Top 5 Tuesday: Top New to Me Authors in 2017

Top 5 Tuesday is a meme by the fantastic Bionic Book Worm, and it explores a different bookish topic each week. If you’d like to join in, check out the rest of her Top 5 Tuesday December Topics!

I read so many new and amazing books this year, and by so many authors I had never read before, or even heard of! These are some of my absolute favorites, who’ve written some of my new absolute favorite books. The prompt said I could pick 10, yet somehow I only managed 9. There are about 2 weeks left in the year, maybe I’ve yet to discover the tenth…..

Anyway- my top authors! (Not in any particular order):

Celeste Ng

I read both of Ng’s novels in the past few months, Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You, and her writing is some of the most beautiful I’ve read this year. The way she manages to weave a story together is masterful, and I love her characters. Everything I Never Told You in particular STILL takes me breath away when I think about it.

John Boyne

John Boyne is best known for The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and while I’ve never read it (though I did see the movie years ago and was appropriately horrified by the ending), I was introduced to Boyne’s writing with The Heart’s Invisible Furies and The Absolutist, and they are among my very favorite books I’ve read this year. His writing is funny, devastating, and unafraid to dig into unsightly, poignant truths by revealing the very worst of the human heart while somehow managing simultaneously destroy and/or WARM my own. Also he told me I had excellent taste in books 😉 😉

Marissa Meyer

I read all of Marissa Meyer’s books with year with the exception of Wires and Nerve (I’m saving it to read with the second book in 2018), and The Lunar Chronicles, all the Lunar Chronicles extras, and Heartless were a JOY. The Lunar Chronicles were without a doubt the best series I read this year, and I had such a fun time reading them. Some of her characters are my absolute favorites now. And the thing is, I was actually had zero interest in reading them until I finally picked up Cinder this past spring out of a sudden curiosity, and I’m VERY glad I did.

V.E. Schwab

The Shades of Magic series is another series I’m so glad I picked up this year. Not only did I have a great time binging Schwab’s series and meeting her fantastic characters, but I got to see what a talented and HARD WORKING lady she is. She’s such an inspiration and I hope to read more of her books in 2018.

Donna Tartt

The Secret History was the very first book I finished this year and BOY did it set a precedent. It’s the only Tartt book I read this year, and honestly it was so much I still don’t feel quite ready to pick up anything else by her. The Secret History is a story about terrible characters doing terrible things at a small Vermont university and it’s atmospheric and TERRIBLE and I loved it, and it kind of makes me feel like I’d be intimidated by Tartt if I ever met her in real life, but I’m so glad I read her writing this year.

Hanya Yanagihara 

If you’ve been around my blog you’ll know how much I love A Little Life, and that it DESTROYED me when I first read it this past July and that it’s now one of my favorite books ever. It boggles my mind that Yanagihara managed to write that massive book in only 16 or so months, and that when she first heard that it was making readers cry she was shocked, because she hadn’t shed a single tear writing it, which basically makes her the toughest person in the universe in my opinion and she has my eternal respect.

Katherine Arden

I only JUST read The Bear and the Nightingale, but the writing was my absolute favorite kind, beautiful and atmospheric and historic, the kind that takes it’s time unwinding its story, and most of all, the kind that takes me to a place I love being. I adored that book, and even though I’ve yet to read The Girl in the Tower, I know Arden is one of my new favorite authors.

 

Hannah Kent

Speaking of chilly atmosphere, Hannah Kent is the queen of it. Her book Burial Rites, set in harsh, frigid 1800s Iceland was one of my favorite books and historical fiction reads this year. And the way she balances different perspectives (3rd and 1st in the same book???) is masterful. Her book had one of my favorite endings of any book this year and I get RILED just thinking of it.

 

Adam Silvera

I read More Happy Than Not this year and I really liked it, but then I met Adam in September and he was SO wonderful. We talked about writing and he was so encouraging to me when I told him about my own book I had finished earlier this year (and subsequently had not touched since). I walked away feeling so encouraged and inspired, and it’s one of the reasons that, while I’m not going to rewrite the book I finished earlier this year, I am going to turn an aspect of it into something new and make it my 2018 project. Yay!

Who are some of your top authors that you discovered this year??