“All the books are the same nowadays.”

I hear this often, and while I think there is plenty of room to look critically at the traditional publishing industry and market changes…I think it’s a shallow analysis.

If we’re to talk about how “BookTok ruined reading” (another similar claim I don’t subscribe to because again, I think it’s a narrow understanding of what’s happening in publishing), then we need to talk about how algorithms shape perceptions. And while those algorithms certainly favor certain discourses and topics and perpetuate biases and injustices (Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Nobel is an excellent read on this), consumers do not engage passively. Every act of engagement feeds that algorithm, and if that engagement is done without critical awareness, a commitment to diversity of thought, and without effort put into seeking out a variety of stories, then certainly, it might appear as though all the books are the same or that the online book community is homogenous in preference.

With a little bit of effort, however, it becomes clear that fresh, singular, subversive, exemplary stories are out there.

Here are a few wonderfully unique stories for your TBR:

Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill
Herculine by Grace Byron
The Reformatory by Tanarive Due
A Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft