April Novel Reading List

Updated: Apr 7, 2023

Fantasy and Sci-fi focused

A bite-sized peek into my overly complex reading list spreadsheet.

When I decided to get serious about my writing, I also evaluated my reading habits. I read books for school, and to fill the time while traveling. Audiobooks were great for occupying my mind as I worked with my hands. Depending on what my schedule was, the amount of time I spent reading was all over the place. To top it off, all of my reading was very passive.

Keeping track of which titles are selling well at any given moment and which titles maintain popularity through shifting trends is an important practice for any writer. Popularity shouldn't change what any writer writes, but understanding the larger market can help set expectations for writers, agents, editors, and publishers.

But, a writer can't get a good handle on their comps without reading a ton. This is why my reading spreadsheet comes in. I'm a spreadsheet nerd, but that is another topic entirely. I like reading and writing speculative fiction, so I looked at the most popular titles in Fantasy and Sci-fi over the past 10 years.

The New York Times Bestseller list was my first stop, but I found it hard to find yearly breakdowns (and the cost/benefit of spending all that time to look up every book that appeared on each weekly list for the past 10 years wasn't worth the effort). Next, I looked at the winners of the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and the Goodreads Reader Choice Awards. Unsurprisingly there was a ton of overlap between these lists. But, there were also a lot of repeated authors and multiple books from the same handful of series. To round out my reading list, I found a few writing-focused or genre-specific websites that curated lists of stand-alone novels.

This process generated a list containing 400 novels across 10 years and two genres. The rest of this post will not be a rundown of all 400 titles—or even 20 tiles. Like my Webcomic Reading List, I will only go over what I have slated to read over the next month. Reading four or more books in a month used to seem like an aspirational goal, but now it sometimes feels as though I'm not reading enough!

I will address my new-found (rekindled?) love for the public library in another post, but for now, it is enough to say my Novel Reading List is largely dependent on my holds list, and when those titles are available.

Comps for what I like to write are the focus of my reading list, but that doesn't mean I don't read other genres. Non-fiction in particular can be a great source of inspiration, and I also like to leave room to read whatever else I might feel like reading. That means, in addition to the fantasy and sci-fi categories, there is also a catch-all category. There will be an ebb and flow between the categories, which may mean some months have no titles in one or two of the categories (like this month).