This week, book banners showed up to the Douglas County Public Library board meeting in Colorado to protest books in the system’s collection. It is not the first time they’ve done it, and it’s also not the first time counter protestors have shown up to push back. None of this is news nor is it all that interesting; at this point, it’s pretty standard, even if there are still folks choosing to ignore this is happening in their own back yards at their public library.

What is more interesting than that, though, is looking at how these crisis actors are presenting their message and courting people to their cause. Propaganda works when an uninformed public — usually folks who aren’t engaged in the inaccurately named “culture wars” online — sees it and is appalled by what is presented. Good propaganda works because it’s convincing and presented in such a way as to appear authoritative. But y’all, this isn’t even close to good, and the book banning bigots do not even care. By presenting their false narratives in the most outrageous manner, they’re able to stoke anger and fear in new ways…and it is working.

But let’s break down what is truth here and what is spin (spoiler alert: it’s all spin). The purpose of sharing this is twofold: first, exposure matters since too many folks who care about the First Amendment Rights of all and the freedom of access are putting their heads in the sand and not looking at this stuff and second, this will help in your own talking points with friends, family, board meeting members and attendees, educators, and legislators, debunking fact from fiction.

Because sorry, that’s your job, too. You can’t not look and pretend it is not happening.

I don’t know about you, but in the last few years, my attention span has shrunken to an abysmal size. Or as author Ann Patchett put it: my “attention span has shrunken like a sweater accidentally thrown in the dryer.” I went from being able to read a hundred pages in one sitting to reading three pages and then getting distracted by… well, anything. A notification on my phone, the distant sound of a car horn, a bird flying past my window. My brain helpfully chiming in to remind me that I need to do laundry. My cat embarking upon a life-and-death battle with imaginary enemies.

It’s bad, folks.

I realized that this had become a real problem I needed to solve when I stood up Cat Sebastian for a Facebook Live at The Unusual Historical Romance Book Club. My brain, scattered at the best of times, somehow managed to mix up the dates of the week. I only realized what had happened the next morning, when I received a DM from Cat asking if I was all right.

That did it. I booked an appointment with my doctor and started Googling ways to improve one’s attention span. And, y’know, one’s memory. Forgetting what day of the week it is seems like the kind of thing to finally kick you into motion.

And as it turns out, it seems that I’m not alone. In December 2021, while working on an article about this topic (the first article I read when I went searching), David Oliver tweeted a question: “Do you feel like this COVID era has hurt your attention span? i.e. you can’t focus on a movie but you can watch a 30-minute show?” The responses ranged from ‘yes’ to ‘pick another topic’, but most were in agreement: the era of COVID has, indeed, affected how long we could concentrate either on movies, books, or even work.

The book The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern doesn’t exist.

Sure, you may have read the book The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, (The “Good Parts” Version) by William Goldman, or watched the movie adaptation. Each version uses a frame narrative with the narrator skipping to “the good parts.” Still, some readers search for The Unabridged Princess Bride in person and online. Ironically, an abridged audiobook exists, furthering the myth that Goldman’s full novel is the “abridged” version.

The Princess Bride is a hilarious example of metafiction: fiction about writing fiction or satirizing its conventions. I’m glad no “unabridged” version exists. The book narrator omits tedious scenes, like Buttercup packing a suitcase. He also offers asides to readers about the cultures of the fictitious countries Florin and Guilder. In a fairy tale like this one, hints provide worldbuilding without overwhelming the story.

In Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian science fiction and fantasy novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Lauren Olamina founds a new religion called Earthseed. Its religious text, quoted throughout both novels, is also titled Earthseed. The fictional religion says humans will outgrow Earth and populate other planets. Earthseed draws on fears of climate change and societal collapse. No wonder some readers assume the Earthseed book is real.

Sometimes, nonexistent books become so popular, authors try to set the record straight. In Rosemary’s Baby, the 1967 horror novel by Ira Levin, All of Them Witches by J. R. Hanslet is a nonfiction book with profiles of infamous witches. It’s an important plot device that doesn’t exist outside of Levin’s novel. Many fans wrote to Levin for help finding copies of this nonexistent book. As Levin wrote back apologetically to one fan: “you are one of a number of people whom I have unwittingly sent on a wild goose chase.” The rock band All Them Witches is named after the fake book.

Cats and books: it’s a pairing that goes together as well as eggs and bacon, peanut butter and jelly, or, if you’re British, a cup of tea and a biscuit. Sure, cats wake us up at 3 a.m. because they demand to be fed, but they’re also undeniably cute when they want to be. As far as I’m concerned, if cosiness were a picture, that picture would be of me reading in a comfy armchair, with — yes — a cup of tea, a blanket on my lap, and a cat purring beside me.

I know I’m not the only one to associate books and cats because not only are there lots of books about cats, there are also lots of books about cats and books.

This is what makes it tricky to rank fictional cats because I obviously want to give all the bookish cats the highest position on the list, but that’s not really how rankings work. Still, I’ve made a valiant effort. This ranking is entirely subjective, based on factors like how much I enjoyed the book, how much the cat features in it, and how lovable the cat character was.

When I think of award-winning graphic novels, two immediately come to mind. They are Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series. Although I’m not as well-read in graphic novels as some, I’ve read both of those. I absolutely adored them for very different reasons. People recommend Bechdel’s memoir so often and so I imagine you may have run across it before. If you haven’t read it yet, just now that it mentions suicide. Oseman’s series also has an emotionally abusive relationship and mentions past experiences of homophobia and bullying. Both are superb reads that I highly encourage every reader to pick up.

For me, I seem to go through phases. For a while I won’t read many graphic novels and then suddenly I’m reading a ton. And then something changes again, and I’m back to reading things without many pictures. It’s odd. However, I find that graphic novels are always a good addition to my reading rotation. So that leads me to my list: you never know when an award-winning graphic novel might be just the thing for your reading life. I have some fantastic ones to recommend below if you need ideas of where to start.

There are also a variety of awards in this list. I tried to choose both the best known ones and some more obscure awards to keep you guess– I mean reading. Definitely reading.

Let’s dive into 20 must-read award-winning graphic novels with something for every kind of reader.

Magical realism is such a powerful genre. The surreal feeling of magical happenings in a realistic setting tends to make a story stick with you for longer than the average novel. In a world where hooking students on books is a constant battle, these tantalizing tales build enthusiasm for reading. It’s such a joy to connect young readers with stories that transport them in a wondrous way. The wonder is not just for kids. As an adult, some of my favorite books are middle grade magical realism novels.

I will never forget the first time I read When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. I finished in the middle of the night, teary and touched, and unable to put into words exactly why this book had affected me as it had. That is the power of magical realism — something unspoken but deeply felt.

Below I’ve gathered some middle grade magical realism books, many of which I frequently recommend in my elementary school library. While middle grade novels are typically geared towards kids in 4th through 8th grade, accessing these books on audio greatly increases the range of students who can enjoy. Whether you’re looking for something to recommend to a specific reader or a read aloud to entice a group, this list is an excellent place to start.

On Monday night, the Miami Heat beat the Boston Celtics in definitive fashion in Game 7, winning the Eastern Conference Finals on Boston’s home court. It was a Heat fan’s fantasy. Caleb Martin played like a sleek god with magic powers. The three-pointers looked easy. With few shooting fouls, the game flowed swiftly and without controversy. For a Celtics fan, it must have been a slow nightmare, beginning with Jayson Tatum’s ankle roll in the first possession and ending with the starters on the bench, resigned to a nineteen-point loss. It was the opposite of the chaotic Game 6 of the series, which was one of the most thrilling and heartbreaking games I’ve ever seen.  

Game 6 began with the Celtics continuing their momentum from their win in Game 5. They looked skilled and confident. Jaylen Brown hit his first five shots. The Celtics led for most of the game. Miami’s Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo had a rough shooting night, but Caleb Martin, Gabe Vincent, Max Strus, Kyle Lowry, and Duncan Robinson kept them afloat. Watching with my husband and our friend, I spoke with conviction about an ambiguous injury I was sure Jimmy was dealing with. I wondered if someone had kidnapped his daughter and ordered him to throw the game. “Get the ball to Caleb Martin!” I yelled, though a few weeks ago that name meant nothing to me. 

Jimmy came alive in the fourth quarter. The Heat were trailing by two with sixteen seconds to go. In what seemed like the last possession, he was fouled while shooting a three. The clock stopped at 2.1 seconds, but after the Celtics’ challenge and the replay, the refs put more time on the clock. Jimmy made all three free throws, putting Miami up by one. The Celtics had the ball with three seconds to go. Derrick White inbounded it to Marcus Smart, who missed a three, and with a tenth of a second left and Max Strus trailing him, White looped around to the basket, grabbed the rebound, and in one deft motion, banked the ball in. It was a stunning, gutting loss. How could the Heat possibly recover? White’s putback replayed in my mind in the hours after, and the next day, and the next.      

I don’t like roller coasters, or scary movies, but man do I love the frenzied, fish-flopping-on-land feeling of the last minutes of a painfully close playoff game. It is an experience of great art that creates an agonizing giddiness I’ve never felt from anything else. If a game is close when the fourth quarter begins, it’s like being given a decadent dessert. A perfectly ripe fruit. Suddenly everything feels crucial. How many fouls does Player A have? When will Player B get their shot back? 

Before my father died in 2001, I knew that I loved him but only dimly. I didn’t really feel it, and to the extent that I did, I experienced it as painful. When he was dying I almost didn’t go to him. When I was trying to decide whether to go, someone asked me, “Do you want to see him?” And I said, “That’s hard to say. Because when you’re with him you don’t see him. He doesn’t show himself. He shows a grid of traits but not himself.” Still, I decided to go. The death was prolonged. It was painful. Because of the pain, the “grid” that I referred to—my father’s style of presentation—could not be maintained. A few days after I arrived, my father lost the ability to speak more than a few words at a time. But his eyes and his face spoke profoundly. I saw him and I felt him, and I loved him more than I thought possible. I was stunned by both the strength of my feeling and my previous obliviousness to it, and by my realization that, if I had not come to see him, I would never have known how real my feeling was or how beautiful it was to say it and to hear it said.

I recall that, at the time, I had a mental picture of this experience that looked like one of those practical joke containers disguised as a can of nuts or something; you open the lid and a coiled cloth-covered spring leaps out at you—it felt that startling. This image was followed by another mental picture, an image of human beings as containers that hold layers and layers of thought, feeling, and experience so densely packed (“the body remembers everything”) that the (human) container can be aware of only a few layers at a time, usually the first few at the top, until and unless an unexpectedly powerful event makes something deep suddenly pop out, throwing some elements of the “self” into high relief and disordering others, hinting at a different, truer order that was there all along.

My father wanted to stay at home and so he did; he suffered in his own bed almost up until the end. There was only one hospice worker coming in a couple times a day to give him care plus morphine, which wasn’t strong enough and to which he became quickly accustomed. My sisters and I didn’t realize until quite late that we needed to keep upping the dose; he couldn’t speak by then, though he grimaced in rage and pain.

One of his few visitors during this horrible time was a minister named Amory Adamsen. He was a minister with some kind of half-assed training as a counselor. Before my parents separated, my mother requested that they try counseling. I think she requested it because she’d been going to AA meetings for years and had the lingo down cold; she probably thought she’d be seen as this reasonable person while he’d be seen as a mad, pawing bear, and she’d have official permission to dump him. But my father would agree only if it was a Christian counselor, even though he wasn’t a Christian, and so Mother came up with this Adamsen person. All I knew about him was that (according to Mother) he considered my father the “least introspective person” he’d ever met and that he’d also quite avidly read my novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, which is about, among other things, a girl being raped by her daddy. He even came to a reading of that book I somewhat cluelessly performed in Lexington (on Mother’s Day!); he gave me his full pious and slitty-eyed attention while my poor father wandered the aisles. Now here he was at the house with my father upstairs dying. Apparently, he and my dad had kept up contact long after my parents’ separation, going to basketball games over the years. Although the prick hadn’t returned my father’s last call about a game, here he was, smiling at everyone, hugging, dispensing comfort, looking around. He told my father he was sorry about missing the game, which I do not think my father gave a fuck about at that point. He told him he’d sure enjoyed getting to know him. Then he mingled with my uncle and his wife, with me and my sisters. He kept singling me out with his eyes and finally asked if he could talk with me privately, that he had something to ask. So we went upstairs, shut the door, and he revealed that what he wanted to know was: Did my father really sexually abuse me? He said that he knew just how rude and inappropriate it was to ask, and he added that if I was offended, he was so sorry, he’d just drop it. I said that whether I was offended depended on why he was asking. If it was just curiosity, yes, I was offended. But if it was a moral concern and had something to do with what kind of prayer he wanted to say, that was different. He allowed that he was curious and that he knew it wasn’t his business and he was sorry. I maybe should’ve hit him and walked out of the room, but just so he would know, I said my father never did anything like that, what I wrote was fiction. Amory said he knew it, he knew my father was very moral, he was no sex pervert. I said, “Well, actually he was, but only a little, no more than average, really.” This confused the moron, but he got over that and said that even though he knew my dad was innocent, there was always this tiny question in his mind, and he was glad to finally put it to rest. He went on to declare, however, that even if I had said yes, my father raped me, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference, that he liked my dad a lot and would’ve made no judgment. We talked about how awful molestation is and how much of it there seems to be. He said my dad had worried about me. For example, he had always wondered why I didn’t get married and was concerned that I might be a lesbian. I told him that I was in fact getting married. He seemed disappointed. He went into my dad’s room to pray at him and I went downstairs to tell my sister Jane about this idiotic conversation. My sister said that although she had been planning to ask Amory to speak at the funeral, after hearing this, no way. We both decided not to tell our mother, who was easily upset about the subject of my writing just generally. Naturally Amory Adamsen wound up speaking at the funeral. I didn’t stay for that event so at least I didn’t have to listen to it.

The cover of our Summer issue, online next week and on newsstands June 13, features a drawing of a dog perched on its hind legs, midmotion—so much so that she appears to be almost sliding or dancing off the page as she reaches for a leash (or is it a length of ribbon?). The first thing I noticed about the cover—besides its chic abundance of white space, which seems to beg me to spill coffee or red wine on it—was the dog’s smile. Her eyes are closed almost beatifically, and her mouth is curved in that upside-down rainbow that anyone who has ever loved a dog will recognize. This is a cover that, appropriately for summer, will bring you joy. The canine in question is London, the guide dog of our cover artist, Emilie Louise Gossiaux. Gossiaux and I chatted on the phone about her unique relationship with London, her especially tactile drawing practice, and human-animal connection. 

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about our cover star, London. What kind of dog is she and how long have you had her?  

I don’t read my old work anymore. After a decade as a writer, I know exactly what it’ll make me feel—compassion, some pity; maybe there will be a phrase that I’ll admire, ­­­­but mostly I’ll feel self-loathing. Last year I came across my diary from a summer when, five years after having arrived in Oklahoma as a refugee from Iran, I was determined to win a national championship in Tae Kwon Do so I could get in to an Ivy League university. It was the summer of 1994, and I was fifteen. I kept the diary because I was lonely, weighed down by money worries and shame of being Iranian, desperate to perform my Christian faith. I was anorexic and addicted to Tae Kwon Do, which I practiced for six or seven hours a day. Writing in the diary was a self-soothing mechanism—I wrote down every kind word anyone said to me.

Reading it now, I feel gentler toward my old self, a version of me now nearly three decades in the past. I read her entries like I might read a daughter’s. Maybe when I’m seventy, I will read my forty-year-old self with similar compassion. The most interesting parts of the diary come at the end. After that summer, I returned to the diary in 1995, 1997, 1998, and twice in 1999, and in each entry I seem appalled by my voice in the one before it until finally I give up and stop writing in it altogether. There was no chance of sounding anything but stupid to the Dina of the following year, though she was the audience I was most eager to impress. The penultimate entry, from February 1999, during my sophomore year at Princeton, reads: “Note to Junior Dina: Don’t read this crap anymore.” Then, a few months later, scribbling a final entry on a locker clean-out notice: “I’ll always be a stupid kid. Good thing I realized that now.”

The following two pages are from a later entry, August 2, 1994.

Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and a book of creative nonfiction, The Ungrateful Refugee, which won the 2020 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis and was a finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Nayeri is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, an O. Henry Prize, and the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Granta.

To be British is a very complicated fate. To be a British novelist can seem a catastrophe. You enter into a miasma of history and class and garbage and publication—the way a sad cow might feel entering the abattoir. Or certainly that was how I felt, twenty years ago, when I entered the abattoir myself. One allegory for this system was the glamour of Martin Amis. Everyone had an opinion on Amis, and the strangeness was that this opinion was never just on the prose, on the novels and the stories and the essays. It was also an opinion on his opinions: the party gossip and the newspaper theories, the Oxford education and the afternoon tennis.

The British male! Or at least the British bourgeois male, with his many father figures, both real and acquired. From certain angles, in certain photos, Amis looked like Jagger, and so he became the Jagger of literature. He was small, true—I feel a permanent pang of camaraderie at his line in The Pregnant Widow about a character who occupies that “much-disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”—but he was also hypermasculine. It wasn’t just his subjects: the snooker and the booze and the obsession with judging all women “sack artists.” It wasn’t even just the style: an inability to leave a sentence alone without chafing at every verb, the prose equivalent of truffle fries. It was also the interview persona, all haughtiness and clubhouse universality, however much that could be contradicted in private by thoughtfulness and generosity of conversation.

But most of all, his British maleness was in the purity of his comic perception of the world. He practiced a very specific form of oral literature—anecdote, putdown, punchline, alcoholic joke: monologues from the ruined-dinner table. This morning I picked up an old copy of Money taken from my parents’ house and there they were, the riffs: “You just cannot park round here any more. Even on a Sunday afternoon you just cannot park round here any more. You can doublepark on people: people can doublepark on you. Cars are doubling while houses are halving.” Or: “I should have realized that when English people say they can play tennis they don’t mean what Americans mean when they say they can play tennis. Americans mean that they can play tennis.” Or: “This guy had no future in the frightening business. He just wasn’t frightening.” A novel by Amis is an apparatus for each line to find its best exposure. ” ‘Yeah,” I said, and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”

This summer, we’re launching a series called Overheard—which is more or less about what it sounds like. We’re asking writers to take their notebooks to interesting events or places; they’ll record what they see, but mostly what they hear. In the first of the series, Elena Saavedra Buckley goes to a TriBeCa gallery opening for an exhibit of collaborative paintings by two Swedish hip-hop artists, and surveys the scene.

The art show I was going to was risky to google, because it was called Fucked for Life and took place in the basement of a gallery called the Hole. It had been raining, and the humidity followed us downstairs, where the low-ceilinged room felt like the hull of a ship. The paintings reminded me of more focused, imaginative versions of the kind of thing your friend’s stoner older brother might make in his room—they had barely shaped demonic faces at their centers, orbited by tagged abstractions and blooms of neon, all lacquered and dripping. Some sat in ironic-seeming ornate gold frames; others hung against long stretches of loose fabric layered with graffiti, which had been made the day before and seemed to be releasing damp chemical wafts. 

This was the private opening of new collaborative paintings by Bladee and Varg2, whose real names are Benjamin Reichwald and Jonas Rönnberg—two Swedish artists affiliated with a Nordic brand of underground hip-hop that’s been gaining steam since the mid-aughts. The two collectives at its center are the Sad Boys—helmed by the fairly famous Yung Lean—and Drain Gang, which was started by Bladee. I didn’t know much about Varg2 before this weekend; he’s a techno producer who used to go by just Varg until a German metal band of the same name sent him a cease and desist. (He then released an album called Fuck Varg.) But I love the warbling, auto-tuned, alabaster Bladee—the second e is silent—who raps as often about Gnosticism and demons as he does about weed and being depressed. He has obsessive Zoomer fans like the rest of Drain Gang, though his are made especially rabid by how difficult he is to grasp. You can barely see him from behind his hair, hoodies, sunglasses, and blasted-out photo edits; one comment on a recent music video reads, “i don’t think i’ll ever get used to seeing high quality footage of bladee,” and a four-second clip of him saying “Drain Gang”—just the audio!—has 132,000 views. He says he was once struck by lightning in Thailand. 

These years, the only basketball I watch is the playoffs, but I take them very seriously, because they’re so fleeting, dramatic, and sublime. I love the ever-changing narratives. The pregame handshakes. The postgame interviews. The controversial tweets. The stupid commercials one can’t help but memorize. I love when a player “gets hot” and their teammates keep funneling them the ball. The rarely seen, silent green siren that flashes when a coach uses their challenge to dispute a call. The sudden announcement of a technical foul and the way the mood shifts during the single, solitary free throw.

I love catching glimpses of the players’ tattoos of babies, ancestors, dates, signatures, playing cards, angels, lions, phantoms, and crosses emitting sunbeams.

I like when the refs touch each other in any way, but especially when all three of them put their arms around one another, huddling to discuss a difficult call. I like watching endless replays of fouls, trying to decide whether something was a block or a charge, or who touched the ball last. I like when the commentators disagree with the refs and when the broadcast cuts to the former ref Steve Javie in some NBA warehouse in New Jersey, standing in front of TV screens, calmly hypothesizing what the refs are discussing.

I love the emotions, which in other sports are often hidden under the players’ helmets and hats. Jamal Murray’s arms outstretched in joy as he backpedals after nailing yet another three. Jimmy Butler’s and Grant Williams’s noses touching while they scream at each other like two feuding angelfish. Robert Williams’s head in his hands on the bench.

Over the last few years, I’ve been reading unappreciated and erased novels by Black artists from the twentieth century. They’ve helped me think about the idea of illegibility—about what the literary world has historically deemed too wild, complex, radical, experimental, or challenging to be included in the precarious and burgeoning Black canon. I’m also interested in why some promising writers give up after only one or two books. What conditions are required to be a writer over a lifetime? Some of these forgotten novels have since been rediscovered, like Nella Larsen’s twenties classics and Fran Ross’s 1974 Black feminist picaresque, Oreo. Others are still fairly unknown, like William Melvin Kelly’s dem and Willard Savoy’s Alien Land, his only novel, published in 1949, about mixed-race identity and passing. My most recent addition to this “shadow” canon is Alison Mills Newman’s Francisco. Originally published by Ishmael Reed’s press in 1974, it’s a California road-trip story about a Black woman artist, musician, and actress whose husband, the eponymous Francisco, is a Black indie filmmaker. Reading it, I can see how it rubs against that era’s prescribed notions of uplift, chastity, and even Black feminism in its celebration of Black love, sensuality, and joy. It doesn’t deal in the familiar tropes of trauma or alienation, and the female narrator is enthralled by her male lover at a time when narratives about Black men as absent or as abusers were more palatable to the mainstream. Thanks to New Directions, who reissued the book a couple weeks ago, it’s found its way back into the world in time for the author herself to experience its discovery.

—Danzy Senna

Read Danzy Senna on Robert Plunket here.  

The career of the filmmaker/playwright/novelist/actor Bill Gunn serves as both a cautionary tale about the racial and aesthetic narrow-mindedness of the American film industry and a still-visible signal flare to artists interested in pushing beyond conventional forms. His best known work, Ganja & Hess, which he wrote and directed, is a Black vampire movie with hints of Cassavetes and Jodorowsky, a rough-hewn, hallucinatory freak-out that lodges itself deep in your subconscious. It’s now considered a classic, but even with his increased recognition in recent years, being a devoted Gunnian requires a good deal of digging. His great soap-opera homage/parody Personal Problems, a collaboration with Ishmael Reed and a murderer’s row of excellent Black actors and musicians shot on early video equipment, is now in wide and official circulation. But his first film, Stop!, finished in 1970 but never released by Warner Brothers, requires luck and persistence to see. Having finally tracked it down this month in a fuzzy but perfectly watchable dub online, I can say it’s worth the effort. An improbable anticipation of The Shining blended with the free-flowing sexual gamesmanship of Nicolas Roeg’s then-contemporary Performance, Stop! would have been only the second released Hollywood film by a Black director, and surely the strangest for a long time to come. In its startling mix of genres and frank, often sinister sex scenes, it belongs in a dim, curious video store aisle of the mind.

A couple of weeks back, I shared a roundup of pending legislation across several states and at the national level which would ensure the right to read. There is another bill worth highlighting during this legislative session that is making positive progress in Connecticut.

Senate Bill 2, called the Act Concerning the Mental, Physical, and Emotional Wellness of Children, is a wide-ranging one covering everything from children’s mental health coverage to public libraries. Most pertinent to the ongoing removal of books from public and school libraries, though, is the bill’s creation of sanctuary libraries across the state. The bill would allow every community within Connecticut to designate a public library as a sanctuary library, wherein books which have been banned, challenged, or censored will be readily available to anyone who would like to borrow them.

The bill would open up small grants for libraries which choose to take on the distinction as sanctuary libraries, coming in at about $1,200 annually. The bill has made its way through committees and has been slated for discussion on the Senate floor for this week. You can follow the progress here.

Senate Bill 2 signals to libraries across Connecticut that the legislators find access to information so vital that it belongs under the state’s child wellness bill. Connecticut’s Ferguson Public Library in Stamford was the second library in the country to declare itself a sanctuary library in January 2023, following the lead of Chicago Public Library last fall. Under the new bill, any city could designate one library a sanctuary. Those cities with more than one public library may meet criteria to become eligible as sanctuary libraries or may choose to remain “nonprinciple” libraries; the difference would be in ability to receive the grants earmarked for the purposes of sanctuary libraries.

The bill was a surprise to the Connecticut Library Association and to librarians across the state. It emerged following a meet-and-greet hosted by the Ferguson Library following its designation as a sanctuary library; Senator Cici Maher attended the event, and two weeks later, after hearing from constituents that book bans were among the biggest concerns of library workers, she returned to session and her committee and began drafting the proposal.

Why do I pay attention to AAPI Heritage Month? As a school librarian, I spend a lot of time thinking about the diversity of my collection. I’m a white woman working in a school where white kids are a slight minority. I know that my ingrained racism keeps me from selecting books that are appropriate representative of the world unless I make a serious effort. One reliable way to naturally encourage diversity is to pay attention to heritage months. Of course, we need Black and Native American literature year round. We need to be centering gay and disabled authors from September to May, and in the summer, too. But these occasional focuses help me design displays and chose read alouds with intention.

Below, I’ve gathered some picture books that celebrate cultures from around Asia. All books are created by AAPI authors and illustrators, and feature characters interacting with their culture in some way. Whether you’re seeking a story about the act of grappling with your heritage or simply looking for a story where an AAPI culture is a complement, there is something to enjoy.

If you’re looking for more AAPI stories, especially ones for older readers, I’ve linked to some more recommendations below. Hopefully you’ll find a story to either make your readers feel seen or to help them understand how much there is to see in the world.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic circa 2020, there came the rise of virtual book clubs. With the strict adherence to social distancing rules, many started virtual book clubs in schools, libraries, or even just among friends. These virtual book clubs work in a similar way as those from Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon.

But here’s the most intriguing thing that came out of the pandemic: businesses that are not necessarily bookish in nature also started their own virtual book clubs. One such company is MUD\WTR, a coffee brand that launched its book club back in January with self-help book sensation Atomic Habits by James Clear as the first title. There was even a Q&A for their 1,467 members and guests after the session.

“We came up with the idea of a book club when planning for a big campaign in Q1 2023. The idea was around ‘healthy habits create healthy minds’ and my task as community manager was to find a way to make this come alive for our community. I knew from research that our community loves to read, and I used to work at a bookstore, so that helped,” says MUD\WTR’s Community Engagement Manager Britney Haddad. “We’re more than just a product — we’re about encouraging people to rethink their habits. When making positive changes in your life, it helps to surround yourself with people doing something similar, and our book club did just that.”

Chico’s, a clothing brand, also took a leaf out of someone’s book. The clothing store for women relaunched its Chico’s Book Club in March with the first title No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, a collection of essays by model Paulina Porizkova. The book club’s rules are more lenient (they want you to do it on your own terms), and most sessions can be done online or in-person.

These brands pivoting toward bookish territory definitely sparks some intrigue and so it raises the question: what’s the deal?