Every reader who has traveled far enough, across genres and across more authors than they could ever name, eventually settles into a handful of favorites. The authors whose names alone are enough to make you pick up a book without glancing at the blurb. The ones who can announce a new release and you’ll trust them with your whole heart, buying it and reading it without knowing a single thing about what’s inside, because you already know it will be great. Or the ones where, if they sell all their books in bulk, you’ll buy them because you know that every book written by these authors never fails.

For me, these are those authors. Somewhere along the way, they shaped how I read and my reading preferences. Maybe their writing style and the themes they raise simply touched something in me at the phase of life I happened to be living through.

Fredrik Backman

Backman writes wisdom and wraps it in beautiful words. His characters are rich and full of character, moving through life dynamics that feel close to the world around us. He shifts between topics and characters so smoothly that I never catch the seams. One page I’m simply following a story, and the next I realize I’ve been learning and reflecting on a dozen things at once. He never repeats himself, either. Every book arrives with a fresh idea and a story I didn’t see coming.

I’m so in love with his writing that I find myself back on his Instagram profile just to read every caption he posts. His profile is the first place I visit whenever I open the app, because it’s refreshing to find writing of that quality in a space where so few people can write with his kind of brilliance. There, you can read him in his rawest, most original form, with no publisher standing in between. I love that he shares his family, his wit, and his charming dog. What a cure it is for the days I’m longing for one of his books.

My Reviews of Fredrik Backman’s Books:

• My Friends
• A Man Called Ove
• Bear Town
• The Deal of a Lifetime and Other Stories
• Things My Son Needs to Know about The World

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Kimmerer knows living things the way few people ever do, and fewer still can share the beauty of nature with the kind of brilliance she brings to it. She loves what she writes about just as deeply, and you can feel that love in every line. Her knowledge and her affection pour into her words together, and the result makes me want to find every book she’s written and read each one slowly. She has a rare gift for drawing analogies between the wisdom held in nature and the ordinary things we already understand. It’s charming and genius all at once, so much so that I often find myself pausing, sitting with the moment whenever her words leave me stunned.

My Reviews of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Books:

• Braiding Sweetgrass
• The Serviceberry
• Gathering Moss
• The Democracy of Species

Elif Shafak

Shafak carries her characters across time and across regions, and somehow makes every one of them feel close. She writes about cities the way a historian and a poet might if they worked side by side, showing how history layers richness into a single place. Her words remind us how vulnerable life is, how fragile we are as human beings, and how strangely life tends to unfold. Reading her is insightful, refreshing, enlightening, and humbling all at once.

My Reviews of Elif Shafak’s Books:

• There Are Rivers in the Sky
• The Forty Rules of Love
• The Island of Missing Trees
• 10 Minutes 28 Seconds in This World
• How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division
• Black Milk

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Looking back, across every phase of my life where I kept reading anyway, this list has never stayed still. It shifts here and there, because every author carries their own themes and their own questions, and whichever one speaks to the phase I’m living through tends to become my newest favorite.

If you haven’t met these writers yet, I hope one of these names lingers long enough to become the next book in your hands.

I hope this post becomes a way to track the authors I love, and why I love and relate to them. Someday the reader I grow into will look back on this record and be glad I kept it.

Stay around, and check back on the writers I fall for along my reading journey.