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Best of 2019

Posted: January 31, 2020 in None
Best of 2019

I’m not gonna sugar coat it. 2019 hit us pretty hard here at EBR, and I find it somehow apropos that I’m sitting here writing the content for this page while I’m slowly and inevitably sliding down into clutching grasp of a cold. Just kind of puts the cherry on top of things, you know? If you happened to notice those weeks in 2019 that we failed to meet our goals, please trust that we were at the very least always banging away at that pile of books, trying to share our oh-so-vaulted opinions with you our reading public. And if you didn’t notice… well… thank you very much for not noticing. 🙂

Below is our list of the best fantasy books and best science fiction books that we read here at EBR. Honestly, we should have read more horror than we did. I’m still trying to finagle a way to get Adam Nevill’s most recent book. There’s a lot of great fiction out there. So, this list probably doesn’t fit everyone’s bill, but they definitely hit ours.
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Best Science Fiction Books

Posted: December 6, 2019 in None
Best Science Fiction Books

This is a list of books that we consider to be the best Science Fiction books we’ve ever read. In making this list, we’re not trying to dictate what the best Science Fiction books ever might be. Although this list would likely overlap with that one to some extent, were we to make such a list. But we’re not. So there, Mr. Internet. Still, there’s a wide timeline that we’re trying to cover here, so don’t be surprised if there are some old ones on this list.
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Best Fantasy Books

Posted: June 10, 2019 in None
Best Fantasy Books

These books are absolutely the best Fantasy books we’ve ever read. You might notice that nowhere in that statement did we qualify this list as being “the best fantasy books of all time”. That would just be silly. We’re not trying to elucidate any differences between The Lord of the Rings and The Worm Ourboros, or how one might apply to them a comparison of books in A Song of Ice and Fire or The Wheel of Time. Suffice it to say, there are some books out there with History (capital H), but we’re just going to talk about those that have EBR history (lowercase h), because those are the ones we really care about. Yeah?
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Best of 2017

Posted: February 26, 2019 in None
Best of 2017

2017 was just as awesome of a year as we’d ever had, but the first part of 2018, which is when this page should have first been published, was a wicked wild ride. What with launching off on our own and pulling in some new reviewers, things were busy around here to say the least. Suffice it to say that this annual update to the site was overlooked at the time, possibly pushed to the back burner. Thinking back about that time of our lives and the life of our website… I don’t blame us at all for skipping over this one. 🙂 We can only hope that you’ll forgive us for this small indiscretion and accept our humble apologies along with our list of favorites for the year.
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Best of 2018

Posted: January 10, 2019 in None
Best of 2018

2018 was a bit of a crazy year for us here at EBR. We started by throwing off the shackles and supremely annoying ads of Wordpress.com, and leaving behind a website that was doing essentially nothing for us with regards to helping us find more readers.

The new site has been a labor of love, and a copious number of hours have been spent by the team in hacking and slashing the reviews we’ve posted over the last ten years (yeah, ten years people!) and trying to figure out how best to restructure the site to make both our readers and search engines (Google) love us ever more.

We held a contest for and opened our doors to a couple new reviewers — Yea, new reviewers! — and have loved what they’ve been able to add to the site. We’ve tackled in earnest the social media sphere and have picked up a growing number of followers there on multiple different platforms. From the look of things, most of the rocky is done and over, and the future is looking up, up, up from here.
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Vanessa’s Top Ten

Posted: December 11, 2018 in None

Posting my Top Ten cuz people have asked and, yes, they are listed in a particular order (however they’re subject to change should something better come along)–my favorite is listed first, because I’m not mean. I’m also not going to claim that any of these are The Best Books Anyone Should Read, but if you agree with my reviews, you would probably enjoy these, too.

Best of 2009

Posted: February 12, 2018 in None
Best of 2009

OK, we got called out on it, so to prove that we respond to almost ALL requests. Here is the Top 10. We didn’t particularly want to do one, since we only had 4 months of publishing reviews before the year was over, and there were only 26 or 27 books in our category Books We Like at the time. But here we are… doing what you wanted, because we are just that great.
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Best of 2016

Posted: January 12, 2017 in None
Best of 2016

2016 was a solid year for us speculative fiction book lovers (and movie-goers and TV bingers…ah, what a wonderful world we live in), which means that the Best of 2016 has some seriously excellent volumes of sheer awesomeness. And here at EBR we should know, because we participated in Mark Lawrence’s Blog-Off and read some of the worst the self-pubbed world has to offer–the following are golden in comparison. Plus we have a list of what we’re looking forward to this year so you can be ready to pre-order. Here you’re sure to find many hours of reading bliss.
Best Books of 2016:
The Mortal Tally by Sam Sykes – EBR Review
The Spider’s War – EBR Review
Babylon’s Ashes – EBR Review
The Liberation – EBR Review
Poseidon’s Wake – EBR Review
Borderline by Mishell Baker – EBR Review
The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Astor by Scott Wilibanks – EBR Review
Freedom of the Mask by Robert McCammon – EBR […]Read the rest of this page »

Best of 2015

Posted: January 18, 2016 in None
Best of 2015

Here at EBR 2015 was a great year. Not only did we get through a record number of books, but we also participated in Mark Lawrence’s Blog-Off and were nominated for a Hugo. Again. We are that awesome. It was hard to limit the best books from 2015 because there were so many, but we do this for y’all so you can spend your time reading the best books possible. The books aren’t in any particular order and of course we didn’t read every book published this year. If we missed something, definitely leave us a comment.
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Best of 2014

Posted: January 29, 2015 in None
Best of 2014

Alrighty. 2014 somehow vanished. It was a wild year for all of us here at EBR, both professionally and personally. We’ll get into some of that down below, and in a separate post. Anywho! The Best of 2014! Yowsa, we had some killer novels this year. As usual, we don’t present the books in any order. And there are gonna be some books here that we haven’t even reviewed yet (again, this year was a bit crazy). And we didn’t even come close to reading everything… so feel free to poke and prod us in the comments about stuff you don’t see on this list!
THE BEST OF 2014
THE THICKET by Joe Lansdale (Amazon — EBR Review)
THE WIDOW’S HOUSE by Daniel Abraham
THE BROKEN EYE by Brent Weeks (Amazon — EBR Review)
SKIN GAME by Jim Butcher (Amazon — EBR Review)
DUST AND LIGHT by Carol Berg (Amazon — EBR Review)
THE RIVER OF SOULS by Robert McCammon (Amazon — EBR Review)
STELES OF THE SKY by Elizabeth Bear (Amazon […]Read the rest of this page »