I’ve written about my book club for Book Riot before. It’s been one of my favorite things for almost ten years. How our book clubs works, generally, is that each member takes a turn choosing a book. Everyone reads it, and then we meet once a month to discuss that pick. When you choose the book, you lead the discussion. That means, yes, if you choose the book, you ask the questions. 

At my book club, each meeting begins with the discussion leader sharing why they chose the book and what they thought about it. Maybe they chose the book because it’s a buzzy new book that they’re excited about or maybe it’s a classic that they have been meaning to read for years. Their initial thoughts are usually just a quick summary — they thought it was exciting, they thought it was boring, it was a slow start but got better — and then they, popcorn-style, ask someone else in the group for their initial thoughts. This primes the pump for the rest of the conversation, and often the book club discussion goes fairly smoothly from there. But, if it doesn’t, then the person who chose the book is in charge of keeping the conversation going. 

This has led to varying degrees of panic over the past ten years — less now than then, but still sometimes now. But after more than 100 book club meetings, I’ve learned a few things about what makes a good book club question. 

A good book club question invites your book club to get talking. My book club’s first question is sort of a no-judgment zone. The point is just to start talking. The first few quiet moments of book club can feel a bit like staring at a blank page that needs to be filled, so your goal with your first question is just to break that silence. A good book club question is concerned about character. Even the most plot-driven story is driven by people on the page making decisions and going about their days. So what do you think about the characters in your book? But don’t just ask if they were likable. Were they believable? Do their decisions make sense? Would you do the same in their situation? A good book club question is an investigation. Authors love to leave clues in their work, little allusions to work that inspires them. Is there an epigraph in the beginning of the book? What book (or movie or play or song) is it from? What might that have to do with the book you hold in your hands? Do the characters listen to a particular song? Is it a real song or invented for the book, like “Never Let Me Go” was invented for the book of the same name? A good book club question directs the conversation outwards. Does this book have something to say about the larger world? If it’s an old book, does it still feel relevant, or do the ideals of the characters seem dated? If it’s a new book, does it talk about the world in an interesting way, or does it seem to beat a dead horse? A good book club question might be the result of — or inspire — a Google search. When you read the book, did you come across any questions that drove you to a web search? Maybe you’re curious about the bookstore the characters visited. Is it real? Is it based on a real store? Or maybe you want to know where the author is from, and how that influenced the book. Ask your book club members what they think! A good book club question imagines what might have been different. My book club recently read a book where the first quarter of the book was about a conversation in a graveyard. Would the conversation have been different if it had taken place in a barn? Or in a restaurant? What if it was a different genre? Sometimes imagining something different about a book shows you what is essential about the book. A good book club question might come from a reading guide — or it might not. These days, many books have a URL on the back flap or maybe on a back cover that invites you to download reading guide questions. (If not, you can Google “BOOK TITLE + discussion questions” and usually come up with something.) These can be a great starting point, and there was a point in my life when I was committed to printing these guides out or saving them in my notes app so I knew I would always have a question handy. They’re useful, especially when they provide some background to the book, but I wouldn’t rely on them. Going down the list of questions often feels like you’re going through a school assignment. A good book club question gets various — and sometimes conflicting! — answers. The most boring book club conversations I’ve ever been a part of were the meetings where everyone liked the book. When you just sit in a circle and agree with each other, there’s just not much to go on. The most fun, on the other hand, were when we had a 50/50 split of people who loved the book and people who absolutely hated it. The fun of book club is in learning about your book club members through their opinions of the book. The best book clubs are the ones where I leave with a head full of different ideas about the book than I had when I walked in. A good book club question inspires respectful and kind conversation. The fastest way to kill a conversation is to make someone feel silly or stupid for their opinion or because they misremembered a plot point. Book club arguments are a delight, but everyone has to understand that the stakes at book club are low: you don’t need to agree, and you don’t have to convert someone to liking the exact same things about a novel that you do.

Hopefully, this list gave you some great ideas for how to keep the conversation rolling at your book club! If you want great book club discussion questions that can work for any book, check out this list!

Want some rules to keep your book club running? Here’s what my book club does. Here are some great picks for your book club to read this fall!

With a backlist of over a dozen novels and novellas, Colleen Hoover isn’t a new author. Since publishing her first novel in 2012, the romance writer has earned the loving nickname of CoHo and has worked to cultivate a huge following of devoted fans. She started a Facebook group in 2016 called Colleen Hoover’s CoHorts that is still active today with over 130,000 members gushing about her work. Other groups have sprung up dedicated to talking about her individual novels, like this one for Verity with over 30,000 members. Hoover is the 2nd most followed author on Goodreads.

Since TikTok’s emergence into the literary scene, she’s been dubbed the “Queen of BookTok,” accumulating over 800,000 followers and hundreds of videos under the hashtag #colleenhoover. According to Hoover’s publisher Atria, her most popular books on TikTok have spent a combined 151 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Novels like It Ends with Us published in 2016 were back on the list in 2022 with staying power. What about Hoover and her books has resonated so much with TikTok?

Her TikTok Content

It doesn’t take long to see why Hoover is so engaging on her TikTok. Videos with her mom and family and the realities of authorhood give viewers a glimpse into who she really is. She posts updates about her books of course, glimpses of a new manuscript, and announcements about release dates along with duets with readers sobbing at the end of her emotional rollercoaster books. But she also posts videos of her “hot mess” life, posting even when her mic cuts out or when she forgets her mouse and keyboard on a writing getaway eighty miles from home. 

As someone with chronic depression and anxiety, wild mood swings are just a normal part of my life. Sometimes, I’m bursting with frenetic energy, barely hanging on for dear life as I do All The Things. Other times, I’m flattened by chronic fatigue, barely able to function.

But a new emotion has been building up inside me these past few years, coating my insides with acid and leading me to isolate myself from others: rage.

The source?

Manifold.

There’s the growing resentment that comes with being a woman who engages in a huge amount of emotional labor, who makes sure things are running smoothly before she attends to her own career and mental health. There’s the fear and frustration that come from seeing entire communities controlled and silenced and erased via fascism, the fall of Roe v. Wade, the varied legislation attempts that seem born out of cruelty more than anything else. There’s the growing impatience that comes with seeing seemingly rational people radicalized, seeing them embrace individualism over collectivism.

I always get excited for September — even though I’m long past back-to-school days, September feels like a new start, and it’s the time when I’m ready to learn a ton of new things. I’ve got my shiny new school supplies ready, and now I’m looking forward to diving into books that will teach me new things and take me new places. Fortunately, September is also an excellent month for brand-new books to gobble up to do just that! 

From memoirs of all kinds to true crime to graphic nonfiction, there’s something for everyone in this month’s batch of new releases — I also have my eye on a paperback release, Thicker than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erica Cirino, which comes out September 22. This month’s nonfiction new releases also take place all across the world, so they’re perfect for learning about new places and a bit of armchair traveling. 

There are many more books coming out over the month of September, but here are 10 nonfiction new releases I am particularly excited to check out, and I think you should be too! The publication dates are listed after each title to make it easier to add to your never-ending TBR pile.

Regardless of how much weight you subscribe to awards — they are, after all, from humans subjectively picking their favorite — award lists can still be a great place to find your next read from. There are so many awards that it’s definitely like standing in the cereal aisle, inside another cereal aisle. It’s hard to know or hear about all of the awards and then there’s the most recent awards and all the previous years and an immediate feeling of “Where do I even start?”

Since I love and read so many crime books (mystery, thriller, suspense, true crime — and everything related!) I decided to take a look at the many annual mystery awards to pick out the ones that are my favorites. So now you have the subjective judgment of the judges, and me! Basically we’ll pretend they’ve been judged twice so double murdery seal of approval for must-read best award winning mystery novels!

I checked out all the info I could find on about 16 different annual awards for mystery novels and picked out the ones that I was like “Yup, yup, great book, all the awards!” Below you’ll find a range of mystery books, and one true crime, with the year and award they were honored with (While I listed one award for each many of them are multiple award winners!). But first you may want to whisper some sweet encouragement to your TBR list because it’s about to get heavy with these 20 great reads.

It’s September! September feels like one of those weird in-between months, not quite summer, but not quite fall either. At least, not here in Tennessee. While October is full of pumpkins and Halloween prep, and August is full of pools and playgrounds right before school starts, September is just sort of there. But while the month may feel a bit nebulous, September children’s book releases are spectacular. I had the hardest time ever narrowing down my selection to 12 books. I could’ve easily made a list of 20. In picture book new releases, some of my favorite authors and illustrators, like Julie Flett, Ryan T. Higgins, and Kate Messner, return with new books. In middle grade new releases, Kwame Alexander returns with possibly his best book yet, and several books explore mental health in really meaningful ways. 

Many authors on this list have tweeted about how their books will not be carried by Barnes & Noble after B&N’s decision to shelve only the top 1-2 bestselling children’s books per publisher. This decision disproportionally affects marginalized authors. I encourage readers to buy locally or buy online from places like bookshop.org. If a local bookstore isn’t carrying a book you want, call and ask them to stock it. 

September Children’s Book Releases: Picture Books

During the COVID confinement and afterward, I watched around sixty films starring Cary Grant. What a comfort to have him in my mind before I slept. No matter if he is comic or desperate, self-possessed or wounded, romantic or cool, he is ridiculously good-looking and seems never to know this. I love it when he puts his hands on his waist and pushes his hips forward as if about to dive or perform some acrobatic trick. His slim, athletic torso and long arms are always tanned. Sometimes he wears a fine shimmering gold medal around his neck. I love his dark eyes that have not forgotten his youthful suffering. He makes me laugh when he rolls his eyes around with his own special brand of sophisticated nonchalance. Though he isn’t aggressive, he doesn’t seem weak either. I find him buoyantly masculine. I can’t resist watching him. A few days ago, on a flight to Los Angeles, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s hugely entertaining thriller North by Northwest again. Grant was fifty-five when he made this film and long past his box office peak in the screwball comedies that made him famous. In the Hitchcock film he wears a nice-fitting, light gray suit with a gray silk tie and cuff links. The suit gets dirty, sponged off and pressed, then dirty again. Grant’s hair is a little gray, too. I don’t wear ties anymore, but I would wear a tie worn by Cary Grant. North by Northwest appeared in 1959, around the time that he was experimenting with medical LSD and searching for more “peace of mind,” as he called it. I don’t really know what a great actor is, but I think Grant is sensational.

—Henri Cole
Read Henri Cole’s recent essay on James Merrill here.

In a scene midway through Whit Stillman’s Barcelona, which I rewatched this week, the Spanish Marta (played by a not-so-Spanish Mira Sorvino) is explaining to patriotic American naval officer Fred why her friend Montserrat has left his also American cousin, Ted.

I took over the Paris Review softball team this year because the former captain, Lauren Kane, left the magazine for a big job at The New York Review of Books just before I was hired, and someone noted during my first week that I might be a good replacement because I “like sports” (i.e., I sometimes watch Premier League soccer on weekend mornings). I am not, strictly speaking, an athlete, and had never played a full game of softball; still, wanting to be amenable, I agreed and found myself on the phone intermittently all spring with the New York City Parks Department, trying to get our field permits nailed down. At one point I was arguing with someone about the timing of sunset on a specific day in July.

The list of things I didn’t know about softball when the season began in May is long and comical. Among them: Not every field has bases—if you don’t bring them, you might need to use your shoes as second and third. Turf can be very slippery and you should expect bloody knees and have a first aid kit on hand. The play is often at second, and even more often at first. Pitching badly is sometimes actually preferable to pitching well. You can run through first base but not the other ones. You have to shift over in the field when a lefty is batting. You should not attempt to catch with your bare hands, even if it seems like the ball is coming at you very slowly. Right field is actually kind of a chill place to be, except when it isn’t. It all comes down to the quality of your ringers—and sending people shamelessly pleading emails to get them to show up to your games.

When I arrived to play our first game, against Vanity Fair, I didn’t even know how many outfielders a team required. It was a bleak beginning of the season, pre–Memorial Day; there were only seven of us, most of whom had never played and the rest of whom hadn’t practiced. I had expected  a few people hitting around jovially in the summer twilight, and instead we arrived to face a team of guys who were saying things like, “My favorite spring ritual is dusting off my cleats!” One of them got really mad at me over the way I was standing at first base. (I was standing wrong.) We lost 27–1. I was surprisingly demoralized by the experience and wasn’t relishing the concept of forking my summer evenings over to what seemed like the perfectly miserable pastime of taking the subway up to Central Park to get crushed. All in all it seemed like it was going to end up being a raw deal, being softball captain—the kind of thing I would try to foist on someone else next summer. In our second game, we lost 11–3 to The Drift.

DAY ONE

I sit at the long blond pine table I use for a desk. Nothing happens. Maybe I can make something happen.

A few years ago there was a popular self-help book called How To Make Sh*t Happen, never mind that peristalsis is involuntary. I eat some mango slices and a green apple and a banana. I drink twelve ounces of whole milk with a scoop of whey protein. I find a leftover fried artichoke in the fridge, wrapped in aluminum foil.

I listen to Michael Gielen conducting Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, but it’s not loud enough.

Johann Peter Eckermann was born in 1792. In 1823 he sent Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a collection of his essays about the writer’s works, and he became Goethe’s literary assistant till the latter’s death in 1832. The following is an entry from Eckermann’s diary that recounts one of their early meetings.

Thursday, September 18, 1823

Yesterday morning, before Goethe left for Weimar, I was fortu­nate enough to spend an hour with him again. What he had to say was most remarkable, quite invaluable for me, and food for thought to last a lifetime. All Germany’s young poets should hear this—it could be very helpful.

He began by asking me whether I had written any poems this summer. I said that I had written a few, but on the whole had not felt in the right frame of mind for poetry. To which he replied:

If you went to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco this spring you could see a big small thing, a model that imagines what Manhattan will look like in 400 years. Actually Man-Nahāta is not one model but four, which hang in a square. Starting at the bottom left and walking clockwise you see a version of the city every hundred years, beginning in 2100. Emergence, the first in the series, is a grid of streets and skyscrapers, except for where an organic glassy form appears in Central Park, black and yellow and blue lit from below, awful. In Growth (set in 2200) the form expands in concentric and overlapping spirograph shapes, an almost periwinkle blue at the edges, rippling amber toward the center, where it calcifies into hills. By Decay (2300) it flows back, leaving edges of buildings made soft, eroded into shapes like melted candles. In Rebirth (2400) the built environment is overgrown, peaks and valleys where a city used to be, made of white chalky photopolymers and fiberglass.

Man-Nahāta was commissioned by the director Francis Ford Coppola, who hired the architect Neri Oxman and the OXMAN group to create studies for Megalopolis, an epic set in a future New York City that starts production this year. Made for a movie that does not yet exist, the model has its own narrative, based in part on the projected mean global sea level and surface temperature rise in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most people walked around it the wrong way, or maybe not wrong but counterclockwise, changing the story. The glassy form recedes, buildings sharpen, streets reappear. You could circle the model again and again, speeding up or slowing down time, repeating the disaster or undoing it. Susan Stewart writes in On Longing that the miniature, “linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination. It marks the pure body, the organic body of the machine and its repetition of a death that is thereby not a death.”

***

Film has always tangled with architecture and invention. Brian R. Jacobson writes about this history in Studios Before the System. In 1888, Eadweard Muybridge took his pictures of horses in motion to the New Jersey laboratory of Thomas Edison. Soon after, Edison filed a patent for the kinetoscope, an early moving picture machine. William K. L. Dickson and William Heise made the first film for the Edison Manufacturing Company in 1892. Around this time Edison was bought out of General Electric and started the Edison Portland Cement Company. He made designs for concrete homes that could be built with a single pour, which Edison described as “the most wonderful advance in science and invention the world has ever known, or hoped for.” The houses would be affordable, fireproof, and made on site. There is a photograph of the inventor next to a two-story prototype with a covered porch and balcony, windows evenly spaced, and decorative molding. Edison wears a dark suit, his tie askew and his left hand in his front pocket. Man and his little house.

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I am a baker of pies and a believer in pleasures, but also the kind of killjoy who can’t take a rom-com in the spirit it’s intended. Hence my fraught relationship with Heartburn by Nora Ephron. I remember—from 1983, the year the book was published—it being marketed as a “hilarious” comedy about a woman cooking her way out of a broken heart at the end of a marriage. Heartburn was a cultural sensation in the suburbs of my youth, such that I recall my mother cackling over the film adaptation and criticizing Meryl Streep’s looks—not pretty enough! The story was said to be inspired by Ephron’s divorce from Carl Bernstein and has always been considered a delicious revenge plot by a spurned woman upon a cheating man.

Ephron had a dazzling career as a trailblazer for women in journalism, and she wrote many of the greatest movies of all time, including When Harry Met Sally. She was a master, so my cavils over Heartburn‘s myths about romance will be brief: I don’t think a woman who stays in a bad relationship is just a starry-eyed believer in true love, as the heroine, Rachel Samstat, is presented to be. Nor do I think that men are just dogs—which is the book’s explanation for her husband, Mark Feldman’s, behavior—or that the happiest ending is finding a new relationship. But Ephron, in Heartburn, wasn’t looking to soul-search—this was her revenge novel. At one point, Rachel, who is a food columnist, admits to her therapist that she tells stories about her life in order to “control” the narrative. Ephron, writing Heartburn, was controlling the narrative of her divorce while showing off her wit, and she did it wonderfully. The one-liners never cease, as when Rachel says that Mark celebrates the political dysfunction of Washington, D.C., because if the city worked, “something might actually be accomplished and then we’d really be in bad shape” and adds, “This is a very clever way of being cynical, but never mind.”

As the new school year kicks off — or is already in progress in many places — it’s worth taking a look at the states which have enacted laws that ban books. This guide is not comprehensive, but gives an overview of the legislation currently on the books that will impact how teachers and librarians select and share reading material in classrooms and libraries.

Before diving it, it is worth noting these are all “red” states. It is a popular and unhelpful narrative to simply write off these laws because of where they are being enacted. In many of these states, there is significant disenfranchisement of voters in addition to laws which make voting harder than it needs to be; this ensures a certain political persuasion remains in power. These systemic barriers to voting are the same ones which need to be considered in arguments that the people who can’t get these books from libraries thanks to these laws can “just get them at the bookstore.” We are in the business of dismantling hurdles, not leaving them where they are.

Further, as we’ve seen through these censorship roundups over the past year+, it does not matter where or how book bans begin. They trickle through each and every state in varying degrees, and what you see here could become models for future legislation elsewhere. Finally, writing off certain states does not help in ending book bans. Everyone, regardless of political affiliation or state of residence, deserves the right to access books, reading material, and information they want to. Fighting fire with fire helps no one.

Note that this list is not comprehensive. I’ve pulled out some of the biggest laws in several states that are having an immediate impact and that will likely influence further legislation within and beyond their jurisdictions.

Book Ban Bills Currently Enacted Across the US

Florida

There is not a wrong time to read some great witchy YA books. That said, there is something particularly good about reading new witchy YA books as the seasons begin to shift toward shorter days and nights. Lighting a candle and cracking open the windows to dig into a story about people who have magic powers, who often have cute or terrifying familiars, and who want to change their worlds? Count me in. We’re lucky, too, in that YA continues to offer more and more witchy books that are representative of the world at large. These books are queerer and more colorful than they ever have been before.

Whether you’re new to witchy books or are looking to add some more great options to your TBR, let’s dive into some outstanding new books that have hit shelves this year. Don’t like especially scary books or want more sweet witch stories? Never fear. Those are well represented here, too.

Bonus: Tirzah highlighted a ton more YA witch books publishing this year, and I’ve not repeated any below. Twice the witchy goodness!

One of the things I love the most about Star Wars is that there are so many stories in the galaxy. There are so many characters, so many stories, and such a rich history available that the possibilities are endless (I’m of the opinion that you can never have too many SW books, shows, or movies). Which makes me wonder why some of the most obvious books/series haven’t been made into TV shows yet.

This list focuses on canon books, mainly to avoid confusion. I’d love a Mara Jade TV show, and I’ve heard the rumors about her in Mandalorian season 3 and the rumors about a possible Disney+ Heir to the Empire movie, but forgive me if I’m skeptical. That being said, I would watch the hell out of a TV series based on Legends. Yes, I’m being purposely vague and sweeping: I’d watch any and all of it.

I’m behind on my Star Wars book reading and even further behind on my Star Wars comics reading (so many books, not enough hours in the day, and throw in single parenting a 6-year-old, and you’ve got your answer as to why that is), but I’ve come up with a list of Star Wars books and series that deserve their own shows. It goes without saying that this is not an exhaustive list by any means, and it barely scratches the surface. Let’s take a look!