Recommend the 20 best books you've read in the last five years

donutage: A brilliant webcomic series concerning 6 school-aged "mystery kids" investigating vaguely supernatural events in the town of Tackleford, England. This case, along with volume 7 (The Case of the Forked Road), is one of the high points, but it is well worth reading the series from the beginning. Although each case is fairly self-contained, they take place chronologically (in consecutive school terms), so there is longer-term character development going on as well.

donutage: Another webcomic series collection, also involving British school kids. GC Is more solidly in the fantasy genre, but mixes in elements of science-fiction, mild horror, humor, and mystery. This volume is the culmination of several long-term dramatic arcs: it definitely helps to start from the beginning.

donutage: Begins confusingly in media res, but once I got going I had trouble putting this down. The central plot concerning occult conspiracy theories has become increasingly and distressingly relevant, but the novel is also an examination of intellectual integrity and the duties of fiction.

donutage: It's a "classic" for a reason. Ambitious, profound, playful, at times bizarre. Like many, I read this back in high school and was somewhat flummoxed by the "boring" "digressions" about whale anatomy and sailing ships. When I re-read it a couple years ago, I was more willing to take the sprawling narrative on its own terms and found it infinitely enjoyable.

donutage: An informative book on practical science cleverly disguised by a veneer of science fiction and Ryan North's signature brand of wry humor. Do you know how and why soap works? I didn't until reading this book, and that's just one of hundreds of actually useful bits of knowledge it contains.

donutage: I read (and loved) the Hitchhiker's Guide books ages ago, but didn't bother with the Dirk Gentley novels until my teen son and I decided to read them together, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find them delightful. Of the two, the first (this one) is probably has the more coherent plot, but both are full of Adams's unique brand of oddball humor.

donutage: I made a point of completing my reading of Austen's novels recently. Pride and Prejudice remains my favorite, and there's much to be said for all the others, but this one stood out to me because it is so different from its siblings. Essentially a parody of the popular gothic novel, it is full of delightful narratorial asides about what *ought* to happen according to the genre's conventions and how this novel will fail to deliver them.

donutage: A history of the video game in graphic novel format. The story itself is fascinating enough, involving as it does the intersection of the nascent gaming industry and late Cold War-era international business, and it is served well by Brown's spare art and deft storytelling.

donutage: I read a bunch of Sherlock Holmes recently, and it's hard to single out any one of them, but I found this novel-length work especially satisfying as it takes its time setting up and then unraveling its mystery.

donutage: An inventive and, by the end, surprisingly moving story of an orphan raised in and by a graveyard. Categorized as a YA title, which is understandable, but I consider it also a meditation on parenthood.

donutage: I'm not sure how many people are represented by the Venn diagram intersection of design nerds and people obsessed with the infamous Milgram experiments, but apparently I am one of them.