When we arrive at the Paradisus, I worry I have made the first of many mistakes. Has Costco failed us? A bland remix of Ed Sheeran wafts up from the swim-up bar in the central courtyard into the lobby. My parents do not drink. They do not like to swim. I worry that Ed Sheeran will follow us to our room.

I continue to worry. Three months ago, I called Ramona, a Costco Travel representative, and asked her a question. What is the most popular and well-reviewed of the all-inclusive vacations offered by Costco Travel? Mexico, she said. And then she qualified: Costco members have many different tastes, but most have unanimously enjoyed a stay at the Paradisus La Perla (Adults Only) in Riviera Maya, Mexico. Compared to other Latin American countries, Ramona said, many Americans reported that the Mexican resort felt “worth it.”

I was hesitant to join the crowds of U.S. Americans descending on the Caribbean, but Ramona maintained that Paradisus was the best option for my needs: parents who never vacation, mostly shop at Costco, and harbor a fundamental dislike of restaurants and an extremely low tolerance for what they determine is not worth their money.

Doodling today is not what it was. Or is it? Google “doodle” and you’ll find the Google Doodle—what Google calls a “fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous” transformation of its logo by a team of dedicated Doodlers to commemorate significant, and not so significant, days: from the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Anne Frank’s diary to “Chilaquiles day.” You will also find a long list of apps that take Doodle as their name, including the ubiquitous scheduling tool. This recasting of the word in the age of the internet takes us far from the freewheeling squiggles, squirls, and whirls decorating the margins of telephone books and notepads—which is, perhaps, what doodling once was, in some near-unimaginable bygone era, when we worked with pens and pencils on paper, and when our attention and our hands wandered in different ways.

“Doodling” describes an activity of spontaneous mark-making by an agent whose attention is at least partially directed on something else. It’s the doodle’s apparent spontaneity and whimsy, but also its complicated relationship to attention—that most anguished-over of modern commodities—that makes it ripe for exploitation by the marketing strategies of app-based companies. That is: the doodle is usefully positioned, around the edges of our work documents and our conscious thought, to help us think about how our minds wander and about what those forms of wandering might yield. In a self-styled “doodle revolution,” which she introduces in a TED Talk and a book, Sunni Brown, founder of a “visual thinking consultancy,” explicitly attempts to capitalize on doodling’s wayward energies. Brown praises the potential of doodling for the workplace, coining a technique that she calls “infodoodling” as a tool for honing the attention of workers and thus increasing their “Power, Performance, and Pleasure” (plus, presumably, productivity—and profit). The goal is to “unlock” the potential of “visual language” to realize the full potential of our brains and “to help [us] think” in different ways. Brown’s self-styled revolution sits within a broader trend toward rehabilitating the act of disinterested drawing, as a kind of salve to our frayed modern attention spans. The doodle-curious consumer will find online a baffling array of derivative self-help- and wellness-flavored “guides” to doodling, full of promises to help us “Discover [our] Inner Whimsy and Find Moments of Mindfulness,” as the Daily Doodle Journal has it, or to “enhance your creativity,” according to another notebook of the same name. Doodling, or: how to cash in on the mind at play.

The activity of distracted drawing was first named “doodling” at a very particular moment: in the 1936 Frank Capra film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. To be clear, the word “doodle” already existed. It possibly derives from the German dudeltopf, meaning “simpleton,” cementing a strand of aimlessness or surplus value that persists in its current form. Before the twentieth century, it was used to refer to a “simple or foolish fellow.” It is in a courtroom scene toward the end of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town that the word was coined in its current meaning: distracted drawing. The film’s oddball protagonist Longfellow Deeds has been proclaimed insane by his relatives for, amongst other things, playing the tuba and giving away his inheritance money. In his defense, Deeds argues that he plays the tuba to help himself think, and points out that everybody is subject to such inane, or insane, distracted fiddlings (or in the idiom of the film, “everybody’s pixillated,” meaning something like “away with the pixies”). Not least pixillated of all is the court psychotherapist, Emile von Haller, who has been trying to make a case for Deeds as a manic depressive. It is the psychotherapist’s own doodle that Mr. Deeds triumphantly exposes in the film, calling von Haller a “doodler,” which, he explains, “is a word we made up back home to describe someone who makes foolish designs on paper while they’re thinking”:

I arrived in New Holland, Pennsylvania early, around 7 A .M., and drove down the main street, taking in the produce stands, machine repair shops, and country stores that bear Mennonite names: Yoder, Yoacum, Yost. Cattle graze in unpeopled fields, and in one, three Staffordshire Draft horses stood obediently, harnessed to a plow, as though posing for a painting.  

Lancaster County is home to many auctions, but the New Holland Sales Stables have been a mainstay of the Amish and Mennonite communities since 1920, and boast the largest horse auction this side of the Mississippi. The sale barn auctions more than 150 horses, ponies, mules, and donkeys beginning at 10 A.M. sharp every Monday, rain or shine, regardless of season, and even on holidays.

The barn opened at 8 A.M., so I made my way across the patchwork of Lancaster County’s small towns, through East Earl Township, Blue Ball, and Goodville, past a Christian playground manufacturer with replicas of Noah’s ark, a taxidermy shoppe called Nature’s Accent, Shaker furniture showrooms, saddleries, dozens of churches, and hand-painted signs advertising asparagus, tulips, watermelon, raw milk, whole milk, lemonade, onions, potatoes, homemade berry pies, salvation.

NEW HOLLAND SALES STABLES INC. was painted in faded red capital letters on the corrugated tin barn. The barn was made up of a large central building with a sale arena flanked by stadium bleachers, a concession stand, and an auctioneer’s booth located ringside. A line for the concession stand had formed at the entrance. “Get your hot dogs now, they’ll sell out by ten,” one woman said to her husband. A couple of old Amish men sat on a bench drinking coffee and spitting dip into empty cups or onto the dusty floor in front of them. One wore a thick denim chore jacket over a blue gingham shirt, muddy cowboy boots, and a white straw hat. This seemed to be the uniform—any place can attract regulars. His friend wore a lavender button-down under thick black suspenders. His floppy white hair hung past the brim of his cowboy hat, making it difficult to tell where his head hair stopped and his long white beard began.

Next week, I’ll be sharing the results of the Our Queerest Shelves Halfway Check-In Survey, but today, I wanted to chat with you about my answers to the questions about my favourite new and backlist queer books I’ve read in 2024.

And while we’re at it, I’ll also answer some questions from the Halfway Check In Tag circulating on BookTube and BookTok, including how many books I’ve read so far this year, my favourite new author I’ve discovered this year, and my most anticipated 2024 release that comes out in the second half of the year. Let’s get into it!

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I’d love to hear your answers to any/all of these, so let’s chat in the comments!

If you’re reading this newsletter online and want new queer books and queer book news in your inbox, sign up for Our Queerest Shelves here.

Whew, this was a busy one!

The New York Times has unveiled its list of the 100 best books of the 21st century so far.

A new Zora Neale Hurston novel is coming next year.

Books about disability are popular banning targets.

It’s officially (finally!) happening: the Uglies adaptation has a release date.

Start your weekend off right with the Book Riot highlight reel.

The Best Books of 2024 So Far

That’s right folks, we’re at the midway point of the year, which means it’s time to crown Book Riot’s Best Books of 2024 (so far)! Check out our favorite reads that were published between January 1st and June 30th of this year. We love them all and we hope you will too. Happy reading!

The Bestselling Books of the Week, According to All the Lists

Today’s bestsellers including a couple of new titles, starting with All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker. This is a thriller set in 1975 Missouri, and it’s a Read with Jenna pick. The publisher describes it as a “missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each.”

The other new release is a nonfiction book by the hosts of the politics podcastPod Save America called Democracy or Else: How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps. This is an illustrated humorous guide to participating in U.S. democracy that promises to advise readers on how to “sav[e] American democracy just in time for the 2024 election and 2025 insurrection.”

📚 For another finger on the publishing pulse, check out the most-read books on Goodreads this week.

Friday at last! Look busy while you catch up on bookish news.

12 Book Club Picks for July, from Reese’s Book Club to Roxane Gay’s

This month there is a wide range of books selected offering a wonderful reading list, and certainly at least one book is a great fit for you. What have these 12 book clubs chosen this month? There’s an emotional YA novel set in California, a queer horror novel set in the ’90s, a sex therapist’s sexuality guide, a novel by an author who writes in a different genre each book, and a take-down-the-patriarchy reimagined fairy tale!

Books About Disability Are Popular Banning Targets

The data on book bans shows precisely the themes and topics that are being targeted and that have been targeted since early 2021 in this most recent wave of censorship. Among them are books by and about LGBTQ+ people, people of color, books that explore social and emotional learning, and books that explore sexuality and puberty. But there’s another segment of books targeted that has not been as deeply explored as the others–indeed, while PEN America’s data notes that books about health and wellbeing were the second most frequently banned in schools in the 2022-2023 school year, that category is so broad that it fails to specify that many of those books are about disability.

Related: libraries are under siege.

The Best Narrative Nonfiction for Your Summer Reading Pile

Have you ever read nonfiction that reads like a thriller or like the most immersive novel? That’s narrative nonfiction! Narrative nonfiction uses various craft elements to create a story, not merely a reporting of events. The prose is usually written in a compelling, descriptive literary style, while still preserving the facts of the story.

My cats are simply fascinated with my laptop, and they’ve taken to marching all over my keyboard. I hope spell check is up to the challenge…

Libraries & Librarians

News Updates

PLA released its 2023 Public Library Technology Survey.

NYPL budget issues have made it difficult for branches to purchase in-demand books for their patrons.

Book Adaptations in the News

Netflix’s latest hit adaptations have also boosted book sales.

Emily Henry’s Funny Story is being adapted as a movie.

Before I dive into this week’s book recommendation, allow me to get personal for a moment. There’s a reason I’m thinking about this book in July. July is my brother’s birthday month, and I’m missing him a lot this year. I read this book a few years after my brother died from leukemia, and I immediately felt a really deep, personal connection with a lot of the specifics of this story. I think a lot of people will.

This book is one of my all-time favorites for a reason. It hits at some really rough emotional truths that had me sobbing, but there were also moments of real humor, believe it or not. I can’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t love this one. If you haven’t read it, please do!

Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s Alex, and I’m coming at you with new releases. The number of new releases this week can only be fairly characterized as something between flabbergasting and downright upsetting. So many tough choices on what books to highlight. May you have lots of reading time this month to deal with the oncoming tide of pages.

Let’s make the world a better place together. Here are two places to start: Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, which provides medical and humanitarian relief to children in the Middle East regardless of nationality, religion, or political affiliation; and Ernesto’s Sanctuary, a cat sanctuary and animal rescue in Syria that is near and dear to my heart.

New Releases