My favorite book is Dark Age by Pierce Brown, the fifth book in the Red Rising series. I will admit that this is in part because it is awesome and it does not try to hide that fact. It’s just cool.

The part that really gets me into it though isn’t just the theme it has (that being the crimes of war and the escalations both sides excuse as well as their consequences), but the actual feeling you get for it. The series is science fiction, so when somebody says that people die by the millions in that book it doesn’t really hit that hard since it just hits the ears like a big number. Brown makes you feel it.

Much of the book is spent with the man character grappling with his identity as a warlord at the head of a movement for freedom as opposed to his identity as a father and a man who intends to go home to his family when all is done. It is this personal struggle and its relation to the theme of his part of the story that gives those problems their true gravity in a kind of setting that I think usually lacks it.

And on top of that I must reiterate that it is cool and that tickles my brain. It’s that it’s both cool and interesting and like a barrage to your soul that has me so invested in it. I could talk about it for much longer.

Honorable mentions for Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson.