Great selection of books/reads!

Dec 7th: Matt Dinniman's madcap adventure Dungeon Crawler Carl finally made it to the UK in hardback this year.

A real cult fave that's getting rave reviews: think #D&D meets Hunger Games, with aliens, apocalypse, & an excellent cat called Princess Donut. Well-written and really entertaining!

💙📚🪐

Dec 6th's choice for best new #SFF hardbacks this year: The Works of Vermin by @hironennes.bsky.social is a sumptuous, monstrous tale of horror, unnatural pests, a rotting fantastical city, court politics, and layers upon layers.

Visceral and unnervingly entrancing!

💙📚🪐
#horrorsky

Really?
I mean, he's always been staggeringly prolific. And I've really enjoyed this series so far 🤞

It's been languishing on my wishlist for ages... but that's not the kind of recommendation I like to ignore, so I think I'll actually pick up a copy this weekend!

(an interlude just to make it very clear that this is my *personal* best books of the year as a SFF bookseller, necessarily filtered through my personal preferences and what I've been able to read!)

I'm a bookseller in a physical bookshop, so unfortunately not!

And today's bonus best new paperback of 2025 is Metal from Heaven by August Clarke which I snapped up when Amal⤴️ called it "a delirious shout, furious and grief-stricken and staggeringly beautiful ... about labour, anarchy and highwaywomen ... Queer and audacious and delicious"!

Fantastic read!
💙📚🪐

5th Dec on my advent of best books of the year is The River Has Roots by @amalelmohtar.com.

If you love beautiful, beautiful writing you should check out literally anything she's written, but especially this new tale of two sisters living on the edge of Faerie.

💙📚🪐
#SFF

😆

I'm sure they don't know when they place the order. Perhaps they found it on a list of topic books (which also could have been AI generated), or just googled the topic themselves.

And often we don't either, until it arrives!

So, mandatory labelling would be VERY helpful in that kind of situation.

And re: people reading, I guess we're biased in that we do mostly see people who are already thinking about reading, or buying books for their kids or schools, because those are the people coming in!
But we often get people who have never bought a book before + want suggestions, which is always fun

Etc.

And then the negative effect it's having on the authors and illustrators I know is horrible to see.

I'm worried about AI.
As a bookseller it's a headache in so many ways. But re: our reputation as booksellers, schools wanting to order ai-generated kids' "fact" books, trying to explain to customers that we'd recommend ordering a different pet care book because THAT one has all the signs of being ai

Indeed!

Well, if people are going to print them anyway I'd rather they were labelled as such, on the cover and on Nielsen, but hopefully it'll end up being a "don't touch this even with a stick" kind of warning to people.

Dec 4: And today's bonus paperback released this year (just last month) is book 5 of Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive: Wind & Truth, bringing the first arc of the storyline to a close.

I'll be honest, haven't read this one yet because I think I need a re-read of the whole series so far 😅

🪐💙📚

Hooray!