Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the afterlife and if it’s real. It’s always been hard for me to completely believe in it. I can be skeptical about everything, particularly mystical things. Perhaps because I had learned early on in school that having a spiritual side meant you weren’t as intelligent as other people, and intelligent was what I most wanted to be. The unspoken/spoken law of most academic settings is that to know better is to know that real knowledge has nothing to do with faith. (This is, in part, what my poem in the Review’s Winter issue is about.) 

Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy” is one of my go-to anthems when I want to think about the purpose of life and what it means to believe beyond plain knowledge. Prince has always been a kind of spiritual guide to me. One of my first poetry chapbooks was named Alphabets & Portraits. For the epigraph, I chose the opening lines of his song “Alphabet St.” as a reminder of what miraculous things poetry can do (“I’m going down to Alphabet Street / I’m gonna crown the first girl that I meet / I’m gonna talk so sexy / She’ll want me from my head to my feet”). These days, the opening monologue of “Let’s Go Crazy” gets to me especially:

Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today
To get through this thing called life
Electric word life, it means forever and that’s a mighty long time
But I’m here to tell you, there’s something else
The afterworld, a world of never-ending happiness
You can always see the sun, day or night
So when you call up that shrink in Beverly Hills
You know the one, Dr. Everything’ll Be Alright
Instead of asking him how much of your time is left?
Ask him how much of your mind, baby
‘Cause in this life things are much harder than in the afterworld
This life you’re on your own
And if the elevator tries to bring you down
Go crazy, punch a higher floor

The song’s upbeat rhythm and the salaciousness of his dig at that overpriced therapist always get my blood pumping when I’m down. I love the possessed elevator in the song, ready to bring you down to hell (or to a life full of low vibrations, which could be the same thing). Who doesn’t strive to “punch a higher floor” daily? When I hear Prince’s encouraging words, I too want to rise above all the bullshit of existence.

Everybody in the New Wave–nostalgia hotel has their phones out, which makes me pretty much like everybody else. After breezing past the lobby desk, I peek around: slate colors, fresh leather. There are scented candles burning somewhere. There’s a coffee bar selling things at New York prices, and while I wait for what will be a bitter, strong, iced $5.50 Americano, I see them: maybe 1,500 antique books, lined up in a custom black bookcase that’s about twenty feet tall.

In their latest show, Fixer Upper: The Hotel, the home-and-lifestyle reality stars Joanna and Chip Gaines renovate and redesign the Karem Hotel in downtown Waco, Texas, into what they name the Hotel 1928. (The original hotel was built in 1928.) The Gaines family struck gold in the 2010s with their house-flipping show Fixer Upper, and they eventually outgrew HGTV to form their own network, Magnolia. What’s not to like about the duo? Joanna Gaines looks like a movie star, and she’s unreasonably charming. And Chip is a dang goofball! Their dynamic onscreen is instantly recognizable, harkening back to classic sitcom marriages—loud, foolish husbands with extraordinary wives. Joanna barely bats an eye when Chip shows up in the first episode in a bellboy uniform just for some fun. The pair decided that their hotel lobby needed a library, and upon Joanna’s request for “a ton of books,” Chip purchased around 300,000, the entire collection of Larry McMurtry, the Texan writer who died in 2021. McMurtry spent a lifetime collecting books—more time collecting than writing, even. He opened a used-and-rare bookstore called Booked Up in Washington, D.C., in 1971; by the eighties, he had amassed enough books to outpace Georgetown real estate and expanded to stores in several cities out West. In 1986, he opened several locations of Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, where he eventually condensed his vast collection.

Chip Gaines’s parents grew up in Archer City as well. In the third episode of Fixer Upper: The Hotel, Chip takes Joanna on a roadtrip to take a look at the books. In a tone just this side of menacing, he says to Joanna, “We’re gonna see … this amazing bookstore that I bought,” a combination of understatement and confession. (Gaines purchased both the books and the two remaining storefronts in Archer City.)

After some standard husband-wife “Babe, what did you do” dialogue, Joanna concludes, as she wanders the stacks and stacks of the store, “I think this is the coolest thing you’ve ever bought in your entire life.”

Hebe Uhart had a unique way of looking—a power of observation that was streaked with humor, but which above all spoke to her tremendous curiosity. Uhart, a prolific Argentine writer of novels, short stories, and travel logs, died in 2018. “In the last years of her life, Hebe Uhart read as much fiction as nonfiction, but she preferred writing crónicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana Enríquez in an introduction to a newly translated volume of these crónicas, which will be published in May by Archipelago Books. At the Review, where we published one of Uhart’s short stories posthumously in 2019, we will be publishing a series of these crónicas in the coming months. Read others in the series here.

Yesterday I was riding the 92. The bus was half-empty and a woman of about sixty or seventy caught my eye. It was difficult to get a sense of her age, or her social class. Could she be poor? No, but she didn’t seem rich either, nor did I pick up on any of that visible effort the middle class put into their appearance: dressing neatly, in complementary colors. Her clothes reminded me, more than anything, of someone trying to go incognito. She didn’t come off as a housewife; I decided she had the look of a government inspector. She sat down beside me.

“Señora, I’m getting off at Pueyrredón,” I said, so I wouldn’t have to get up if her stop was before mine.

“Works for me,” she said, “I’m getting off at Laprida.”

Twice in his life, Ellis made a contract with himself. He’d promised he would give himself five years and by the end of them, if he still wanted to kill himself, he would. Both times he’d made this contract, he still wanted to die at year five. But since, for a few months during each five-year span, he had a break from his compulsive ideations, he told himself it meant that the clock had reset and the contract was void. That, and he didn’t want to kill himself, not really.

I met Ellis in New York when I was twenty-six. He was the soft-spoken cybergoth—black mesh top, bleached-blond hair shaved to a perennial buzz—who always danced by the speaker stacks at warehouse parties. The angles of his jaw and his heavy brow lent him a harsh beauty.

He told me about his suicidal thoughts the first time we had dinner. We didn’t know each other well, really at all, so his pain alarmed me.

“I’ve had them ever since I was young,” he added.

Parable of the Movie

“I like your movie. I can tell that horror is a big influence.”

“Thank you, yes, I love horror movies.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean horror movies. I meant horror.”

1.

Once I had to go to Disney World with my small children. On the way to the airport our taxi driver exhibited signs of Obsessive Disney Disorder—when he found out where we were going he started obsessively describing and listing and explaining everything that had to do with Disney World, even though he was a grown man.

We stayed at the Portofino Bay Hotel, a Disney-owned property that is a replica of the storied village on the Italian Riviera. There were imitation Renaissance churches and Mediterranean piazzas clustered around a fake harbor with old Fiats parked on the cobblestones and fishing boats moored in the fake bay. Outside cafés ranged on the harbor, serving espresso under green-and-white striped awnings. Italian cypresses were planted along the pools. If you didn’t know it was a Disney replica of a real place, it would have to be characterized as being extremely tasteful and lovely. So you did tend to get confused between: Is this a theme park of Italy or is it just lovely and pleasant.

There is a REAL Florida out there that is TRULY historic. I madly drove out to find the REAL Orlando, forgetting my phobia of freeways. After almost getting killed (horns blasting at my side, cars swerving out of my way), I did find the real Orlando. It is situated on several lakes lined by turn-of-the-last-century Victorians and bungalows. I went to the history museum. The number one industry in central Florida is cattle. Has anyone in Florida ever seen a head of cattle? No. But maybe that was before Disney.

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

It Feels Like a Lot Because It Is a Lot

If your latest scroll through the Netflix menu left you feeling like every other option was based on a book, you’re not super wrong. Nearly one-third of the English-language shows Netflix has released so far this year are adapted from existing IP. Leading the way are the limited series Fool Me Once, based on the novel by Harlan Coben, and One Day, adapted from David Nicholls’s 2009 novel, which was previously adapted for film in 2011. When we look beyond Netflix, 7 of the 10 highest-grossing movies of last year were based on existing work, and—here’s the real  👀 stat—the last time the highest-earning film of the year was not adapted from existing IP or part of a franchise was 1998 when Titanic raked in the equivalent of $600 million (equivalent to $1.2 billion today) in the U.S. alone. That’s a full quarter-century of adaptation domination, and there’s no slow-down in sight. 

Color Purple Actress Criticizes Film for Queer Erasure

Speaking of adaptations! In a wide-ranging interview at BuzzFeed, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who appeared in last year’s adaptation of The Color Purple, goes on the record to criticize the filmmakers for downplaying the lesbian relationshipbetween main character Celie and her life-changing lover Shug Avery.

The Color Purple is a book about Black lesbians. Whether the choice was made to focus on that or not in the cinematic iterations of The Color Purple, it’s still a movie about Black lesbians. People can try to say the story is about sisterhood, but it’s a story about Black lesbians. Period.

This is a familiar debate and hardly the first time an adaptation of Alice Walker’s beloved novel has failed its queer characters and missed an important opportunity to meet queer audiences where they are. It’s especially disappointing, though, coming out of a year in which some of the most celebrated films and series—All of Us Strangers, Passages, and Fellow Travelers—were about queer relationships. Can it be a coincidence that writers, producers, and studios were more comfortable with those stories about white men than with this one about Black women? 🤔

It’s been close to two years since writing about why libraries need to have strong book challenge policies; in the fall, this guide helped to consider where and how to actively incorporate inclusivity in collection policies. Because library collection policies are living documents and need to be regularly updated to accommodate the climate around them, it’s time to revisit this topic and look at what contemporary book banning has made clear needs to be better articulated in these policies.

This guide is for library workers, of course, but it is also useful for library advocates. It is an opportunity for you to look at your local library’s policies and champion strengthening them in order to encourage and support the most inclusive collection possible.

Below are four areas of consideration. It’s not comprehensive, but instead, a series of places to start now.

Demco, Broadart, and other library suppliers create an array of stickers for use in helping readers find items of interest quickly while browsing. These stickers include genre — mystery, science fiction, romance — as well as themes — humor, holiday, LGBTQ+. What is meant to help readers find, though, can be used to not only stigmatize but to target those titles.

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes, these books are brand-new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. I adore cookbooks, food writing, and food memoirs. There’s just something special about diving into a world of culinary enthusiasm that sparks so much joy. This week, I’m recommending a cookbook that I can already tell will be my favorite cookbook that I read this year.

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We all know that kids love to play and that it’s a crucial way they learn about the world, but did you know that play directly helps children develop early literacy skills? That’s part of why how-to books for kids are so important, as they can help guide children in making and building things in imaginative ways. Learning to craft and build is a form of playtime and is especially important for the development of a five to nine-year-old’s brain. Additionally, skills like origami, drawing, gardening, and cooking can help with promoting physical abilities; think of how using craft tools like scissors can help work on movement control and improve gross motor skills. Play is so crucial to children’s development that the American Library Association has emphasized the importance of play as an early literacy skill.

These eight how-to books for kids will engage the makers and tinkerers in your life, teaching them while broadening their interests. I’ve also included a couple of simple picture books that encourage building and creating; if you know a younger maker, they might enjoy getting started through those.

An additional note: at Book Riot, we do our best to actively promote diversity in books and publishing. This list features very few authors and illustrators of color because I wasn’t able to find many that had written how-to books for the K to 3 set (if you know of any I missed, please share!). I did, however, find some excellent digital creators of color making fun and educational craft content for kids. Tabitha Brown’s YouTube series, Tab Time, has how-to craft and snack videos that are aimed at preschoolers, and Cheryl Gavrielides’s Instagram, creative_mama_che, has some fantastic and easy craft projects as well. Make sure to check them out too!