Locus magazine's February issue, with its impressively thorough look at the previous year in SFF publishing, is in the mail now. And up on the Locus Online website, taken from that issue, is their fabled (and absolutely enormous) 2006 Recommended Reading List.

They list:

• 21 SF novels (including Jo Walton's Farthing, Peter Watts's Blindsight, and Charles Stross's Glasshouse),
• 20 Fantasy novels (including Robin Hobb's Forest Mage, Greg Keyes's The Blood Knight, and Tim Powers's Three Days To Never),
• 12 first novels (including several favorites of mine: Naomi Novik's Temeraire, Alan Campbell's Scar Night, and, above all, Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora),
• 11 YA books (including Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith),
• 30 collections (including Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things twice, and Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu only once),
• 25 anthologies (including the SFBC originals Escape From Earth, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, and One Million A.D., edited by Dozois solo),
• 13 non-fiction books (including, of course, Julie Phillips's amazing biography James Tiptree, Jr.)
• and 14 art books (including The Fabulous Women of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell and Edward Gorey's Amphigorey Again).

For those of you who ran out of fingers a while ago, that's one hundred and forty-six books (let's leave aside the short fiction for now). Even if you read a book every day (like I just finished doing), and started today, you would be finish up on June 27th. And most of us (even me, honestly: I cheated quite a bit) , don't read that quickly.

So I don't want to hear anyone say that there's nothing good to read...