Book of the Week (2018 Archive)
How the book of the week emails got started…
Going into 2018, I was working on my fourth novel and reading widely in my genre, trying to get a higher-level view of the landscape and fill in some gaps in my genre knowledge before I really dug into my next project. I’ve always read widely, but as any reader does, I have naturally gravitated to tropes and types of stories that I enjoyed the most, and largely ignored the rest. As an author, I decided I needed a more nuanced view. I needed to know what I didn’t know.
This was an exercise in going outside my comfort zone. As is typical in life, many discoveries await you at the edges of your comfort zone, and reading more widely has been no different for me than any other adventure. It’s a slog, sometimes…but it’s also a thrill.
Over the course of the last two years, I’ve read tons of bestsellers, some film-to-book adaptations, and several modern sci-fi authors I’d found online but never heard of. I read dated classics, and Hugo Award Winners from the 1950s, and pulp fiction from before that, and comic books for which only seen the film adaptations. I read stories that are out of copyright and older novels that are considered the seed from which all sci-fi has grown. And most of all—I read a lot of my contemporaries.
At the same time, while I was reading, my subconscious was working on another problem. I had grown a small following through my email list and social media, and I was hungry for a deeper way to engage with them more often that didn’t hinge on my slower-paced output of new fiction.
Thus the Book of the Week was born.
I decided to send an email each week to my readers, and in that email recommend a book for them. Occasionally it would be mine, but mostly it would be books I’ve read and loved, and other sci-fi content that I think might entertain readers.
The list below is 2018’s archive. Beginning in January of that year. Looking for something to new to read? If you like science fiction, I’m sure you’ll find something you like below.
Enjoy.
-MG Herron
Austin, TX,
February 7, 2019
New adventures each week!
Join MG Herron’s SFF book club to get sci-fi/fantasy book recommendations like this one in your inbox every Friday.
