2015 New-to-Me Authors

Today's Top Ten Tuesday topic is "Top Ten New to Me Authors I Read in 2015". This should be fun.

I was trying to decide how to organize this list. I thought about trying to list them from best to worst or vice versa. I finally gave up trying to shuffle them around for that exercise and decided to just list them in the order read.

1. Ruth Ozeki - A Tale for the Time Being was the first book I read this year, and it was fabulous.

2. Rainbow Rowell - I read Fangirl back in January because I was hearing so much about this author. It was super cute and the story took me back to my college days.

3. John Scalzi - I read Lock In for my Take 5 presentation last spring. I was hooked. It was a future detective novel in which the main character was a droid controlled by the brain of a man who could no longer use his body.

4. Hannah Kent - Burial Rites book was chosen for a book club meeting this year and it is captivating. The setting of 19th century Iceland is like a character in the story.

5. Emily St. John Mandel - Here's another book I read for the Take 5 presentation. Station Eleven was getting a lot of hype and it was so worth it. It seems like the story is jumping around in time and following a bunch of threads. Then towards the end, it comes together spectacularly.

6. Kirsty Logan - Her first novel The Gracekeepers was like a dream. The world is mostly covered in water and the land people are afraid of the water people. There is a circus bear involved and a girl who buries the dead.

7. Rebecca Skloot - I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for two book clubs this summer. It was a difficult read, because of what happened to Lacks and her family, but it was also well done and fascinating.

8. JoJo Moyes - Moyes has been getting a lot of attention as her formerly British-only books cross the pond. Me Before You might be getting the most hype. It's a contemporary fiction novel about a girl who takes a job as a caretaker for a quadriplegic man.

9. M.L. Stedman - I choose The Light Between Oceans for a library book club book because it had been having some good reviews. It was really good, and presented a moral quandary for the main character. Lots of good discussion on this one.

10. Laura Moriarty - The Chaperone was another book club book which followed the chaperone for Louise Brooks on her first trip to New York. Can't imagine how difficult that would have been. That was really the set up for the real story about that woman's history. I still think about this book.

40% of these books were book club picks, either mine or someone else's. I'd say that means we've got some great pickers.

What are some new authors you read this year?