A shelf with opinions.

Books

Books and series I recommend without reservation — heavy on sci-fi and fantasy, with the occasional weird gem. Each one gets a quick hook and why I think it's worth your time. Roughly ranked, but everything here made the list because I loved it.

Currently reading

Mark of the Fool

J.M. Clarke

Alex has just landed a spot at one of the best magic universities around when he's Marked as one of five prophesied Heroes, which also signals the start of an apocalypse the Heroes are meant to stop. Problem is, his mark is the Fool, and nobody thought a Fool could do magic at all. Whenever he reaches for combat, spellcraft, or divinity, the mark yanks his attention away, though it makes learning anything else come easy. Rather than serve the other Heroes, Alex figures he'll do more good as a real wizard, so he disappears into hiding, enrolls, and gets to work finding the loopholes the mark leaves open. It's a good story with characters I like, and a lot of the fun is watching him puzzle his way around the mark instead of powering through it.

LitRPG
Progression fantasy
Fantasy

The shelf

Manna

Marshall Brain

I read this years before the current AI wave, and loved it. Marshall Brain wrote it in 2003, and the question it really asks isn't about the technology. It's about who automation ends up serving: everyone, or just the people who own the machines. It plays that out to two extremes, both uncomfortably plausible, and LLMs have only made it more prescient. It's free, and I think everyone should read it. Short but impactful.

Novella
AI & automation

The Bobiverse

Dennis E. Taylor

The book starts with Bob dying. He's awakened a century later as software and loaded onto a von Neumann probe, then sent out to explore and self-replicate across the galaxy. What I like is that it's equal parts exploring the universe and solving problems like an engineer: Bob spends the series balancing the systems he builds, working with people who keep changing those systems on him, and dealing with what immortality actually does to a person. It's smart and funny. The first book is We Are Legion (We Are Bob). Ray Porter narrates the audiobooks and he's fantastic, giving each diverging Bob their own voice.

Sci-fi
Humor
AI

Dungeon Crawler Carl

Matt Dinniman

Aliens demolish Earth and turn the planet into a brutal, livestreamed dungeon crawl, which Carl enters in his underwear with his ex's cat, Princess Donut. It starts as pure comedy, complete with an absolutely unhinged AI running the show, and slowly turns more and more real. The satire hooks you, and the heart sneaks up on you. That combination is why I love it. On audio it's narrated by Jeff Hays (Soundbooth Theater), and he's so good it sounds like a full cast. I was convinced a separate narrator voiced Princess Donut, but it's all him.

LitRPG
Comedy
Sci-fi

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or why he's there, and slowly works out that he's humanity's last shot at stopping the sun from dying. It's science fiction in the classic sense: a real 'what if' worked out with actual physics and chemistry, but never losing the human side. A lot of why it works is the unlikely friendship he forms out there with an alien in the same predicament, which becomes the heart of the whole thing. It's a fun book and a great example of what the genre can do. On audio, Ray Porter narrates, and the way the production handles a certain character's voice is genuinely clever.

Sci-fi
First contact

Riyria Revelations

Michael J. Sullivan

Royce and Hadrian are a two-man thieves-for-hire operation: Royce a cynical assassin who grew up on the streets, Hadrian a deadly but endlessly optimistic swordsman. A job goes wrong, they get framed for a king's murder, and it pulls them into something much larger. It's classic fantasy that keeps building on itself as it goes, but the best part is the relationship between Royce and Hadrian. Tim Gerard Reynolds narrates the audiobooks and is excellent. There's also a prequel series, the Riyria Chronicles; the author says either is a fine place to start, but I'd begin with Revelations and its first volume, Theft of Swords.

Fantasy
Adventure

Red Rising

Pierce Brown

Darrow is a lowborn miner on Mars, surgically rebuilt to pass as one of the godlike ruling caste and tear it down from the inside. Brutal, operatic, and escalating like a freight train. Underneath the rebellion it's really a spy story, and the suspense is what makes it: you're learning this strange, lethal world at the same time Darrow is, and exposure always feels one wrong move away. The first trilogy is the one I really recommend. On audio, Tim Gerard Reynolds is the draw, and the distinct accents he gives each caste add a huge amount.

Sci-fi
Dystopia

The Hedge Wizard

Alex Maher

Hump is a working-class apprentice who inherits a powerful spellbook after his master's untimely death and sets out as a Hedge Wizard, in a world where real power is supposed to belong to the god-chosen. He isn't one of them, so he has to earn his the hard way, through study and nerve. The magic here is dangerous and hard-won, closer to careful experimentation than a tidy XP bar, and Hump gets ahead by being smarter and better prepared than people with far more raw talent. It helps that the Chosen and the wizards run on slightly different systems, which turns his climb into a real puzzle. Tim Gerard Reynolds narrates, and he's fantastic. A great pairing with Mark of the Fool if you like watching someone claw their way up without being handed power.

LitRPG
Progression fantasy
Fantasy

Expeditionary Force

Craig Alanson

Aliens invade Earth, and an ordinary soldier named Joe ends up paired with Skippy, an arrogant, absurdly powerful AI left behind by a long-dead elder species. Together they have to punch way above humanity's weight in a galactic war, and the heart of the series is Joe and Skippy's relationship. Like Dungeon Crawler Carl, it's a serious story wrapped in comedy, but where Carl leads with the jokes, this plays the military sci-fi straight and lets the humor do its work. The hook for me is the cycle it runs on: an impossible problem, an improbable plan, and a lot of hard work to make it stick. R.C. Bray narrates, and his Skippy is half the reason to listen. The first book is Columbus Day.

Military SF
Humor

The Undying Mercenaries

B.V. Larson

Fun military sci-fi, plain and simple. Earth is a small new player in a galaxy run by impossibly powerful elder species, and humanity's whole game is to fight and survive without drawing the kind of attention that would get the planet erased. The signature twist is that death isn't permanent: soldiers killed in the field get reprinted from a saved body scan and thrown right back in, which makes the combat genuinely brutal and disposable. James McGill, the soldier you follow, is a rule-bending troublemaker who keeps stumbling into things way above his pay grade. It's not deep, but it's a great time. The first book is Steel World.

Military SF

The Fear Saga

Stephen Moss

An alien fleet is on its way to take Earth, but it's years out, so the aliens send an advance team ahead: agents in human-passing bodies whose job is to quietly sabotage us so we can never get ready. A few people stumble onto the truth and have to prepare Earth's defense in secret, without tipping off the agents already among us or triggering a worldwide panic. What I like is that it takes the preparation seriously and plays it straight, and the slow cat-and-mouse with those agents is what carries it. It's tense and surprisingly plausible. The first book is Fear the Sky.

Sci-fi
Alien invasion

Black Ocean

J.S. Morin

The crew of the starship Mobius runs shady jobs across a galaxy where magic and spaceships share the same world. The blend is the real draw for me: spellcraft sits right alongside starship tech, and the Mobius keeps a wizard on the crew as naturally as it does a pilot or a gunner. It's episodic, basically a fun job-of-the-week, which makes it easy to keep coming back to. The first story is Salvage Trouble, and on audio it's bundled into a huge omnibus, something like sixty hours for a single Audible credit.

Space opera
Magic & sci-fi

Off to Be the Wizard

Scott Meyer

A slacker discovers that reality is just a computer file he can edit. It goes wrong fast and strands him in medieval England, where he poses as a wizard alongside other nerds who found the same trick. The whole conceit is reality as a codebase you can hack, played for laughs. It's the first book of the Magic 2.0 series.

Comedy
Sci-fi/fantasy

Thrawn

Timothy Zahn

Grand Admiral Thrawn wins with his mind instead of fear. His method is to understand an enemy completely: not just their fleet, but their culture, their society, even the way one person thinks, often through their art. He turns that into tactical advantage, and his deductions are so sharp they feel almost magical. And yet for all that brilliance, he's hopeless at the Imperial politics that decide who actually survives it. Timothy Zahn wrote him twice, in the original Legends trilogy that starts with Heir to the Empire and in a newer canon trilogy, and both are great. Like most Star Wars audiobooks, they come loaded with music and sound effects that match the franchise's fun campiness.

Sci-fi
Star Wars

The Martian

Andy Weir

Mark Watney gets stranded on Mars and has to science his way home, one solvable problem at a time, narrating the whole ordeal with great gallows humor. It's the purest version of what people love about Andy Weir: a rock-solid 'what if' grounded in real science, a steady stream of problems solved through sheer ingenuity, and just enough of the human side to make you care. There's a real satisfaction in watching someone this competent work the problem and refuse to die. It's where Weir's whole formula started, the one that runs through Project Hail Mary too. On audio, R.C. Bray's narration is a classic in its own right.

Sci-fi
Survival