Locus Recommends You Start Reading

Locus has posted the Recommended Reading list from their February issue, and, as usual, it contains neverly everything even remotely worth reading from the previous year.

There are 24 SF novels (including what I thought was a fantasy trilogy), 18 Fantasy novels, 10 First novels, 11 Young Adult novels, 20 Collections, 26 Anthologies, 11 Non-Fiction books, and 10 Art books. Not counting the short fiction -- which would add up to several more book-length works -- that's one hundred and thirty books.

Now, I'm a pretty quick reader, but even I only get through about a hundred to a hundred and twenty "real" books a year -- so just keeping up with the Locus list every year is a full-time job. In fact, it's too much for most people, especially anyone who wants to read a book that isn't SF, Fantasy, or Horror -- I know even expressing such a desire is heresy, but I stand by it.

And, even with all the reading I do in the field, I've only read 29 of these books so far (though I do have another 18 of them already, so I could read them immediately, given time). Even if I read all of that, it's still less than half of the list.

I'm not sure if the lesson here is "we're living in times of abundant Good Stuff" or that "Locus's list is too long and unfocused to be helpful." But it's somewhere in between those two, I bet.