Upgrade by Blake Crouch put his work on my radar. The premise sounded intriguing and I couldn't put the book down. It led me to Dark Matter, Recursion, Pines, and Abandon, of which only Abandon I opted to quit reading. He went from essentially nobody to me to "Ooo, there's a new book coming out!" in the span of this year.

My other surprising hit was getting back into reading comic books and diving into Radiant Black and the associated Massive-Verse stories. It felt like a blend of superhero and Power Rangers style storytelling and parts of it felt very unique and interesting to me (how they handle the main character and where the power of Radiant Black is in the comics releasing now is really cool, trying to avoid spoilers!). It also comes across as a more realistic version of the stories that superhero/PR tell where there's social media and dialogue that comes across as real speech. I think of it akin to Star Trek vs. The Orville, both great but I see the path of how we get from here to the type of world The Orville embodies but the people on Star Trek don't feel exactly like real people by today's standard and it seems that much farther out.