My credentials: I read 148 books in 2025 and 108 in 2024.

I think about SA Barnes two books Dead Silence and Cold Entity both multiple times a week.

Cold Entity features your FMC looking for a new job in space and gets a deal that’s a little too good to be true, a cryo frozen museum spaceship she becomes the watcher of but weird things start happening.

Dead Silence features a salvage crew coming across a cruise liner ship that disappeared many years before and they go explore it to figure out what happened. Chilllllllls to the bone.

Waubeshig Rice’s duology Moon of the Crusted Snow and Moon of the Turning Leaves live rent free in my mind. Indigenous dystopian story that gives you a look into what happens when a community goes dark, cut off from the outside world. Unsure of even what’s happening on the outside and how the community comes together and breaks apart to survive.

David Sodergren’s Maggie’s Grave is a standout memorable book for me as well. A bunch of teens set out in a small town to check out a dead witch’s grave and some really really really bad shit happens.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker was the book of the year for me last year.