Best Sci-Fi Fantasy Books With Anthony Jeselnik | House of Reads

Joanna Robinson (0:16)

Hello, and welcome back to House of R. I'm Joanna Robinson, and it's kind of just me here today with a bunch of books. This is the long-promised House of Reads episode where I'm going to be talking about a lot of books that I love, that I want to recommend, and we got a lot of listener recommendations as well. So we're going to go through these piles of books that I have in front of me if you're watching this.

Quick programming reminders just in general. Next week we only have one pod. Mallory will be here, of course, and we'll be talking about Wandavision. We're doing a Wandavision re-watch in advance of Vision Quest, so that's something we're really excited about. You can send us emails about Wandavision or books I forgot to mention.

You can send those to hobbitsanddragons.gmail.com, as always. Follow us on social at House of R Pod. Follow the pod wherever you get your pods, et cetera, et cetera. I will be talking about these books. We also have a guest on the pod this week. I'm really excited. Anthony Jeselnik, who has just launched a new Ringer podcast called Jeselnik Book Club. He's been doing the Jeselnik Book Club for a while, but he just launched the podcast, so we will have a section at the end of this pod where Anthony and I talk about some of his sci-fi fantasy recommendations. What's really cool about that actually is that he and I have similar, but somewhat different reading tastes. A lot of his recommendations were ones that I had either heard of and not gotten to, or maybe hadn't even heard of at all.

I think he's got a lot of out-of-the-box recommendations that nonetheless fall under the bucket of sci-fi, fantasy, genre storytelling. It's really exciting to have a different voice on the pod to make some recommendations of books that you might not have heard of.

That is the plan today. We've got a couple of different categories. Then I'm just going to go through the books here and recommend them to you and stare down the camera while I do that if you're watching this at home. If you want to know about the books that we're recommending, we will have a list of all of them in our show notes. Shout out to Carlos Chiriboga for his tireless work on this podcast. We will have a list of at least the books that I am recommending and talking about at length. They will be in the show notes. You can get those on Spotify and on YouTube. If you're just listening to this, I will be just talking about books so you can always listen to this, but there is a visual component if you're watching this as well at home.

I've never done a talk at a camera for a really long time podcast, so we're just going to go on this journey together surrounded by our friends, the books.

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Joanna Robinson (3:39)

We're going to start off on a high note, with what I'm calling the best books I've read this year, and I'm going to start with a slight cheat.

That's because this book, The Everlasting by Alex Harrow, I did technically read at the end of last year, came out October 2025, but it just won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, so I thought that I should talk about it. We've talked about it a little bit on the pod before, Mallory's read it as well, she really, really loved it. But The Everlasting is a complicated time travel story about a star-crossed mystery, a reedy professor, and then a badass lady knight sort of in the vein of Bran of Tarth. And basically, it's set in an alternate reality where he has read of her legend, he has studied it, he is a historian, he has studied her legend, and then he goes back in time and meets her, and then there's just this back and forth mystery as they loop sort of Groundhog's Day style through this epic to figure out exactly what happened in the past. And it is just incredibly complicated, but actually emotionally perfect. And I just loved this book, and we're going to talk about Alix Harrow again in another category. But everlasting, Alix Harrow.