The writer Paul Graham summed up the problem: searching for the good books. “There are a huge number of books and only a small percentage of them are really good, so reading means searching,” he notes. “Someone who tries to read but doesn't understand about the need to search will end up reading bad books, and will wonder why people who read a lot like to do something so boring.”

I like speculative fiction, sometimes called “science fiction” or SF. I like to think about the future. One problem is that a lot of SF books are badly written. In fact, that’s a problem with books in general. Most of them are terrible.

So I am delighted when I find a really thorough list like this one: Reactor magazine’s list of the “most iconic speculative fiction books of the 21st century.” (I’ll even forgive that absurd phrase “most iconic.”)