For most of my life, one of my favorite things to do to relax has been to sit down and read a book. While my taste has changed quite significantly since I started reading and I have less time to do it now, I still love when I get to sit down with a book, so this is a summary of some of my favorites.

One of my favorite genres is epic fantasy, and the Wheel of Time certainly delivers there. It is my single favorite series of all time, and the combination of deep character development, the size of the cast, and the pacing makes every single chapter so good. It slows down a little bit at some points, but rarely for no reason, and it always picks back up to a high point soon after. The series is incredibly long, weighing in at over 4.5 million words, but its so worth it that I've read it twice and am debating a third.

The Stormlight Archive is another of my favorite series, and its another long epic fantasy series. It hits almost as hard as the Wheel of Time's highs, but it has a completely different feel across the entire series. I read it for the first time in my junior year of high school, but just recently completed a reread in anticipation of the fifth book coming out this winter.

One of my other favorite genres is hard science fiction, and it doesn't come much harder than the Three Body Problem. The series is a trilogy, where many of the main characters have scientific background, and backs up its "science" with real science twisted just enough to make the fiction seem like it could work. Its another take on what an alien invasion could look like, but we never actually see the aliens, because they are just on their way the entire series. Instead, it focuses on what happens to humanity in this situation, and is overall a crazy good read.

One of my favorite science fiction authors is Andy Weir. And as much as I love the Martian, I might like Project Hail Mary more. Its another "stranded in space" story, but it has a completely different feel. The narrator wakes up with amnesia, and slowly remembers more of what he has to do and why he's there over the course of the novel, and the balance between these flashbacks and the present is done beautifully. I have no negative comments, its so good that I went through it in one day the first time I read it.