So a weird thing happened to me when I started drafting this post. I had such a list of books I loved from the past year. Easily two dozen books. All excellent. All super recent! I must have read them, what, two-three months ago? Four at most?

Wrong. They were all from 2019. And I didn't read one single standalone graphic novel that was published within the last ten months?? Seriously, 2020, what on earth.

After further thought, here's some stuff I loved that was actually from 2020.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. Not only is this a great story, but I read for muscular language on the sentence level and this is a master class.

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots. If you ever found yourself thinking: "What if Venture Bros. or The Boys but with a bi woman protagonist" then this book is for you.

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi. One of the most interesting variants on the "kid with superpowers" trope I've seen recently.

Finna by Nino Cipri. Quirky and surreal with a ton of heart.

A Sinister Quartet by Mike Allen, Jessica Wick, C.S.E. Cooney, and Amanda McGee. Four novellas, all luscious.

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger. I am cheating a little here because this one probably belongs more on my I'm-looking-forward-to list as I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive. But! it looks so damn good and it has an asexual main character (!!!) and I already know I adore it.

Sal & Gabi Fix the Universe by Carlos Hernandez. One of the funniest SFF authors in the business. This is book 2 in a duology--read Sal & Gabi Break the Universe first!

Lumberjanes continues an excellent all-ages run. Think weird-stuff-in-the-woods a la Gravity Falls, but with more diversity.

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is hands-down the spiritual successor to Adventure Time, and I do not say that lightly.

Dorohedoro is not technically from 2020 but was released on Netflix in 2020 and it's just so absolutely exquisite that I can't in good conscience leave it off any kind of best-of list I get my grubby hands on. It's the best kind of weird fiction with incredibly well-written character relationships and I just adore literally everything about it. It's one of the very, very few pieces of any kind of media that includes a strong platonic friendship between the male and female leads and explicitly states that this relationship is and will remain a friendship. This is so rare and precious and I love it forever.

2021 is...surprisingly imminent. And terrifying. Luckily, though, there are books. Here are a few I'm looking forward to especially.

Saint Death's Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney. I was lucky enough to read a draft of this years ago and I'm told it's even better now. I'm pumped.

Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw. Honestly most of what I know about this is that it's a.) a haunted house story that's b.) written by Cassandra Khaw, and honestly that's all I need to know in order to require this book like yesterday.

The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw. "This band of dangerous women, half-clone and half-machine, must battle their own traumas and a universe of sapient ageships who want them dead, in order to settle their affairs once and for all." Um, yes, inject this directly into my veins.

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones. I don't know much about this (saw it on a list somewhere) but this is one of those authors whose stuff I will gladly snap up on sight forever.

Saga by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples. I can't find a definitive official return date for my favorite comics series ever, but I did hear some rumors that it would be in 2021, so I'm adding it here out of a desire to bring it into being by sheer force of will alone.

As for me, I have two books coming out in 2021. My first-ever two-book year! 

In May my adult SF debut, Firebreak--which is like if Ready Player One got hit over the head and forgot all its 80s references and misogyny and instead got very angry and took up anticorporate water rights activism--comes out from Simon & Schuster/Saga (https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Firebreak/Nicole-Kornher-Stace/9781982142742), and in July my middle-grade debut, Jillian vs. Parasite Planet--a space survival story with loads of science, mind-control parasites, a protagonist with anxiety, and a cartoon-addicted intelligent nanobot swarm--comes out from Tachyon (https://tachyonpublications.com/product/jillian-vs-parasite-planet/). I've also got a novelette coming out at Uncanny that's my favorite of my stories to date.

I'm always looking for recommendations--what were your favorites of 2020 and what's on your list for 2021? And if you wrote something for 2020/2021, I'd love to know about that too and support your work amid all this *gestures widely at everything*.