Books my friends have recommended to me

Middle of last month I was purchasing a few things on amazon to bring to the US for friends at Christmas, and was about 3GBP short of getting free shipping. So of course I did the sensible thing: I asked my FB friends for book recommendations so that I could spend an extra 20GBP buying books in order to save 3GBP in shipping. But instead of any old book recommendations, I asked people for the best book they'd read in the previous year (with the option of telling me why they were recommending it, but not required). I got a huge response (and within a few hours had purchased Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy which had gotten a number of independent recommendations; I'm nearly done with the last one, and if the rest of the books recommended me to are as good as these, I'll be quite happy), and since searching through old FB posts for book recommendations is inconvenient, I've collected them all here:

• Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart.
• Anghelides, Peter, Warship (Blake's 7).
• Archer, Jeffrey, The Clifton Chronicles.
• Backman, Fredrik, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She is Sorry.
• Barry, John M., The Great Influenza.
• Beard, Mary, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.
• Bergman, S. Bear, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You and Blood, Marriage, Wine, and Glitter.
• Blessed, Brian, Absolute Pandemonium.
• Bronte, Charlotte, Villette.
• Bryson, Bill, At Home: A Short History of Private Life.
• Bujold, Lois McMaster, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen.
• Bujold, Lois McMaster, The Warrior's Apprentice.
• Bujold, Lois McMaster, Shards of Honor and Barrayar.
• Butcher, Jim, The Aeronaut's Windlass.
• Chambers, Robert W., The King in Yellow.
• Clarke, Stephen, 1000 Years of Annoying the French.
• Cline, Ernest, Ready Player One.
• Cornell, Paul, The Lost Child of Lychford.
• Doerr, Anthony, All the Light We Cannot See.
• Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose.
• Evanovich, Janet, The Stephanie Plum Series.
• Fisher, Catherine, Incarceron.
• Frey, James, A Million Little Pieces.
• Gibson, William, The Peripheral.
• Gradin, Temple, Animals Make Us Human.
• Graebner, Debt: The First 5000 Years.
• Hobb, Robin, Elderling Saga.
• Hobb, Robin, Soldier Son trilogy.
• Hope, Anna, Wake.
• Ishiguro, Kazuo, The Buried Giant.
• Jackson, Shirley, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
• Jemisin, N.K., The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate [[Review of The Fifth Season]].
• Kingfisher, T., The Raven and the Reindeer.
• Kowal, Mary Robinette, The Ghost Talkers.
• Leckie, Ann, Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy. [[Review of Ancillary Justice; of Ancillary Sword.]]
• Le Guin, Ursula K., A Wizard of Earthsea.
• Maguire, Seanan, Every Heart a Doorway.
• Mason, Haven, Rainbow Gold.
• Melville, Herman, Moby Dick.
• Miller, Laura, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia.
• Moore, Alan, Jerusalem.
• Novik, Naomi, Uprooted.
• North, Claire, The Sudden Appearance of Hope.
• Oates, Joyce Carol, Blonde.
• O'Brien, Stacey, Wesley the Owl.
• O'Farrell, John, An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: (or 2000 Years Of Upper Class Idiots In Charge).
• Okorafor, Nnedi, Phoenix Rising. [[I started off with Binti, which has been elsewhere recommended to me. I reviewed it here.]]
• O'Malley, Daniel, The Rook and its sequel The Stiletto.
• Pushkin, Alexander, Evgeny Onegin.
• Reynolds, Alistair, Blue Remembered Earth and sequels.
• Riddell, Chris, Goth Girl.
• Robertson, Al, Crashing Heaven.
• Rovelli, Carlo, 7 Brief Lessons on Physics.
• Samatar, Sofia, Winged Histories.
• Scalzi, John, Redshirts.
• Schiff, Staci, Cleopatra.
• Schulz, Anne, Essen und Trinken im Mittelalter (1000-1300).
• Simsion, Graham, The Rosie Project.
• Smith, Patti, We Were Just Kids.
• Smollett, trans., Gil Blas.
• Stross, Charles, The Atrocity Archives.
• Vermes, Timur, Er ist wieder da/Look Who's Back.
• Walton, Jo, The Just City.
• Wiesel, Elie, Night.
• Willis, Connie, The Doomsday Book.
• Woolfit, Susan, Idle Women.
• Zeh, Juli, Treideln.
• (author unknown), The True Story of the Pirate Long John Silver.

Whoa. That was a lot longer than it seemed when it was just a bunch of comments on an FB post.

Edited to add: I will add comments and links to my reviews of them over the course of the year. These comments will be [[in double brackets]].