Whether you’re in public schools or libraries or aren’t but support your local public institutions, one thing you can do right now to prepare for the fall and its inevitable wave of “parental rights” discourse and book challenges is get ahead of the misinformation. By openly addressing what has been happening over the last year and setting the record straight, you become the transparent organization that these groups are desperately demanding (even when they then are mad when it happens exactly as they demanded).

Build a guide to the current climate on your website, your social media, and affiliated groups to challenge the narrative being pushed by Moms For Liberty, No Left Turn, and others. Be upfront about the claims being made against libraries and schools in a broad way, then focus it on your local institutions.

Here’s a stellar example.

The Forest Hills Public Schools (Michigan) has been subject to a local group’s demands to things like “removing CRT” from the curriculum and “focusing on fundamentals.” They’ve been especially intent on highlighting the so-called Critical Race Theory being taught in the schools, beginning their quest for information via FOIAs last spring. The school board meetings have also become a space for right-wing political rallies.

A Political Action Committee in Forest Hills — developed and run by parents in the district — has stepped forward to right these claims through their group SupportFHPS. Included on their website is a thorough guide to all of the claims being made about education right now, both nationally and locally, with links to credible sources about why such claims are wrong and why they’re being made. It is a handy, easy to use guide that is accessible and understandable to people who are not staying on top of all of this news — which is impossible! — and it is a vital tool for passing along and ensuring that everyone has the same correct information at hand. What makes this guide especially good is that it’s usable to people inside the community specifically, as well as broadly applicable to those outside it.

If you’re a millennial on Twitter, or at least if you follow millennials on Twitter, you’ve likely come across the “We need an American Girl doll who…” meme. It’s a hilarious trend that combines one of the most sought-after toys of the ’90s with hyper-specific situations, and book lovers are not immune from getting called out by it. Because we can’t resist catching the latest social media wave, we’ve collected the best bookish American Girl doll tweets for your reading pleasure.

Since their introduction in 1986, American Girl dolls have highlighted a variety of different points in history and unique experiences. Fans could even create a doll to look like themselves and buy matching outfits! But leave it to Twitter and Instagram to find the gaps in American Girl doll representation.

Wow, meme one and I’m already feeling attacked!

For those of us who grew up obsessed with books, taking trips to the library every chance we got and memorizing the check-out limit, books have always been our safe spaces. They’re where we go when we have too much to do, or we’re going through something, or just need to escape for a while. I’ve spent many an hour with my head tilted sideways, reading every title on the shelves of the library or hunched on the floor, flipping through a book before buying it at my favorite bookstore. Libraries, bookstores, they’re my favorite places in the world!

With all of that time spent in the quiet of a library or lost in the shelves on a darkening afternoon, I realize just how quickly that setting can turn sinister. A scream in the silence, eyes peering from the other side of the spines. The quiet is only comforting until you want — no, need — someone around to help you.

And some authors have tapped into that fear, turning the places we love so dearly into an accomplice to a crime. Have used the darkness and the silence and the wandering as a way to heighten tension rather than relieve it. If you want to read about the ways a bookstore or library — and not the books inside — can scare you, here are eight novels to get you started.

Disability Pride Month is in full swing, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with all of the wonderful books by disabled authors that are making their way around the internet. I love when people discover disability literature and realize the incredible range of books out there. From romance to poetry to memoir, disabled authors write it all. For some folks, I know this year is their first foray into disability literature, and I appreciate the effort to learn new things and expand one’s understanding of the world. 

While I love seeing nondisabled people pick up books by disabled authors, I’ve noticed that when able-bodied folks review disability literature, they often say things like, “I can’t relate to this” or “the writing is just too clunky.” But disability literature is, at its core, for and by disabled people. These books entirely center disabled folks and our experiences. But when able-bodied people review disability literature, they often write their reviews through an abled lens, which skews their understanding of the book.

Let’s look at the medium of the text itself. To create a print book, many of the writers used accommodations because the very method of communicating in a book format is inaccessible to them. Working on a computer, formulating ideas into written language, or looking at a page aren’t actions that every disabled person can do. So to even communicate, some disabled people have to adapt to get anywhere close to the able-bodied norm. 

For example, I write by not looking at a screen or by using voice-to-text, and that changes the rhythm and flow of my writing. Using accommodations to write will change the prose and structure of essays. It is literally impossible for some of us to reach the literary standard based on able-bodied folks’ abilities. So if you assume disabled people will write like able-bodied people, you may be disappointed.

If you apply the expectations and assumptions of an abled lived experience, disabled literature may not work for you. I often see nondisabled people say they can’t relate to disabled people’s stories, that our lives are too “different” from their own. Or some able-bodied people say that they feel they didn’t learn enough from disability literature to make it worth reading.

This week, we bring you reviews from two of our issue no. 240 contributors. If you enjoy these, why not read recommendations from four more of our Summer issue poets?

I was watching the sunset on the Greek island of Hydra with my best friend when I suddenly said, “I think I hate Henry Miller.” I’d just raced through The Colossus of Maroussi and then Tropic of Cancer. So, as my friend and I perched on rough stones by the sea, I forced her to listen to my least favorite passages from Tropic of Cancer. Miller brags about his penis—“a bone in my prick six inches long”! He catalogs what seems like “every cunt I grab hold of.” At a bar, he ejaculates on a stranger’s dress. (She’s “sore as hell.”) In 1934, when Tropic was published, this ecstatic obscenity could have been appealing; in 2022, reading it reminds me of being trapped in the bathroom queue at a party next to a coked-up man with a PhD and a browser tab permanently open to PornHub. The book feels, in Miller’s words, like “a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters.”

“I think I hate Henry Miller.” I think. Why did I qualify? Well, there is Tropic’s bravura opening. And despite the ethnographic gaze that saturates The Colossus of Maroussi, certain episodes of hilarity delighted me: the saga of Miller’s diarrhea during his visit to Crete, for example, in which he shits his pants, then shits at “the bottom of a moat near a dead horse swarming with bottle flies” and embarks on an oft-frustrated quest for “soggy rice with a little lemon juice in it” to quiet his bowels, all while touring ruins and being plied with victuals that are decidedly disquieting to his bowels. There are also passages of arresting beauty, where the writing has the feeling not of mania but of deep dreaming. Miller’s first approach to the island of Poros can only be quoted in full; it is perfect. 

Does the moment redeem the mass of it? Can I recommend The Colossus of Maroussi for the sake of one gemlike isle? The question engenders other questions: what, if anything, redeems a work of literature? Is the language of redemption even appropriate? What about the language of possession? Yours, mine. Give, take. In college, listening to people debate that problematic, shifting thing called “the canon,” I privately thought that the books included in it are far weirder than either its defenders or detractors usually admit. I’ve rarely felt that what I read “excludes” me: no matter who wrote it or when, it is mine for the taking, or leaving. I cling to that feeling even now—even when I read “while it’s all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.” 

“Today I’m REALLY worried about death. I almost started crying. However, my new calligraphy kit is AWSOME.”

“My dollys are so fun to play with. They bend and move and pose. : )

P.S. the police think that Peterson might be guilty because there was blood all over the scene of the crime and a used condom (EW!) and a bloody soda can with hair on it.”

*

I encountered Joan Didion’s famous line about why she writes—“entirely to find out what I’m thinking”—many times before I read the essay it comes from, and was reminded once again to never assume you know what anything means out of context. I had always thought the line was about her essays, about writing nonfiction to discover her own beliefs—because of course the act of making an argument clear on the page brings clarity to the writer too. She may have believed that; she may have thought it a truth too obvious to state. In any case, it’s not what she meant. She was talking about why she writes fiction:

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means … Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

These pictures, Didion writes, are “images that shimmer around the edges,” reminiscent of “an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia.” (I know these frightening psychedelic cats, the art of Louis Wain, very well—I saw them as a child, in just such a book, which I found on my parents’ shelves.) Play It As It Lays, she explains, began “with no notion of ‘character’ or ‘plot’ or even ‘incident,’” but with pictures. One was of a woman in a short white dress walking through a casino to make a phone call; this woman became Maria. The Bevatron (a particle accelerator at Berkeley Lab) was one of the pictures in her mind when she began writing A Book of Common Prayer. Fiction, for Didion, was the task of finding “the grammar in the picture,” the corresponding language: “The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement.” This is a much stranger reason to write than to clarify an argument. It makes me think of the scenes that I sometimes see just before I fall asleep. I know I’m still awake—they’re not as immersive as dreams—but they seem to be something that’s happening to me, not something I’m creating. I’m not manning the projector.

To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

In December 1981, I visited my older brother at the University of Michigan. There three men taught me to play three songs on guitar: “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Genesis,” and “Suzanne.” The first left me cold. The second, its melodic charms notwithstanding, featured the line “They say I’m harder than … a marble shaft,” leading me to believe, until just now when I finally looked him up, that Jorma Kaukonen was born in Finland and never really learned English. The third rocketed me, on my return to William & Mary, straight to the town record store, where the cashier sold me Songs of Leonard Cohen with a money-back guarantee on the condition that I listen to it ten times before complaining.

There existed milieus where Cohen’s music was inescapable, such as kibbutzim and the GDR. Tidewater, Virginia, was not that milieu. A basic tenet of its all-pervasive racism was that white people couldn’t do music. Black people were denied decent jobs and homes, but there was no question that high school dances would be themed “Always and Forever” and culminate in “Brick House” and “Flashlight.” At college, surrounded by northern suburbanites’ awkward skanking to babyish punk rock, I realized that I had been inadvertently blessed. But it did take me at least ten listens to acclimate to Cohen’s chansonnier velocity and compound meters while his lyrics were sinking their claws into my soul.

I taught myself all the songs on the record and borrowed his novels from the library. An image of sainthood from Beautiful Losers haunted me for decades: to live like a runaway ski. I blame The Favorite Game for the image of a sentient vibrator that drives a couple from their home, as well as a description of getting trapped in a writhing mass of young people at a political rally but failing to orgasm. I suspect they’re also from Beautiful Losers. The Favorite Game is about getting laid a lot in swinging Montreal (autobiographical).

This week, we bring you reviews from three of our issue no. 240 contributors.

The documentary Rocco, which follows the Italian porn actor and director Rocco Siffredi, feels like a hundred perfect short stories. We learn that Rocco carries around a photo of his mother at all times. We watch Rocco and his teenage sons chat in their cavernous and starkly lit climbing gym/weight room in Croatia. We discover that Rocco’s hapless cameraman of many decades, Gabriel, is actually his cousin, a thwarted porn star. During one virtuosic shoot (Rocco Siffredi Anal Threesome with Abella Danger) Gabriel accidentally leaves the lens cap on, which they discover only after shooting the entire scene. There’s a surprising sweetness in Rocco, a man in the twilight of a certain era. “They used to focus on the women’s faces,” he says, sadly. He’s decided to retire. The final scene finds Rocco carrying a giant wooden cross on his back through the hallways of the Kink.com Armory. This tableau is the brainchild of Gabriel. “Because you die for everyone’s sins,” he tells Rocco.

—Emma Cline, author of “Pleasant Glen” 

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is about a lot of things: the last ever screening at Taipei’s Fu-Ho Grand Movie Palace; a ticket-taker who wants to gift half of a steamed bun to the projectionist; a young man cruising the theater for sex; and that lonely, amorphous feeling of THE END—not so much death as the cinematic mood of loss. When I heard about Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which was directed by Tsai Ming-liang and released in 2003, I could neither see it in a movie theater nor stream it anywhere. At the time, my brother was quarantining in a high-rise apartment building in Santiago, Chile. He found an illegal copy of it on the internet and sent it to me. I liked the criminality of this exchange. No character in Goodbye, Dragon Inn breaks the law, but it feels like there’s a crime going on. Part of this is due to the rain and the shadows and the grimy brokenness of the Fu-Ho Grand, but it’s mostly because Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a stripped down melodrama of longing. The ticket-taker is the film’s star. At one point, she goes behind the movie screen. The light hits her face. We seem to know nothing about her, but that’s not true. We know how, in the light of the screen, despite the forces that would stop her, she hopes and dreams. In this way, we know her exactly.

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To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

On “Tower of Song” (1988), Leonard Cohen’s weary croak cracks the joke: “I was born like this / I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” He can’t quite sustain his own melody, but some of us remain enchanted—and not merely by his self-effacement. The irony, we suspect, involves us, too. Choicelessness is one of his great themes: we don’t choose our blessings or our deficits, and we don’t choose our material conditions. Fine. But Leonard Cohen takes it further: maybe we can’t even control the impulse to defy our deficits, to work against the grain of what we’ve been given. We feel sentenced to sing even without a golden voice—by our own unruly desires, or by “twenty-seven angels from the great beyond.” The metaphorical cause matters less than the effect: “They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song.”

Leonard Cohen came to music late, at least compared to his countercultural contemporaries. Bob Dylan was twenty-one when he released his first album; Leonard Cohen was thirty-three. He struggled to adapt his literary strategies to the new form. Even before his baritone stiffened with age, there was something workmanlike in his sensuous, spiritual, serious songs—not just in his delivery, but in his compositional structure, his preference for the heavy-handed end rhyme. Park / dark. Alone / stone. Pinned / sin. Soon / moon. He never made much use of slant rhyme, syncopation, or any of the sinuous tricks of great vocalists from the blues tradition. The second verse of “Tonight Will Be Fine” (1969) seems to describe the monastic simplicity of his compositions: “I choose the rooms that I live in with care / The windows are small and the walls almost bare / There’s only one bed and there’s only one prayer / I listen all night for your step on the stair.” For me, Leonard Cohen’s voice is that step on the stair—stumbling through the song’s tidy rooms, making the floorboards groan. His flatfooted rhythm makes wisdom’s weight hit harder.

I sometimes think of Leonard Cohen seated like a stone on Mount Baldy, where he became an actual monk in 1994 and where he lived for five years. I know a guy who studied at the same monastery. He would try to catch the singer stirring during morning meditation—even just breathing—but his stillness seemed absolute. This discipline frightens me, though it must have been hard-won. I like his songs because they let us overhear the rage and desire rattling discipline’s wooden frame: “I’m interested in things that contribute to my survival,” Cohen told David Remnick. He liked the Beatles just fine, but he needed Ray Charles. And I need Leonard Cohen—not the Zen master, but “this laborer called a writer” (his words) arduously working through a voice too plain for his own poetry. He keeps me company in the difficult silence between my own sentences. “I can hear him coughing all night long, / a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song.” We’re both still straining—sweetly—for the music.

About six months after our daughter was born, my husband calmly set the idea on the table, like a decorative gun. I said I’d think about it.

I couldn’t pretend to be that surprised by the proposition, or ignorant of my part in engendering it. I was too tired. I was too busy. The baby the baby the baby. I had a deadline. I was reading. I was watching The Sopranos (again). I was depressed. I just wanted a nap, needed a nap, ached for a hot throbbing nap. This might, I figured, be “real” marriage, harder deeper marriage, marriage opening its cute mouth all the way and showing the mess that was back there.

Accidental iPhone video of forty minutes in the kitchen one night, a view of the cutting board and the wallpaper: You can hear a baby and the banging of something metal and you can hear our two adult bodies rustling around the space, running water, sliding a knife into the knife holder, dragging a chair across the wood floor, opening and closing the fridge―a sound like a breath and then nothing. We speak in short, muffled bursts, loving to her, not unloving to each other.

Maybe, I thought, the libido of a certain kind of woman is an animal that lives a little and then crawls into a cave and lies there panting for a few decades until, with a final ragged pant, it expires. Could it expire so early? Or perhaps it was taking a breather postpartum—understandable, surely, given how a six-and-a half-pound human body had been slither-pulled out of the place I get fucked, or one of the places.

To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

If apocalypse were at hand, would you choose to light a seventy-dollar Bois Cire scented candle by your bed and leaf through a Penguin Classics copy of George Herbert’s The Temple as the air conditioner ran on high, “Who By Fire” playing softly on your phone, the world slowly sifting itself down to ash? Some of us might. Some of us would. Leonard Cohen embraced the spiritual and the carnal, and his aching insistence on chasing pleasure at the edges of oblivion has made his voice ever more seductive—comforting, troubling—since his death in 2016. 

That we are now at the edge of several oblivions needs no elaboration. The question of pleasure remains—what we might do with it, since we are all but numb to spectacular shock, and whether it can or should be comforting. I first heard Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” as a teenager, before I heard Cohen’s original. At the time I preferred the cover; its beauty was immediate, seamless, intoxicating. But over time I’ve come to love Cohen’s churchly lounge act for the opposite reasons. There’s something uncanny in the synthetic sheen and gravel of Cohen’s track—a self-negating camp performance of spiritual grandeur that erases the line between rapture and sleaze.

And on the other side of pleasure—a luxury candle, poetry, air-conditioning—there is often both rapture and sleaze: tender depravity. How much of it are we willing to accept? A lot, maybe. While there’s a time for the sensuous charms of “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne,” I’ve always been drawn to the songs in which Cohen allowed himself to sound unhinged. In “Diamonds in the Mine” he is an unlikely vector of proto-punk rage, particularly at the end, as he genuinely screams his way through the final refrain—“And there are no letters in the mailbox / And there are no grapes upon the vine”—in an atonal vocal shred, his unfazed backup singers hoisting up the chorus’s sunny melody behind him, a spring breeze blowing through a nuclear meltdown. Amid the decadent, Oedipal party music of “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On,” he snarls, “It will only drive you insane / You can’t shake it or break it with your Motown / You can’t melt it down in the rain”—a meltdown of a different order.

“It’s good they told me what / the moon was when I was a child,” reads a line from a poem by Marilyn Monroe. “It’s better they told me as a child what it was / for I could not understand it now.” The untitled poem, narrating a nighttime taxi ride in Manhattan, flits between the cityscape, a view of the East River, and, across it, the neon Pepsi-Cola sign, though, she tells us, “I am not looking at these things. / I am looking for my lover.” The very real moon comes to symbolize the confusion of adult experience. I quote these lines back to myself when I feel acutely that I understand less, not more, than I used to.

The poet Marilyn was the first Marilyn I encountered. Like her when she was young, I lived in a strict Pentecostal environment that forbade much of pop culture, but unlike her, I didn’t gorge myself on movies after escaping the prohibition. Although I had heard of “Marilyn Monroe,” I hadn’t yet happened to see any of her films when I came across Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe in a bookstore. I, like so many, fell for the allure—still, to me, a forbidden one—of her image: Marilyn on a sofa seemingly caught looking up and away from the black notebook in her lap. Her expression suggests she hasn’t yet decided whether the distraction is a source of apprehension or delight. Wearing coral lipstick and a black turtleneck, she is beautiful and bookish. The apparently candid photo is actually from a 1953 series for Life by the photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt. Then twenty-six, Marilyn was famous, and only becoming more so: she’d started dating the baseball star Joe DiMaggio. The revelation that years before she’d posed nude for a calendar (and wasn’t ashamed) had recently scandalized McCarthyite America. Life’s portraits of a sex symbol among books play to an audience’s wish to condescend to the object of their desire, to laugh at the “dumb blond” who thinks she can read. (Desire, after all, is an involuntary subjection often trailed by resentment.) As always, Marilyn insisted on approving the images; the contact sheets show her red pen. And in this photo, whatever anyone else intended, I also see her considered self-creation. 

Marilyn’s poems are, as the book’s title indicates, mostly fragmentary. Rarely (if ever) did a first draft become a second, but themes and motifs recur as though being reworked. They were written in notebooks and on scrap paper alongside lines of dialogue from her films, song titles, lists, outpourings of anxiety, and accounts of both real events and dreams. Sometimes lines that read like poems actually aren’t, as with some of the notes made during her years spent in psychoanalysis and in classes with Lee Strasberg, a controversial proponent of the “Method,” a technique that demands actors dig deep into their emotions and memories in order to fully inhabit their roles. Some of Marilyn’s pages are tidily penned, starting precisely at the red vertical margin, but often the poems and notes range across or even around the page, with words crossed out and sentences connected by arrows. Because the lines often end where the paper does, it’s not always obvious where they break, or whether they should break at all. According to Norman Rosten, a poet who became better known for being a friend of hers, “She had the instinct and reflexes of the poet, but she lacked the control.”

Marilyn left high school when she married her first husband and, aside from a continuing-education course in literature at UCLA, never had further formal education. But she was a committed if haphazard autodidact, going to a now-defunct bookstore in Los Angeles to leaf through and buy whatever books interested her (Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, for instance). Although the playwright Arthur Miller, her third husband, claimed she never finished anything “with the possible exception of Colette’s Chéri and a few short stories,” others contradict this. She professed a love for The Brothers Karamazov and a wish to play its central female character, Grushenka. Her library contained more than four hundred books, including verse collections by D. H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, and Yuan Mei, and an anthology of African American poetry.

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Transcription by Kate Atkinson for $1.99

There’s no point in typing “it’s been a week” anymore because every week is A Week. But as we continue into a crumbling democracy, the growing sense of hopelessness is hard to ignore.

The fall is going to be brutal for schools and libraries across the country. We know this, given how last school year went and how the summer has turned into an opportunity for right-wing groups to protest and intimidate those showing up to library Drag Queen story times and those stealing or complaining about Pride displays. This summer is ample opportunity for these groups to recalibrate and set into motion their plans to implement book rating systems they’ve personally developed, which will inevitable trigger more book bans. Given the overturn of Roe this week, there is little doubt books about abortion or pregnancy will be getting the same treatment as those by and about BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks, too.

While “go vote” continues to be a rallying cry about stopping this — and it certainly does matter — there are other avenues for creating change, too. There’s running for school board, seeking appointment or election onto a library board, and there’s showing up to those meetings (in person/virtual or via email/letter writing). One of the easiest? Become an election judge. This may be called something slightly different where you’re at, but it is the person who sits at an election site and ensures everyone is able to vote.

Every state operates a little differently, but every state requires a number of volunteers to work the polls for elections. You can do this during early voting periods or on election day, depending on your schedule and the needs of your community. Again, depending on needs, these can be long days, but you may be paid for that time.

Sitting as a poll worker helps ensure everyone who is able and registered to vote is given the same opportunity to do just that. In some places, you may help register those showing up that day. The typical day involves setting up voting booths, ensuring that all materials are accessible and working, and helping every person who walks in to vote knows the process and procedure. It also involves making sure that everyone follows the rules of the election: no electioneering at the election site, no advertisements for politicians or ballot measures within a certain distance of the door, ensuring that no one influences the outcome of any vote throughout the day. You may also have to help direct individuals to their appropriate polling place (though hopefully more communities will go the route of DuPage County, wherein residents can go to any polling location to cast their vote).

We may be past pride month, but as we all know, reading books with LGBTQ+ rep should be an all-year-round affair. Especially when it comes to dark fantasy. Especially when those books are sapphic.

Why are sapphic fantasy novels so important? Traditionally speaking, sci-fi and fantasy genres have long been dominated by straight men’s voices. Which is… fine. But it’s empowering and exciting to see that in our contemporary literary culture, we’re starting to expand a little more in representation. There is a wide range of highly inventive, beautifully rendered, and yes, super dark fantasy worlds in which women’s stories are centered.

For me personally, I love to see women setting off on their own adventures in fantasy scenarios. And dark fantasy is especially satisfying because it gives women characters the space to act in morally questionable ways and do surprising things.

Here are 1- fantastic sapphic fantasy novels — some adult and YA. Fair warning: you’re going to want to pick up as soon as you finish checking out this list. Your TBR pile might never recover.

We at Book Riot like a social media trend just as much as anyone, especially when we can find a bookish slant. You might’ve seen this latest viral formula when it first appeared on TikTok as a rating game. Or perhaps you, like this elder millennial, caught on when it made its way to Twitter.

The basic formula is that you say someone is “a 10 but” and then follow it with some sort of dealbreaker. At first it was just friends posing fictional scenarios for each other to respond to. I might post “she’s a 10 but she pronounces the l in salmon.” Then my friends could respond with her new rating based on that quirk. (She’s a 3. If you pronounce that l, we can’t talk. I am working on unpacking oppressive linguistic biases, but I can’t get over that one.)

Then, it grew to be sort of a self-deprecating thing — TikTokers pointing out their low-stakes toxic traits. As an example:

While they’re often silly things, some include some real red flags. For example, one of my fellow Rioters suggested this bookish gem: He’s a 10 but his bookshelves only have Ayn Rand.

One of the best things about reading nonfiction is that it reminds me just how big and weird this world we live in is. I read a lot of nonfiction that tackles big ideas about language, history, current affairs, and identity. But I’ve recently come to love another kind of nonfiction — books that explore the ordinary. I love nonfiction that takes something I know nothing about, and, in many cases, something I’ve never even considered, and makes me care about it. How often do you think about how clocks work? Have you ever pondered the important role rain has played in human history? How much do you know about salt, iron, fig trees, stone walls, cameras?

I will never be an expert in any of the subjects these books explore. That’s part of what makes these books so interesting — they let me into their secret worlds and change the way I think about things I encounter every day. They remind me of what’s so wonderful about being a human: that we share the world with so many incredible creatures, places, and materials, and that sometimes, we make pretty cool things, too.

Many of the books on this list are pure fun. Some of them tackle big themes — race, culture, colonization, environmental destruction, the history of science. But all of them hone in on the specific. I guarantee that every one of them will teach you something new that will totally blow your mind.