This is KAMWyland and you are listening to the to the 412th episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast. This week I finally did something I've been wanting to do for a long time.

I drastically rearranged my bookcase. In the past I've been notoriously

obsessive-compulsive about organizing my books first by fiction or non-fiction, then alphabetically by author or last name.

But since I'm remodeling my office, among other things, this year it felt like a good time for a change.

So I went all radical and decided to arrange them aesthetically, mostly by

spine color, some upright, some piled on their sides, some with their neutral colored pages side out, and none of them with

dust jackets. That's right, I committed the ultimate sacrilege of removing all my dust jackets. I couldn't quite bring myself to throw them away though and now

they have their own special little tub in the top corner of my closet just in case they

changed my mind. In the meantime though I'm incredibly happy with how the bookcase turned out.

Not only is it nice just for change but all those hardcover books with their gold foil titles look simply delicious.

Which makes it appropriate that today we're going to revisit my top books from 2017.

When you're a writer, stories are life.

You can't create them without ingesting them.

That's why Stephen King famously said,

if you don't have time to read,

you don't have the time or the tools to write.

Simple as that.

That's why this annual look back at my top books of 2017 is always one of my favorite posts that I do on my website. For better or worse, however, this year was the worst reading year in my entire life in terms of quantity.

I said that last year when I'd read only 80, but this year I really mean it. I've topped out at just 42 books

read, which for me seems like a really dismal number. The good news however is

that amongst those 42 books were some really good ones. So following is my list of my

top five favorite books in both fiction and non-fiction with a few bonus writing craft titles

...