I have many things to write about, but since it's the beginning of the new year and all, I thought I'd get in the spirit and look back at something I really enjoyed in 2017. Books! In between all the teaching and research and editing and writing and running around, I managed - somehow - to fit in reading books I just felt like reading. This is a list of the best that I can remember, in the order in which I happened to write them down.  You'll find poetry, afrofuturism, fantasy, science fiction, literary fiction, short stories, memoir, and young adult fiction here. Rather than write about each book individually - which I'd love to do, but we all know would mean this post would be delayed till at least June - I will say that the thing they all have in common is a deep engagement with the truth at the heart of their stories. There are stories here that are quietly clever, laugh-out-loud funny, frightening, heartbreakingly sad, infuriating, melancholy and contemplative (and often many of these things at once) but they all create compelling worlds where the stories they have to tell unfold beautifully.

• Binti and Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor. 
• Terra Nullius by Claire G Coleman
• The Herring Lass  by Michelle Cahill
• Every Heart a Doorway and Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
• An Accident of Stars and A Tyrrany of Queens by Foz Meadows
• Battle Hill Bolero by Daniel Jose Older
• Some Tests by Wayne Macauley
• The Fig Tree by Arnold Zable
• The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
• Common People by Tony Birch
• Marriage by Susan Ferrier
• Hunger by Roxane Gay
• Provenance by Ann Leckie
• The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin
• Australia Day by Melanie Cheng
• How It Happened by Shazaf Fatima Haider
• Frogkisser by Garth Nix
• The Ruin of Angels by Max Gladstone