It’s a holiday week, so let’s keep this short and sweet—and end another year of coverage on a promising note.

Earlier this month, I rounded up the current lawsuits pertaining to book bans across the country. Among them are two lawsuits in Iowa aimed at the state’s controversial SF 496, the bill that contributed to the use of tools like AI to determine whether or not school library books needed to be banned.

Lawyers representing Penguin Random House in one of the suits said that the attorneys representing Iowa reported that the law was being misused to ban LGBTQ+ content. Even though the state ban on LGBTQ+ instruction (whatever that means) would still apply to grades six and lower, this does not mean books with LGBTQ+ content cannot be made available in school libraries. Only books that depict “sex acts” as defined by state statute were subject to removal from school libraries.

In other words, those are not books with or about LGBTQ+ characters.

As Andrew Albanese wrote in a piece at Publisher’s Weekly, the challenges of navigating this new law—which passed with the help of state members of Moms For Liberty who have enjoyed a cozy relationship with Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds—showed in the initial lawsuit hearing:

Despite my dad’s best efforts and his love of John Wayne, I was never a fan of westerns growing up. That all changed, though, when I discovered the world of alternate-history westerns. Alternate history books explore history through the question, “What if?” What if: angels and demons controlled a western town? What if: hippos had been introduced to the Mississippi? What if: abused women in brothels got their revenge? Those are just a few of the questions explored in the pages of alternate history westerns, a genre sometimes also referred to as “the weird west.”

Alternate histories often — but not always — blend history with fantasy or science fiction to reimagine what could have been. Think of the popular steampunk aesthetic, for example, and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Alternate history can also be a great way to reclaim the narrative or frame history in a different way — something that’s especially compelling when you’re talking about a place and period as complicated and violent as the American West. While the westerns of old featured an all too predictable glorification of life in the west, despite the brutality that led to western expansion in the United States, these alternate-history westerns often feature more nuanced stories. And with a touch of magic or technology, they’re a lot more fun, too.

So giddy on up and find out how the west was weird.

Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse In this alternate history novella from the acclaimed author of Black Sun and Trail of Lightning, angels and demons run rampant in the remote mining town of Goetia. Only the descendants of the Fallen are able to mine the invaluable new element known as Divinity, but they’re also scorned because of their heritage. For Fallen sisters Celeste and Mariel, this means little chance of a fair trial when Mariel is accused of murdering one of the Archangel elect who rule the town. Celeste’s only option is to represent Mariel in the trial herself to ensure she’s given a fair chance at redemption. But her ties to a demonic ex-lover and an overwhelming urge to protect her sister might distract her from what is really happening. I loved this angels and demons take on the Old West, which meshes so perfectly into the issues of class, discrimination, and outlaw justice.

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey My original Weird West favorite is this duology from author Sarah Gailey, reimagining the history of the United States if they had passed a proposed bill to introduce hippos to the Mississippi. The hippo-riding cowboys who grace its pages are ready to pull the heist — excuse me, “operation” — of the ages to deal with a bayou overrun with feral hippos and stop a corrupt businessman. And Winslow Houndstooth might just have one more motive for taking this job: revenge.

Reading Legends and Lattes has gotten me thoroughly obsessed with the cozy fantasy genre, and lucky for me — and you — there are some really great books like Legends and Lattes out there to enjoy. Exactly what makes a cozy fantasy novel cozy can shift a bit from book to book, but there are some similarities across the board. They’re generally full of heartwarming characters, little to no drama, and relatively low stakes. And the addition of bookstores, coffee shops, tea shops, or bakeries doesn’t hurt. That might just be a personal preference, though.

When it comes to books like Legends and Lattes, in particular, I’m looking for books about characters finally looking to settle down, stories set in magical shops, casts of found families, friendship, and maybe a touch of romance. But most of all, I’m looking for books that invite you in and envelope you a nice, warm hug. Because that is what cozy fantasy is, really: the bookish form of pure comfort. And that’s what Legends and Lattes does so well. So brew up a pot of tea or coffee, drag out your fluffiest blanket, and settle in for the coziest of cozy books, just like Legends and Lattes.

Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne If you enjoyed seeing girlfriends running a shop together in Legends and Lattes, you’re going to love this book that takes that premise and runs with it. After a close call finally convinces Reyna to quit her job guarding an indifferent queen, she and her mage girlfriend, Kianthe, run away to live out their dream: opening up a shop where Reyna can sell tea and Kianthe can read to her heart’s content. But with a vengeful queen on the lookout for her runaway guard and the most powerful mage in all the land, this little shop at the edge of dragon territory might be just as filled with mishaps as cozy chats by the fire.

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune This cozy fantasy also features a café where all are welcome — including the dead. After dying of a heart attack, Wallace discovers he didn’t make a lot of friends in life. And now a newbie reaper has come to collect him. He’s taken to Charon’s Crossing, an unusual tea shop where the kindhearted owner, Hugo, helps souls cross over. But Wallace isn’t so sure he wants to move on just yet. The life he’s leaving behind isn’t what he hoped for, but it might not be too late to create a future worth dying for.

Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk by Coyote JM Edwards An 11-foot-tall, battle-worn drider (that would be a sort of humanoid spider) might not be the likeliest candidate to open a coffee shop, but after retiring from the Ember Guard, Gwen’s ready for a change. Her skills on the battlefield, however, aren’t exactly translating into making espresso. And it’s only with the help of some unlikely friends, both new and old, that Gwen might be able to keep this new venture going. The premise is quite similar to Legends and Lattes (though this story predates it), with a heartwarming cast of characters but no romance.

Even if you don’t pay much attention to literary news, there are some book awards you’ve probably heard of: The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Awards, the Booker Prize. But these big-name awards are just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens and dozens of smaller book awards out there, and paying attention to them will lead you to exciting books that get overlooked by the flashy, mainstream prizes.

One of the best things about these smaller awards is that they often recognize books from indie presses that don’t get huge marketing budgets. There are also lots of prizes designed to celebrate literature from certain regions and written by authors from marginalized communities. All literary awards are subjective and a bit random, but if you’re looking to expand your reading beyond the bestsellers, checking out the past and current winners of niche prizes is a great way to do so!

These eight nonfiction books have all won different literary prizes in the last five years. But many of them have flown under the radar and only have a few hundred ratings on Goodreads. In other words: these are hidden nonfiction gems, each of them brilliant in its own way, and you’re going to want to get your hands on them.

The Undiscovered Country by Andre Bagoo (OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2021) Trinidadian writer Andre Bagoo has written poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. In this collection of essays, he explores art, literature, pop culture, Caribbean history, politics, queerness, and his own life. It’s a blend of moving personal stories, incisive literary criticism, and social commentary. Anyone interested in Caribbean literature should definitely check out this book, the rest of his work, and the rest of the OCM Bocas prize winners!

Afropean by Johny Pitts (Jhalak Prize 2020) The Jhalak Award is given yearly to a book by a writer of color living in Britain. In this sprawling, documentary-style work of nonfiction, Johny Pitts critically examines Black Europe. He writes about the intersections of race and geography that lie at the center of Black European identity, taking readers on a tour of the places, institutions, moments, and movements that have influenced and shaped the culture, lives, art, and politics of Afropeans.

What do we remember about our favourite fantasy stories? Apart from the compelling plots and characters, we’re most likely to fall in love with a fantasy novel because of strong worldbuilding, whether that’s the creation of a fascinating fictional society, the inclusion of fun legendary creatures, or, in many cases, the construction of an interesting and thought-provoking magic system. Throughout the years of fantasy dominating as a genre, there have been many different types of magic systems, some well-explained, with strong structures, while others fall into the “no rules, just vibes” category. But what makes for the best magic systems in fantasy, while others are disappointing?

Many magic systems are based on concepts or ideas that exist in the real world. The wizards of Discworld devote years at university to learning spells from ancient times (or, in later years, simply enjoying big dinners and doing very little real magic). Some magic systems are based on maths, while others draw on crafts such as sewing or weaving. Some fantasy authors have created magic systems based on music, while others have taken a religious slant to their characters’ magical practices, having them work closely with gods to cast spells in their worlds. A good magical system is consistent, not too overpowered (even magic users need to struggle to make a story interesting), and is interesting enough to stick in the reader’s mind long after they’ve finished the story. Here are some of the best magic systems in recent — and not-so-recent — fantasy literature.

The Marvellers by Dhonielle Clayton The Marvellers has some standout worldbuilding, including cities in the sky and travel by airship, but one of my favourite things about Dhonielle Clayton’s first middle-grade fantasy story is the magic system she creates — or rather, magic systems, plural. There’s Marveller magic, which is based around the five senses; some Marvellers perform their magical feats using blends of spices, while others use sound to weave spells. However, there is also Conjuror magic, a different kind of magical system that can involve working with animals, herbs, or the dead. Ella, the heroine of the story, comes from a Conjuror family and is the first person from a Conjuror background to train in Marveller magic — something she is determined to master while still honouring her Conjuror roots. Clayton’s focus on sensory magic brings the story alive and makes the magic systems feel real to the reader; it’s easy to imagine your own favourite hobby corresponding to an aspect of magic explored in The Marvellers.  Fun fact: If you’re an avid reader of middle grade and YA fiction, you might recognise some of the Marveller teachers’ names — many of Clayton’s literary colleagues have cameos in her story.

Sabriel by Garth Nix Is Sabriel a classic now? I think it is. I’m old. First, in The Old Kingdom series by veteran fantasy writer Garth Nix, Sabriel follows the titular character, the latest in a long line of Abhorsens — magicians who use bell chimes to make sure that the dead stay dead. Sabriel has been separated from her father, the current Abhorsen, for some time, and so she must teach herself the magic system that binds the dead and stops them from causing havoc in the world of the living. As Sabriel learns how to use the bells, she walks the line between the living and the dead, almost tripping now and then but always keeping true to the magic.

As every author has probably revealed in an interview at some point, writing a novel is hard work. Writer’s block is a constant professional hazard; characters can decide to do their own thing at a moment’s notice, and I can confirm that it’s a real struggle to stop a plot from getting soggy and slow in the middle. This doesn’t go away with practice; as Joe Fassler noted in his article My 150 Writing Mentors and Me, “The artistic process never seems to get easier, not even for the most successful, famous authors.”

In more practical terms, many writers are hampered by day-to-day life, like having to work a day job or the time-consuming commitment of childcare, something noted by the women writer’s magazine Mslexia: “Survey after survey has found that women spend more time on housework and childcare than men […] So it was for Mrs. Gaskell at the birth of the novel, complaining that ‘everybody comes in to me perpetually’ while ‘Mr. Gaskell just trots off to his study.’” There are also major structural inequalities within the world of publishing that mean Black authors and other authors of colour are underrepresented across the board, with the publishing world throwing up roadblocks such as “quotas for books by or featuring people of colour, a perceived limited appeal for these books and a feeling that authors of colour could only write about race issues.”

But when you finally get the book published, all the difficulties are worth it, right? Well, not always. Sometimes, authors deeply regret the books that they have published, even if — and sometimes because — those books made their names or brought them wild success. Arthur Conan Doyle famously hated Sherlock Holmes so much that he tried to kill the character off permanently, only to be forced to bring him back after a public outcry. Agatha Christie resented the public demand for more Poirot novels; she found her creation irritating and hated all the idiosyncrasies she had given him, something she wryly references when writing crime author Ariadne Oliver’s hatred of her own fictional detective character.

Many of the books that authors regretted writing are well known, but others come as a surprise. However, it’s important to note that nearly all of the authors who went on to regret their books are white, and most are men. As the publishing statistics show, authors of colour struggle far more than white authors to be published in the first place — it’s likely that there are simply not enough books being published by authors of colour for those authors to have those same feelings of regret about the work they have struggled to get out there in the first place.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most influential children’s books of all time; it has been referenced, retold, and parodied in hundreds of later novels, has been adapted for film, and has influenced written and visual media the world over. However, in 2014, a letter by Charles Dodgson — Carroll’s real name — was discovered, talking about how much he hated the publicity that came with such a wildly successful book. Dodgson admitted, “I hate all that so intensely that sometimes I almost wish I had never written any books at all,” and would send terse and angry responses to anyone who wrote to him using his pen name.

Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple seconds later, when we realized the light was only the shining moon rising over the peaks, we began laughing so hard that my parents heard and stumbled out into the front yard. 

I thought of this memory a few weeks ago while in a Lyft in Las Vegas, also at twilight. A man named June was driving me to the Sphere, the giant 20,000-capacity arena built just off the Strip by the Madison Square Garden Company and designed by the firm Populous, which opened earlier in the fall. The Sphere is (mostly) its titular shape, 157 meters wide, and covered in what is reputedly the largest LED screen on earth, and inside is a smaller sphere, holding a lobby and an arena with a curved screen that bears down at and envelopes the audience, a massive take on a planetarium with 4D features. The globular animations on the outer surface are what first captivated the attention of online viewers; since the Sphere turned on, it has featured rotating basketballs, mercurial ripples, AI-generated washes of color, and advertisements that cost brands nearly half a million dollars per day to display. Its most iconic exterior images are all the kinds of things middle schoolers like to draw in the margins of their notebooks: an eyeball, an emoji face, and, yes, the moon. 

I first latched on to the Sphere in mid-2021, when architectural renderings had already been circulating for a few years. During the 2022 midterms, while election forecasters were waiting for late-breaking votes from Clark County, Nevada, where Las Vegas is the county seat, I remember thinking that the Sphere would be the right place on which to beam the same consequential results in the future. If the electoral college was always going to turn random populations into oracles, why not enhance the effect and ground the abstraction with the most cosmic of shapes? At that point, the structure was still a giant salad bowl of curved steel beams just off the Strip; Madison Square Garden had been building the thing since 2018, and inflation had pushed the projected cost to $2.2 billion, nearly double the original budget. By September of this year they finished it, and U2 started its forty-show residency. I booked a trip to Vegas and bought a ticket to Postcard from Earth, the Darren Aronofsky “movie” that had been made for the venue. (Cheaper than Bono’s show.) It was all I could think about for weeks. 

Then I began having dreams that punished me for my enthusiasm. In them the Sphere was a pathetic size, the circumference of a backyard trampoline, languishing in roadside parking lots like a sheepish dumpster with a vending machine’s tepid glow. People whizzed past it in their cars as they would highway billboards for personal injury lawyers. And I guess that was the outcome I was afraid of. For me, the question of the Sphere was not really about the subjects that other journalists had focused on—the state of live entertainment, or what screens do to our attention spans—but about whether a physical object could still truly excite us, siphon and sustain our normally starved collective passions. (For the majority of human history, this type of adulation was mostly aimed at entities that were sacred, cosmic, or both, like comets.) That the Sphere was owned and operated by sterilized companies didn’t really matter to me; perhaps this increased the effect of the thing as a smooth, vacuous singularity of the masses. Once I got there, and once I went inside it, would the energy I had generated thinking about it have anywhere to land? I was hoping—and this might have been the optimism that the Sphere was brazenly promoting at a time when everyone seemed to be shorting it—that if you tore away all the facts about its content, you would still be left with what moved me against all odds: the shape, and the light.

Halfway through Sven Holm’s taut unfolding nightmare, Termush, the unnamed narrator encounters “ploughed-up and trampled gardens” where “stone creatures are the sole survivors.” Holm describes these statues as “curious forms, the bodies like great ill-defined blocks, designed more to evoke a sense of weight and mass than to suggest power in the muscles and sinews.” Later, a guest of the gated, walled hotel for the rich from which the novel takes its name relates a dream in which “light streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones, the leaves on the trees … to reveal the innermost vulnerable marrow of people and plants.” The same could describe the novel, which accrues its strange effects via both this stricken, continuous revealing and the “curious forms” of a solid, impervious setting, in which the ordinary elements of our world come to seem alien through the lens of nuclear catastrophe.

Long before the sanctuary of Termush becomes visibly unsafe, these tears at the fringes of reality signify the truth of the narrator’s situation. The very texture of the world becomes unknowable, imbued with a potency, vibration, or sheen that alters reality. Holm’s Termush is both a realistic chronicle of a microsociety’s collapse and a surreal journey of a man confronted by crisis, remaking his surroundings as a way of coping.

The detritus and decisions of the past may still affect our future, in that the threat of nuclear holocaust has not left us, though it is far less pronounced than in the 1960s, when Holm published Termush. But in the interim, other disasters that manifest in largely “invisible” ways have overtaken us: our fear of radiation and immolation has led to climate crisis fear, which has led to pandemic fear. The grappling of minds with these threats leads to derangement and odd visions, because the elements of infiltration and contamination baffle the brain. Our hauntings in the modern era so often now are not ghosts but simply the things we cannot see—but that radically affect us.

Little wonder then, that, read now, the lucid logic of Termush feels more like lucid dreaming, imbued with a new relevance in which unseen monsters creep through the same rooms as the narrator, studying his movements. The stark deficiencies of emergency management become hyperreal because of the overlay of self-inflictions in our modern times. For Termush—unlike some vintage classics, cult or otherwise—has waxed, not waned, in relevance. The accuracy in the calm description of becoming undone by disaster, and the anonymity of place and character, ensure the novel’s timelessness. It’s a curious book in this regard, with its dispassionate prose that eschews, in large part, the sensory detail of taste, touch, and smell, yet gets to the heart of living through such a situation. At that heart is the disconnection that occurs, laid bare by a certain level of detail—or lack of detail. Amid the banal recitation of procedure and the understated but sharp satire about privileged people, such a strong sense of feeling about the world rises from these pages.

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, starting with one of the most personal.

About thirty years ago, I had a boyfriend who was a drunk. Back then, I was full of vague impulses and concocted impossible projects. I wanted to build a house with my own two hands; before that, there’d been another project, involving a chicken hatchery. I was never cut out for industry or manual labor. I didn’t think that alcoholism was a sickness—I believed he would be able to stop drinking once he decided to. I was working at a high school and had asked for some much-needed time off to improve my mental health, and I spent my days with my drunken boyfriend going from club to club, and from one house to the next. We paid countless visits to the most diverse assortment of people, among them an old poet and his wife who would receive guests not at their home, but in bars. Some turned their noses up at the pair, whispering that it took them a week to get from Rivadavia Avenue to Santa Fe Avenue, as they spent a full day at each bar. It was a year of great discovery for me, learning about these people and their homes, but sometimes it was boring, because drunks have a different sense of time and money. It is like living on a ship, where time is suspended, and as for my boyfriend’s friends, they were always destined for the bottle and stranded at the bar (or so they claimed) until someone could come rescue them. I used to get bored when drunk poets began counting the syllables of verses to see if they were hendecasyllabic, trochaic … it could go on for hours.

The whole time I was mixed up in all of this, nobody ever knew where I was going. I would only come home to eat and sleep—I didn’t tell my family anything. They became concerned. My mom had a cousin follow me and report back to her:

“They sleep at a different house every night. My advice—buy her an apartment.”

I turned nineteen and moved to Chicago. Three weeks later, Dave and I bought a silver Celica for five hundred bucks, which, even in 1999, didn’t seem like much for an entire car. Dave named her Angie (short for Angelica, inspired by the elica on the grille, the C having gone missing sometime in the previous eleven years). He was a sophomore at the University of Chicago, and I was his deadbeat friend who had moved to Hyde Park to get out of my parents’ apartment and go be a dropout eight hundred miles away. We liked to think Angie resembled a low-rent DeLorean. The headlights opened and closed—creaking up and down like animatronic eyes—but shortly after the big purchase they got stuck in the up position.

When we test-drove the car around Ravenswood, the steering wheel felt disconcertingly heavy. Oh, that’s just a minor power-steering leak, said the seller. Easy fix. We didn’t know what power steering was, or that the leak was actually expensive to fix, and that we’d have to refill the fluid on a weekly basis. Plus, the hood stand had broken, or disappeared, or anyway no longer existed, so it was necessary to hold up the hood with one hand and refill the cylinder with the other, which was quite difficult to do. Thankfully, there were two of us. We’d been friends since third grade, and with our easy dynamic, splitting a car didn’t seem odd—only convenient.

Growing up in Manhattan, we weren’t allowed to practice driving within the city limits, and most of my friends failed the test once or twice. I’d gotten my license a few days before moving to the Midwest (third try), and was thrilled to be a license-holding car owner. I’d go out at night—sometimes with Dave, sometimes alone—and drive around the neighborhood. Do laps up and down the Midway, blasting Born to Run or Hüsker Dü. That year was probably the freest I’ve ever felt, though I’m not sure I appreciated the freedom. Or maybe it was dampened by loneliness, and feeling like I had little to do with my time. I’d saved up from being the errand boy at a rock club the previous couple years and decided to be work-free in Chicago for as long as possible, with vague ambitions of starting a band. But I didn’t meet many potential bandmates, and my guitar grew dusty. That fall, I’d stay up till five, six in the morning, and sleep till three. Our lives were small. On Sunday nights, Dave and I would go to our favorite Italian restaurant, where we had a crush on the waitress, and then see a movie. Once a month, we’d hand-deliver our insurance payment to Bill, our friendly rep at the InsureOne office in a strip mall on Fifty-Third Street. The Obamas supposedly lived down the street.

When the money ran out, I answered an ad on a bulletin board in the U of C student center. Far East Kitchen was now my employer. Three or four nights a week, Angie and I would deliver juicy Chinese food across the neighborhood: from Forty-Seventh Street to Sixty-First, Cottage Grove to the lake. No matter how I arranged them, the bags of food would often topple over on the floor of the back seat and ooze “gravy” into the carpeting. I got paid by the delivery—on a slow night, I could finish a shift with sixteen bucks in my pocket. Despite the frequent disrespect and lowly social status, I found it satisfying to race around the neighborhood, making my drops. Less so during ice storms. (When, twenty years later and low on funds, I had a brief stint as a DoorDasher in Eugene, Oregon, the satisfaction, unsurprisingly, flagged. By then, Dave was living in a midsize Canadian city with a wife and child. Our dynamic had gone through some uneasy times.)

The other day, I graduated from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone 15. The iPhone 6 needed to be plugged in all the time, same as me. The next day, when I woke up with the iPhone 15, I didn’t recognize the house where I lived, or the room where I was sleeping, or the person beside me in the bed. Richard said, “I think you should get the wireless earpods. You’ll like them.” I said, “How do you know?” He laughed.

The difference between learning a person and learning an iPhone is that, eventually, you learn the iPhone. You even forget the learning part. Once human beings know something, we think we’ve always known it—like the discovery of irony by a child, it’s a one-way door.

Going back to 2007—it was Richard’s and my second Christmas together—and the way I got the catering job was the chef who usually cooked dinner for the Murphys got sick. Or maybe it was that the catering company I worked for had overbooked the chefs, and suddenly there weren’t enough to go around. Alice, the booker, called me and said, “You do private parties, right? Can you please do Christmas dinner for the Murphys?” I said, “Sure.” It was the thing where you’re a movie actor, and they say, “You know how to gallop on a horse, right?” Or, “You know how to do a triple axel on ice skates, right?”

In the past, I’d worked as a server at the Murphys’ apartment on Park Avenue. They were a warm, easygoing couple, and they tipped well. At their holiday events, there were lots of kids and adults, a mix of Catholics and Jews. Lots of wrapping paper piled up on the living room floor, and each year, Ted Murphy made an appearance as Santa.

$1.99 Rosewood by Sayantani DasGupta Get This Deal

$2.99 Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake Get This Deal

$1.99 The Program by Suzanne Young Get This Deal

$1.99 This Time It’s Real by Ann Liang Get This Deal

$2.99 Swipe Right for Murder by Derek Milman Get This Deal

$1.99 The 99 Boyfriends of Micah Summers by Adam Sass Get This Deal

$1.99 Incarceron by Catherine Fisher Get This Deal

$1.99 The Christmas Clash by Suzanne Park Get This Deal

$1.99 Family of Liars by E. Lockhart Get This Deal

$1.99 A Girl’s Guide to Love and Magic by Debbie Rigaud Get This Deal

Book that made me cry on the subway: Stoner, John Williams
Book that made me miss my subway stop: Prodigals, Greg Jackson
Book I was embarrassed to read on the subway: The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis
Book someone asked me about on the subway: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Book I saw most often on the subway: Big Swiss, Jen Beagin

—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor

My reading this year was defined by fascinating but frustrating books. Reading to explore, reading for pleasure—sometimes the two don’t converge. In January and February, I battled against Marguerite Young’s thousand-plus-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, reading a pdf of it on my computer (why did I do this? I honestly don’t know) and developing a (hopefully temporary) eye twitch in the process. Among other things, the novel is about a bedridden woman in a decrepit mansion experiencing vertiginous opium hallucinations for pages on end. I’m glad I read it but I’m not sure I would recommend it. Speaking of opium, I also finally finished Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, another kind of fever dream (originally written for money, it’s a mishmash of autobiography, philosophy, and outright plagiarism) that is both completely bonkers and a foundation of modern literary criticism—in it, Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief.” One early reviewer of it expressed “astonishment that the extremes of what is agreeable and disgusting can be so intimately blended by the same mind.” Maybe I relate to this more than I’d like to admit. But a primary purpose of these lists is to give people ideas of what they might enjoy, more than what they might profitably suffer through. So, these books gave me pleasure this year: among others, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Hannah Sullivan’s Was It for This, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. I learned a lot from all of them, too.

—David S. Wallace, editor at large 

This year I was so happy. I was happy for the main reason that I think people have been happy throughout human history, which is that I fell in love. At least that’s why stories tend to tell us that people are happy—happily ever after, and all that. When people asked how I was, I found myself saying, so happy, almost involuntarily, and then feeling a little ashamed, like maybe I was boring them. The thing is that other people’s happiness is often boring. All happy families are alike, and all that. I read a line in a short story in the recent Fall issue of The Paris Review, in fact: “We were happy on the road, and happiness can’t be narrated.” This felt true to me, and I also wanted to argue with it. Yet whenever I did, the terms seemed to slip away from me—what was happiness, anyway, and what did it mean to narrate it? And was I really so happy, when in fact lots of things in my life were going wrong, when as always there were days when I woke up listless or anxious, despite some undercurrent of feeling like I was terribly, almost frighteningly happy? Could there be such a thing as a narrative of happiness, and—here, I was thinking selfishly—what might it tell me?

I began to read with these ideas loosely in mind. In the fall, alone in Vermont, I read James Salter’s Light Years. This is a novel about a marriage—about the surfaces of a life and the cracks beneath that surface, the eventual rupture and the aftermath of that break. You have to wonder, a little: how did these two people ruin this beautiful life in a house on a river, filled as it was with bowls of cut flowers, bottles of wine, a pony, a dog? Skating on ponds in winter and Amagansett in the summer. Who would actually wreck such a thing and why? But then I remembered, surprisingly close to the end of the novel, that my own parents had ruined just such a happiness in just such a way, perhaps more dramatically, but not so differently; I had a childhood filled with cut flowers too. This is a tragic book, but it also manages to narrativize something about happiness, about how it is always a dance between the surface and the subterranean. This dance is obscure, even to its participants. We cannot know other people or their happinesses and we cannot quite understand even our own.

I also read, this fall, Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. This is a novel about two married couples, and I was interested especially in one of them. This couple is not very different from the couple in Light Years: they too have a beautiful and aesthetically oriented life characterized by a certain kind of abundance. There is also a woman whose power comes from her slight withholding, and a man who struggles against this, sometimes to the point of misery. And yet this novel is essentially comic. That is where Colwin points us in much of her work, toward that glass-half-full view of human relations and how they might be navigated; even when the actual situations might seem miserable (untenable affairs, as in Another Marvelous Thing), she takes a view of them that might be described as both clear-eyed and full of light. In Happy All the Time, happiness works its way into the narrative mostly through the characters’ acceptance of its limits, and their realizations that the fact of it is a grace. When the four characters sit down with four glasses of wine and toast “to a truly wonderful life,” I thought, Yes, there it is. I am always insisting on toasts, and remarks, on the mysterious power that lies in repeating over and over how lucky we are, really, to be in the company of those we love.

So it does exist, she thinks, happiness.

This week, PEN America released a report titled “Spineless Shelves” reflecting upon the cumulative effect of the last two years of book bans in US schools. Nearly 6,000 books have been banned since 2021–and that number does not include the 444 titles pulled in one district the week the report was released.

Among the key findings in the latest report include:

Copycat banning, where titles that have not been challenged in a district may be removed because a district elsewhere banned themThe removal of all the books by an author when a single title of theirs is bannedBooks on challenging topics or about marginalized identities continue to be among the most banned in schoolsBans on books have not only become more common but many of these bans have become more comprehensive and permanent.

For those paying attention to book bans, it comes as little surprise to hear that Florida and Texas top the list in number of books banned. But it’s not just in those states. All but 9 states have recorded book bans in schools since 2021.

Young adult books top the charts when it comes to book bans, too. YA books compose 58% of banned titles, followed by adult books (17%), middle grade (12%), picture books (10%), and chapter books (3%). All of this points to the reality that books written specifically for a school-age audience are the vast majority being targeted. These are the books that adults call “inappropriate,” “explicit,” or “pornographic”–even though they are for these age groups.

As the report points out, all of this data sits in an interesting position with the research on trust that parents claim to have in librarians–if 92% of them trust library workers to select and recommend age-appropriate materials for children, why all of the book bans?