First, just in case you somehow stumbled upon this blog by accident and hadn’t already at least read Rider’s Revenge or in case you have a friend who you’d really love to recommend the book to but don’t want them to spend their hard-earned money, Rider’s Revenge is free for the month of February.

Second, I’ve been playing around with creating a list of some of my favorite reads in fantasy as part of putting together an Aer.io store. If you want to check it out, it’s here.

If you read in print and are in the U.S. or Canada you can actually order the books on the site. Otherwise it’s just a good place to see a list of books I’ve enjoyed recently.

Not all are newly-published. For example, I read that entire Sharon Shinn series this year even though it’s been out for fifteen years.

I tried to only list books that were part of series where the entire series was enjoyable for me.

It’s interesting, there are a lot of books on my shelves that I liked enough to keep, but where maybe I enjoyed the first book in the series a lot and read the rest of the series but then the rest of the series didn’t work as well for me or the last book in the series didn’t nail the landing enough for me to recommend. (I’m thinking of one in particular where the multiple time lines didn’t quite come together in book five but I read the whole series.)

Also, weirdly enough there are certain authors who are almost a must-buy for me (or actually I’ve conned my mom into buying them now) who I didn’t list because even though I still read all of their books I wouldn’t actually recommend those books to others.

One of my long-time favorite authors seems to have found a love for writing characters who have difficult accents and so 90% of the dialogue in their recent books are in those accents and it’s just…a slog sometimes to get through. I still like their storytelling and characters but I would completely understand if someone picked up one of their current books and asked what I was thinking recommending it.

Also, I have a ton of favorites on my shelves from my teen years but I’m not sure they aged well so don’t want to recommend them without re-reading. I remember loving the Belgariad as a teen, but when I tried to re-read it last year it was a no for me. (There’s a scene where the knight character crushes a young lion to death when he could’ve just let it run away and it was struggling to get free and I just…No. Didn’t even register with me when I was 13 or whatever, but this time it really did.)

So, maybe there’s something there for you, maybe not. I’m always struggling to find new authors so figured I’d share in case anyone else is as well.

(And please don’t think that just because I mentioned a few things that I didn’t like as a reader that that in any way makes me think that my own writing or even what I write about is above reproach. Just like not all authors are ones that I as a reader will enjoy, I know that I am not for all readers either. Such is life.)

Also, in case anyone who reads this is an author themselves, here’s another list I put together on Aer.io of my favorite writing advice books.