Best and favorite books of 2020 include KITTY’S MIX-TAPE, THE IMMORTAL CONQUISTADOR, MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, THE EMPEROR’S SOUL, THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, and THE SWORD & SORCERY ANTHOLOGY

As the new year begins, lists, recounting the best selections from the previous year, emerge.

Leticia Toraci on MY WRITER’S JOURNEY shared their favorite reads of the year.

My Favorite Books Of 2020 Part One: Science fiction starts with Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE.

This was a page-turner, interesting story collection. The stories were very original and I could not put it down. I surely will want to read more books by this author in the near future.

My Favorite Books Of 2020 Part Two: Fantasy And Other Genres mentions Brandon Sanderson’s THE EMPEROR’S SOUL and The Way of Kings.

Sanderson’s books are Epic in every sense, with fascinating story worlds and awesome, multi-layered characters. I plan to read all his books, I repeat, all of them! I hope to read faster than the velocity in which he writes masterpieces, but I probably won’t manage that.

On REDDIT r/TrueLit, gentell_wherewithal includes THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN among What were your top reads of 2020?

I liked her novels but having this anthology made it clear that while she is happy to present her ‘best’ as working within a pretty narrow range of subject matter and themes – sad lesbians with broken relationships looking out at the sea, symbolic or literal mermaids, Lovecraftian body horror – she has nonetheless shown an ability to do all that in surprisingly different ways over a long career.

The Polish site POLTERGEIST shared that THE SWORD & SORCERY ANTHOLOGY, edited by David G Hartwell and Jacob Weisman, was one of their favorite discoveries of the year.

Another anthology, this time fantastic. A dozen or so short stories, most of which range from fairly decent to  excellent . Howard, Martin, Moorcook (Drakestar – thanks for the note on Chaos – I knew I’d seen that name somewhere) and some others. I didn’t like only two stories, the rest – Cossack.

Translation from Polish, courtesy of Google