Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I Want To Read Before the Year is Out

Top Ten Tuesday, brought to us by thebrokeandthebookish.com. This week addresses authors I want to read before the year is out. There are so many!

Steph

1. Siobhan Dowd – I don’t even know what title I’d like to read, but I’d like to read something by this Australian authoress. She is mentioned by Patrick Ness at the beginning of A Monster Calls as one of his main inspiriations and or course, the book was hers originally and finished by Ness. I think that reading her will be a great experience.
2. Don Calame – a Canadian author of quite a few books (including Swim the Fly) which has been on my to read list for far too long… Anyway, all of his works have great reviews – and have been recommended to me by my co-workers. :)
3. R.J. Palacio – I really want to read Wonder and so this author makes my list! I gotta get to it, it’s just sitting there staring at me with that eye…
4. Shannon Hale – I have never read this prolific author and I think that I should at least give it a go!
5. Ray Bradbury – I am ashamed to say that I have never read Fahrenheit 451 and I’m the dystopia queen! So here it is, my dystopia pick for this list is a classic. I feel that I am forever catching up on “classics” haha, there are so many!

Janet

1. Nnedi Okorafor – Akata Witch and Who Fears Death look wonderful; time to get to it!
2. Allie Brosh – because, well, the appeal should be obvious. Her drawings and words, which show her own experiences of being human, pluck a resonating chord, proving the maxim that the more specific art is, the more universal it is.
3. Mary Oliver – the snippets of her poems I have come across were so extraordinary that I now have four of her books out from the library. Sometimes my enthusiasm alarms me, especially when there are so many books borrowed by impulse or half-formed plans that I can no longer move easily in my room because of the stacks of books: books on bookshelves, books on boxes, books on the floor, books in odd corners, books on my dresser, books on my desk, books that were on my desk that I had to move to my bed so I could type this sentence. Okay, the situation isn’t quite that bad at the moment. But if I turn my head in any direction, I see books. In the plural. However, to get back to Mary Oliver, I trust that when I stop being intimidated by the BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS everywhere, her poems will be worth having less than four square feet of clear floor.
4. Naomi Novik – for Uprooted.
5. Jill Maclean – whose The Hidden Agenda of Sigrid Sugden recently won the Red Cedar Award in Fiction.

Yash

(Janet beat me to Nnedi Okorafor and Naomi Novik, so let’s pretend they’re on my list too.)

1. Daniel José Older: FIFTEEN MORE DAYS TO SHADOWSHAPER!
2. Cindy Pon: I have been hearing a lot of good things about Serpentine. (And look how pretty the cover is!)
3. Siobhan Vivian: She co-wrote the Burn for Burn trilogy with Jenny Han and I need this series in my life.
4. Nicola Yoon: Still haven’t read Everything, Everything … 
5. R. J. Anderson: I keep hearing interesting stuff about Quicksilver but that happens to be the second book in a series so … I guess … I’m getting into another series … ??? How did this happen to me? Again?!

Nafiza

*looks a bit panicked* I can’t think of any. I’ve read a lot. Wait. Okay, I’m sure there are some. I mean, we’re talking about reading authors for the first time this year, right?

1. Roxane Gay: Bad Feminist. I need to read this collection of essays. I have it on my shelf!
2. Jonathan Auxier: He’s a Canadian writer of stupendous middlegrade fiction and I have somehow managed to not have read any of his books despite owning one of them. Must rectify that.
3. Padma Venkatraman: I’m going to read A Time to Dance for verse novel month!
4. Mariko Nagai: Dust of Eden in particular. I’m reading that this week.
5. Kwame Alexander: The Crossover. This, too, is for verse novel month so you’ll get to see me talk about these books.