Here are the news stories we covered this week. Grab your coffee and catch up!

Welcome to The Best of Book Riot. Here’s your weekend edition with the most popular stories from the week that was.

The Best Book Club Books Coming Out in November

Publishers Weekly Names Its Best Books of the Year

My second favorite best-of list just dropped (I won’t keep you in suspense: the NYT’s 100 Notable Books list is #1), and Everett is the cover, continuing James‘s romp through the early going of awards/best-of season. I had a reader email from someone inside the business saying James was going to sweep in a way we may never have seen anyone sweep before. The blurb for why James is one of the 10 Best Books of the Year from this PW list I think gets it exactly and succinctly right: “Everett has ascended to blockbuster status without leaving behind what makes him special.” Wish I had put it so well.

Last week, I shared The Best Queer Books of the Year, According to Barnes & Noble: I combed through each of the B&N Best Books of the Year 2024 lists and picked out all of the queer titles. Or, at least, all the queer books I recognized. This week, the Publishers Weekly “best of” list is out, so I thought I’d do it again! Unlike B&N, PW only has a few lists for its best of the year round-up: the general top 10, picture books, middle grade, and young adult. All together, they included nine queer books—but let me know if I missed any!

The only book to show up on both the Barnes & Noble and Publishers Weekly best of lists is All Fours by Miranda July, which has a bisexual main character. Unsurprisingly, the young adult list had the most queer books on it: almost half of the titles on their YA list have a queer main character.

Without further ado, here are the nine best queer books of 2024, according to Publishers Weekly.

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Collins Dictionary has announced its Word of the Year for 2024, and it’s “brat.” The word got a new definition in 2024 thanks to Charli XCX album by the same name. Now, in addition to the first definition of “a child, esp one who is ill-mannered or unruly: used contemptuously or playfully” it also means “characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude.”

Collins explains that brat was one of the most talked about words of 2024: “More than a hugely successful album, ‘brat’ is a cultural phenomenon that has resonated with people globally, and ‘brat summer’ established itself as an aesthetic and a way of life.”

Welcome to your Saturday edition of Today in Books, packed with all the news Book Riot reported this week. Let’s dig in.

A South Carolina Library Won’t Buy New Books for Readers Under 18

Taylor Swift is Publishing a Book!

Welcome to your weekend highlight reel! Here are some of Book Riot’s most popular stories of the week.

7 Horror Books to Read for the 2024 Read Harder Challenge

It’s October, which means it’s Halloween month! This is the time of year when I try to read as many horror and horror-adjacent books as I can — exactly the books I avoid the rest of the year. Despite not usually gravitating toward this genre, October is usually my best reading month: I read more because I’m trying to beat the clock and fit in as many horror books as I can before November. I won’t tell you how many titles are on my TBR this month, but let’s just say I’m inching dangerously close to my library’s very generous checkout limit.

South Carolina Public Library Won’t Buy New Books for Kids

Thanks to a new proviso in the South Carolina state budget, at least one public library system in the state has made the decision to acquire no new books for those under the age of 18. In a statement released across York County Public Library’s social media late last week, the library board chair announced the moratorium on new purchases until the State better clarifies what is and is not permitted in public libraries.

I’m all about queer horror reads in the lead-up to Halloween, and I have so many on my TBR. If you, too, are looking to pick up some creepy queer reads, I thought I’d take a look back at five of the queer horror books I’ve read so far this year and rate whether you should buy, borrow, or bypass them.

I plan to read a lot more in this genre in the next couple of weeks, but so far, here are my thoughts on the queer horror (and horror-adjacent) books I’ve read in 2024.

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Welcome to The Best of Book Riot, our daily round-up of what’s on offer across our site, newsletters, podcasts, and social channels. Not everything is for everyone, but there is something for everyone.

The Perfect Dark Academia Novel for Your Fall TBR

In the fall months, it’s all about dark academia. Give me a creepy school. Give me suspicious students. Give me teachers with secret agendas. I’m looking for a book with all the vibes of a perfect crisp fall day during back-to-school season. But while dark academia is a genre that is really known for the vibes, we need more than a feeling to get us through a whole book, right?

Library News Round-Up

What happens when a library bans Banned Books Week? Well, if you’re Sierra Benjamin, a longtime staff member at the Flathead County Library (MT), you sit outside the library on your days off with a stack of banned books and a sign that says “Banned Books Week is BANNED in your public library!” The library director, Teri Dugan, said that Sierra is allowed to do what she likes in her free time, and that because the library has a number of materials that patrons can check out at any point, they “‘didn’t see a need to necessarily highlight [Banned Books Week].'” Well, maybe they should, because Flathead County has had a few issues with banned and challenged books over the last few years.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

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How Did Holocaust Stories Become Beach Books?

In a guest post for Maris Kreizman’s newsletter, Ilana Massad explores the popularity of light/inspiring/beachy/romantic fiction set in and around the Holocaust to ask, “what happens when we sell real-life suffering for light entertainment?” Citing examples like The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Massad defines the Holocaust Beach Read as a book about the Holocaust that “keeps a reader engaged without being serious enough to put a damper on their good vibes.” As she asks who these books are for, she invites us to consider how transmuting one of the greatest atrocities in human history into digestible stories might deny the humanity of its victims and erode our ability to engage with the horrific reality.