Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, featuring a different top 10 theme each week. This week’s topic is Top Ten New-To-Me Authors I Read In 2013. What fun! I “met” so many authors this year for the first time. Here are the best of the bunch:

Note: If you want to know more about any of the books mentioned here, click on the links to see my reviews.

1) Bee Ridgway: One of my very favorite books of 2013 was Bee Ridgway’s debut novel The River of No Return. It’s time travel plus historical fiction plus secret societies plus mystery plus romance… seriously, just overall excellent and so worth reading! I can’t wait for the sequel!

2) Rainbow Rowell: 2013 seems to have been the year of Rainbow Rowell! Eleanor & Park got everyone’s attention, and then we all gobbled up Attachments and Fangirl as well. Wonderful characters, wonderful writing!

3) Graeme Simsion: The Rosie Project made me so happy! I happened to read this terrific books right in the midst of a bunch of particularly dark reading choices, and I then went on to pretty much force The Rosie Project into the hands of everyone I know.

4) Hilary Mantel: Call me late to the party, but I’d never made time for Hilary Mantel’s award winning Tudor-era books until I went on vacation this past summer. Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies are simply amazing literary accomplishments. And now I know what all the hoopla was about!

5) Jasper Fforde: Another one of those authors that I always thought I’d enjoy, but just never got around to… until this year! I finally read The Eyre Affair, and thought it was great fun. The Tuesday Next series is definitely one I’ll keep coming back to.

6) Brian K. Vaughan: I’m just in awe. I love this man’s inventiveness and the skill he uses in laying out a complex story through the medium of graphic novels. Y: The Last Man is one of the best series I’ve ever read, and I really enjoyed the first two volumes in his new Saga series as well.

7) Gayle Forman: I loved Just One Day and Just One Year, and now really want to go back and read her earlier books, If I Stay and Where She Went.

8) William Kuhn: Mrs. Queen Takes The Train is a delight. I look forward to whatever he writes next!

9) Jojo Moyes: The Girl You Left Behind was my first Jojo Moyes book, but it certainly won’t be my last! I’ve recently picked up copies of Me Before You and The Last Letter From Your Lover, and can’t wait to read them both.

10) C. S. Lewis: Talk about old school! Finally, I’ve been to Narnia. After a woefully deficient childhood, this was the year when I made up for what I was missing by reading the seven Narnia books with my son. And even though we probably could have skipped the last one, all in all I’d say the series was a big success for both of us.

Which authors did you discover in 2013?

I can’t wait to see who I’ll meet in 2014!

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