Every February, Locus Magazine comes out with their Recommended Reading List. It is an exhaustive list of all the best Speculative Fiction of the last year. Literally it is one stop shopping for your Speculative Fiction readers...all of them.
This is an excellent resource to help readers and develop your collections for a variety of reasons.
First, take the list itself, and check your collections. Do you own these books? You should. These are some of the best titles in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror from 2023-- I personally review quite a few of them.
Second, use it to help readers who want books in these genres, but also, to help readers who want to give these genres a try-- especially the stories and novellas. These are proven winners, titles you can suggest with ease as they were vetted by a group of experts. [see below for a list of those experts]
Third, especially in the collections, anthology, and all of the shorter fiction categories, pay attention to the authors producing these stories. Many will become the novelists whose books you will be clamoring to get soon. I know this because...
Fourth, they make this list every single year, so there is a great BACKLIST! You know I love the backlist. Seriously though, you need to assess your collection, you want a suggestion that is on the shelf, you want to discover a newer voices in the genres, you want to make a display? For all of these things and more, you need to look back more than just one year. Don't worry. I made it easy on you.
Click here to pull up a list of each year's list beginning with 2023 and going backward. It's a link that is RA and Collection Development gold.
There are many books on this year's list that I have read and reviewed too. In particular, I want to point you to the anthology section, which is particularly good and will allow you to add more authors to your collection, many of them newer voices. Also, in the nonfiction section, a book I have already told you to purchase multiple times, 101 Books to Read Before You're Murdered by Sadie Hartmann. Hartmann recently signed a contract to produce a second edition. This is a must add to every public library.
The Locus Recommended Reading List is one of my favorite resources every year. It is a treasure trove of CD and RA gold. Bookmark it and use it for guaranteed crowd pleasing suggestions for all of your speculative fiction fans.
Below is the intro to the 2023 list by the editors of Locus Magazine.
Welcome to the annual Locus Recommended Reading List!
Another spin around the ole ball of fire and we’re back to our annual Recommended Reading List for 2023! Published in Locus magazine’s February 2024 issue, the list is put together by Locus editors, columnists, outside reviewers, and other professionals and well-known critics of genre fiction and non-fiction. We looked at 1,012 titles from 2023 in short fiction and long fiction. The final recommendations are combined and trimmed to as reasonable of a list as we can manage, but it is still long. We know there will be titles you loved that do not appear here; it happens every year. As we always say, any one member of our recommending group would suggest a different exact list, but this is our combined sum of opinions, assessed with much affection and care for the field. We did not see everything out there (though we tried!) and there will be books that didn’t make it.
The Locus recommending group this year included editor in chief Liza Groen Trombi; reviews editor Jonathan Strahan; reviewers Eugen Bacon, Liz Bourke, Jake Casella Brookins, Alex Brown, Paul Di Filippo, Sean Dowie, Paula Guran, Niall Harrison, Rich Horton, Paul Kincaid, Russell Letson, Adrienne Martini, Archita Mittra, Ian Mond, Colleen Mondor, Charles Payseur, Alexandra Pierce, Tim Pratt, Adam Roberts, Wole Talabi, Gary K. Wolfe, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro; staffers Laurel Amberdine, Bob Blough, and Mark Kelly; and outside critics James Bradley, Amy Goldschlager, Cheryl Morgan, Graham Sleight, and Tom Whitmore. Input for the non-fiction section also came in from Farah Mendlesohn. The art books section had help from Arnie Fenner, Karen Haber, and senior editor Francesca Myman. Short fiction recommendations added in anthologists and reviewers John Joseph Adams, Vanessa Fogg, Maria Haskins, Allan Kaster, Nisi Shawl, Bogi Takács, and A.C. Wise. Some of the reviewers also wrote year-end wrap-ups, which will include their thoughts, plus some favorite books that didn’t make the final list — look for those in the coming weeks or in the February issue of the magazine, available in print and digital editions. Locus thanks all involved for their time and their expertise.
You can let us know what your favorites were by voting in the 2023 Poll & Survey. The Poll decides the winners of the Locus Awards, presented in June 2024, and is open to all to vote on. The Survey helps us be a better magazine. Thank you for participating!
Click here to access this year's list and all of the backlist Recommended Reading Lists.
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