My bookshelf, alongside being scattered across innumerable shelves and cubbyholes around the house, is characterised by the books most beloved to me (so those are the ones I’m going to cover in this blog post). However, due to the spread of genres and styles my taste tends to encompass, I’ve decided use this time to encourage you to broaden your taste outside your usual genres – read something unfamiliar.
This article is formatted with a top three for each genre, although it brings me great pain to miss out so many wonderful novels and collections. Please enjoy perusing your favourite genres, as well as the genres you avoid or prefer to read around, and I hope you find something worthy of brightening up your 2026.
First, because it’s probably my favourite category (a sentence which feels vaguely like choosing a favourite child), is speculative and science fiction.
1. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
The first novel in the Chaos Walking trilogy, each book deals with different themes around coming of age, and what it means to be human (pretty basic stuff, right?). The Knife of Never Letting Go is set in a new, alien world as humans continue to colonise further away from Earth. Todd Hewitt, our young protagonist leads the book’s adventure plot, following a journey of self-discovery and pondering the terrible subject of violence being an inherent characteristic of human nature.
2. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Another young boy suffers from the manipulations of adults, who wield his circumstances against him. Scott Card creates a frighteningly straightforward depiction of nationalised Earth as a meritocracy, and of eight-year-old super-intelligent Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggins. In a practical exploration of how to ruin a child’s life and also make them a god among men, Scott Card shows readers what not to do. It was a true pleasure to be so outwitted by this fictional teenager.
3. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
One of the most surprising and beautiful recollections of the First World War I have ever read. As in most things, Vonnegut breaks from the mould and surprises the reader with a roster of alien abductions, chronological mischief and a bedridden, failing sci-fi author. Slaughterhouse Five is autobiography at its greatest, and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to learn about the human experience of coping with incalculable loss.
Classics. Any bookshelf would feel intellectually incomplete without some classics. My preference in ‘classic’ literature is slightly unorthodox, however. I tend to steer away from the Brontë sisters and Dickens, instead going for the likes of Waugh, Vonnegut and Márquez.
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
I finished this book most recently, and I still haven’t quite concluded my book-finishing grieving period. Reading this in English is, I’m sure, nowhere near as rich as reading it in the original Spanish, but that didn’t stop me from finding the entire novel lovable. The most accurate depiction of the simultaneous burden and miracle of family, the story follows 100 years of the Buendía family. As a reader you grow with the children, watch them fall in love, suffer and cause tragedy, argue, and love one another (occasionally too much). This book is perfectly curated mess, and I love it all the more as a result.
5. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
In a novel that is both surreal and reflective, Waugh creates a sprawling narrative with a cast of glittering, esoteric characters (looking at you, Aloysius), and a series of beautiful locations. What begins as a tender, homoerotically charged relationship between two boys at Oxford University in the early 1900s builds into a life-long tangle of hurt and love and Catholic guilt all coming to an abrupt halt as war is declared across Europe.
6. Perfume by Patrick Süskind
Chilling but wonderfully lyrical, Süskind brings the reader alongside a man with a superpowered sense of smell, set on becoming the world’s greatest perfumier. The novel is far from sweet or satirical however, bringing some of the darkest aspects of the human character together with enormous ambition.
Last but absolutely not least, fantasy. I’ve spent my life surrounded by fantasy books, so it was difficult to choose, but I think the three I’ve gone for represent the variety the genre has to offer the best (while offering credit to the authors that truly made fantasy what it is today).
7. The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula K. Le Guin
It seems a little strange to have Le Guin on this list as a fantasy author, when her sci-fi has been just as much if not more influential over the years. Still, The Earthsea Quartet, with its creeping melancholia and dazzling descriptive passages never fail to inspire me. In 2025, I visited an exhibition of her maps called ‘The Word for World‘ – supposedly, Le Guin began her world building process with map drawing, and in stories like The Tombs of Atuan, second in the Quartet, it shows in the best possible way.
8. Magyk by Angie Sage
A novel intended for children and first installation in a series of seven, Sage’s prose is energetic and alive with humour. Quirky but brilliant world-building surrounds a story of family, loyalty and overcoming darkness in spite of it. I read this book at 20 years of age and would heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest in good stories and good fun. The characterful hand illustrations from Mark Zug don’t hurt, either.
9. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
The best book I could think of to round of this list. A prelude to one of the greatest fantasy books of all time, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit is a beautiful fantasy romp through a safer Middle-Earth than in Tolkien’s later books, with an excellent array of dwarves for company on an epic (but comparatively mundane) quest to the Lonely Mountain. The legacy of this novel speaks for itself, and I implore you to read it if you haven’t before.
So there you have it, my bookshelf. As mentioned before, there are a hundred other books I could mention — a good deal of them children’s books (C. S. Lewis, Cressida Cowell, you name it, I’ve read and loved it) — and lots of excellent stories in each. I am an avid supporter of a varied bookshelf so please, if you spotted something here that takes your fancy, go out and find it in a second-hand shop, borrow it from a friend or from a library and read something unusual.
To finish on, my favourite short story of all time — The Dechronization of Sam McGruder by George Gaylord Simpson. A story written by a palaeontologist in the margins of his diaries and published by his daughter, this book is everything literature should be: a person sharing their unabashed passion through the most wonderfully unhinged 170-page sci-fi survivalist novel. Happy reading!
Rachel Bulman (she/her) holds a BA in English and Creative Writing as well as an MA in Publishing from the University of Exeter, specialising in interactive and children’s fiction. Her written work has appeared in The Book of Choices, Velvet Fields, and Exeposé, among others. Find her on Instagram @worm.can.read, through her online portfolio, or ask the bridge troll who taught him his riddles three.
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