Here are some of my favorite books read in 2013.

As usual, I devoured a lot of fantasy, with Neil Gaiman’s darkly beautiful fictionalized memoir The Ocean at the End of the Lane at the top of my list. I loved Rachel Hartman’s dragon-themed Seraphina and seriously cannot wait for the sequel. Holly Black’s much-anticipated vampire story The Coldest Girl in Coldtown may not have measured up to her Curse Workers trilogy (which I adored), but it changed my mind about vampire fiction, and that’s saying something!

My copy of Maggie Stiefvater’s vivid and breathtaking novel The Scorpio Races got bookmarked to death. Stiefvater is an extraordinarily controlled and visual writer. Like Holly Black, Stiefvater is worth rereading, just so you can learn from her technique. I also enjoyed Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, mainly for the world-building, and I absolutely treasured Grace Lin’s middle-grade fantasy Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. Lin’s novel has a feisty young heroine and a dragon who can’t fly, but it’s really a beautiful meditation on gratitude. Another middle-grade novel, Will Alexander’s Goblin Secrets, has orphans, floods, and goblins, not to mention exquisite language. I really liked that one as well.

It’s good to get out of one’s comfort zone every now and then, to read something completely different. So last year I read Wesley Chu’s delightful alien adventure The Lives of Tao, which is science fiction/martial arts/action/comedy, as far as I can tell. Not the sort of thing I usually read, but I had great fun.

Oh, and I actually read at least one novel last year that wasn’t speculative fiction: John Green’s bestselling romantic tragedy The Fault in Our Stars. I cried endlessly, of course. When I get my strength back, I’ll read it again.