still-to-be-announced releases for later in the year that I don’t even know about yet. So, this list will get you (and me) through March.

Magazines
I’m starting this year off with magazine subscriptions for the first time in many years. (Like, now that I think about it, I think the last time I regularly read any magazine was Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine back in the early ’90s. Yikes.) Here’s what I’m definitely reading (and recommending, natch) in the first few months of 2017:

• Uncanny Magazine
• FIYAH Literary Magazine
• Beneath Ceaseless Skies
• Shimmer Magazine
• Fireside Fiction

Tor.com Novellas and Short(-ish) Novels
I plan to continue reading all of these as they are published (or as ARCs if I am lucky and they show up on NetGalley). I know I’ve been full of praise for the last couple of years for Tor.com’s novellas, but I still basically love them. The novella length (and price!) is great for quick reading, and Tor.com publishes a great variety of new and established authors in a good mix of subgenres that offers plenty that I like and enough stuff outside my usual comfort zone to keep things interesting and challenging. After 2016, there are a couple of authors that I will be avoiding in the future because I just don’t care for their books at all, but other than that I expect to keep on reading these faithfully. The first quarter of 2017 has quite a lot to be excited for.

• Dusk or Dawn or Dark or Day by Seanan McGuire – January 10
• Sin du Jour: The First Course by Matt Wallace – January 10 (Contains books 1-3 of the series. I probably won’t be rereading it, but if you haven’t read it at least once, you should.)
• The Fortress at the End of Time by Joe M. McDermott – January 17
• Passing Strange by Ellen Klages – January 24
• Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor – January 31
• Idle Ingredients by Matt Wallace – February 7
• An Impossible War by Andy Remic – February 14 (This is one I’ll be skipping, but it’s surely a better fit for someone.)
• Cold Counsel by Chris Sharp – February 21
• Agents of Dreamland by Caitlin R. Kiernan – February 28
• Standard Hollywood Depravity by Adam Christopher – March 7
• Brother’s Ruin by Emma Newman – March 14
• Chalk by Paul Cornell – March 21

Everything Else
Everything else obviously is the majority of what I’ve got on my TBR list. There are a handful of things here that I’m not 100% sure about, but in order to hit my Goodreads challenge numbers I’ll have to get through most of these. I hope I can, because there’s a ton of great stuff coming out over the next couple of months.

• Difficult Women by Roxane Gay – January 3
• Windwitch by Susan Dennard – January 10
• The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden – January 10
• Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Octavia E. Butler, John Jennings (Illustrator), Damian Duffy (Adapted by) – January 10
• Dreadnought by April Daniels – January 24
• Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty – January 31
• Crossroads of Canopy by Thoraiya Dyer – January 31
• Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly – February 7
• The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley – February 7
• Miranda and Caliban by Jacqueline Carey – February 14
• Angel Catbird Volume 2: To Castle Catula by Margaret Atwood and Johnny Christmas – February 14
• Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer – February 21
• Hunger Makes the Wolf by Alex Wells – March 7
• The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories edited by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin – March 14