We made it everyone. It’s Friday. Enjoy it by checking out what we have on offer at Book Riot today:

The Best New Books Out in August, According to Indie Booksellers

Every month, the American Booksellers Association put together a list of the top 25 new book releases of the upcoming month as their Indie Next List Preview. These are books that were nominated by booksellers at independent bookstores across the country, and they cover all genres and categories. Each book has a quote from a bookseller about why they recommend this book, and these recommendations can be printed out as “shelf-talkers” to display in store.

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

Lately, the most-read books on Goodreads have stayed pretty similar from week to week. That’s why it’s surprising to see a new title in the #1 spot and a self-published book at that…

THE LORD OF THE RINGS Magic System, Explained

While The Lord of the Rings isn’t the first fantasy series in existence, it’s the archetype by which nearly all others since have been designed. Every epic fantasy since J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels set in Middle Earth has been influenced by or is outright trying to recapture the brilliance of those books.

The Ongoing Censorship of High School Advanced Placement Courses

The number of students taking AP tests has grown dramatically, especially in the last decade. This is in part due to readiness by students and in part because there are so many more subjects offered as part of the program. As of writing, there are 38 different AP subject areas ranging from art to language, science to math, literature to social sciences, history, and more. 

Yes, I’m still talking about the top books of the 21st century, and as I mentioned last week, I wanted to highlight some of the titles that would have been on my ballot. So here is another book from my list, and this pick is one of a couple horror titles that would be on my list.

Obviously, I read a lot of horror, but, y’all, I think it’s time we all recognize the impact that horror has on literature as a whole. We all know horror is booming right now. It’s no longer niche. It’s mainstream. And some of it is thanks to books like this one. In fact, you’ve probably heard about this one before, but if you haven’t read it yet, this is your sign.

These Friday Check Your Shelf newsletters are where I focus on book banning news, so there’s usually not much in terms of happy updates. This is especially true this week, as NBC recently published an article about one police officer’s two-year attempt to bring charges against school librarians in Granbury, Texas. I have more information linked in the newsletter, but this is such an unhinged story that it needs to be called out specifically. And as we see more legislative attempts to criminalize librarians, we’re going to see an increasing number of law enforcement figures trying to take book banning into their own hands.

Libraries & Librarians

News Updates

The FCC has approved the final rules to support WiFi hotspots through the E-Rate program, but a lawsuit has been filed to block the expansion.

“Austin City Council approved Thursday authorizing negotiations for an extended contract with the Travis County Sheriff’s Office to support security services at Austin Public Library branches.”

Book Adaptations in the News

The adaptation of Nickel Boys will open this year’s New York Film Festival.

Colin Firth joins the cast of Young Sherlock.

The new school year is just around the corner. Department stores are rolling out their school supplies, which are still hard for me to resist. The other day, my mom and I found a Corgi unicorn (Corgicorn?) school supplies set, and she said she had to buy it for me. So I guess I’m set then. I love notebooks, pens, and colorful tabs to take notes and annotate the books I’m reading. It helps me engage with the book’s content and remember what I’ve read.

Today, we’re delving into a couple must-read books for Disability Pride Month, new books, and bookish goods.

Bookish Goods

New Releases

Sesame Street premiered in 1969, the same year that my eldest sister, Kate, was born. The genre of children’s television was in its infancy; Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood had premiered just the previous year, joining Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody on the limited roster of shows meant for the very young, and the idea of using gimmicks from commercial TV—a variety of segments, a sense of humor—to support children’s development (not just to keep them quiet or sell them toys) was revolutionary. In 1969, the Sesame Street universe was inhabited by Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, and Bert and Ernie—all Muppets—plus the humans Gordon and Susan, who were married to each other; Mr. Hooper, who ran the corner grocery; Bob—apparently, according to Wikipedia, a music teacher; and a rotating cast of kids, who seemed to have happily wandered in from the real world.

By the time I was born, in 1984, Sesame had grown. There were more Muppets, including the Count, Snuffy, Elmo, and my personal favorite, Grover, and more humans, including Luis, Maria, Linda, and Gina. There was merch: I took some early steps in Bert and Ernie slippers. And there were studies bearing out what the show’s creators had always claimed: watching Sesame Street could help little kids learn to read and count, improving their chances of success in school and potentially their entire lives. I watched Sesame Street every morning in my Bert and Ernie slippers and my jammies, sitting as still as I could in the rocking chair, hoping against hope that the cat would join me.

My mom had watched Sesame Street with both of my older sisters, and she liked watching it with me, too, which was no accident. The creators knew the value of co-viewing for children’s development, and they wrote the show to entertain parents as well as kids, with on-the-nose parodies of contemporary prime-time TV (among the most memorable, Miami Mice and Monsterpiece Theater), celebrity appearances (Judy Collins sang the alphabet with Snuffy; Jesse Jackson recited poetry on a stoop), and recurring sketches (who could forget Grover as the incompetent restaurant waiter?). Obviously, the Muppets, with their strangely expressive mouths and sophisticated sense of irony, were preferable to any cartoon, and particularly to the Disney-princess franchise—in which any human mom can recognize certain heteronormative toxins, of which my mom, child of one bad marriage, party to another, then finally and perhaps hesitantly in the one that would last, was perhaps even more acutely aware. She dressed all her daughters in overalls. One year she sewed me a cape like the one Grover wore to play Super Grover.

My first salaried job, in 2008, was at an uptight nonprofit run by an oil family in Washington, D.C. I disliked the job, which required me to wear nylons and organize policy “convenings,” the point of which I could not see, and I hated D.C., where irony seemed to have been smothered by earnest, middlebrow ambition. I wanted to move to New York, and I often took the bus up for the weekend. Coming back one Sunday, in the middle of Union Station, I saw an exhibition about Sesame Workshop: it, too, was a nonprofit, which I now considered my area of expertise; surely it wouldn’t require nylons; and it occurred to me that I should try to get a job there. After a couple of tries, I did. It was 2010, and I was twenty-six years old.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Patty Nash’s poem “Metropolitan” appears in the new Summer issue of the Review, no. 248.

Do you have photos of different drafts of this poem?

I do not write in “drafts.” I just continue to write or tinker on the same poem until I can’t anymore. This means that it is hard to see earlier iterations of the poem—the earliest one I have access to is one that I sent to my friends, so it was somewhat presentable already. There are small line differences, however, and sometimes major ones. For example, I changed the gender of the protagonist in this section—here is a screenshot of an earlier version:

I also slimmed down the ending, thank goodness. Earlier version here as well:

“I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral    down /    a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on.

This car was an unwieldy inheritance. It wasn’t needed, wasn’t wanted, and wasn’t even paid off. The FJ Cruiser had been the prized possession and long-standing project of my uncle Andrzej: an elevator repairman who lived in Passaic, New Jersey, until he died suddenly of an air embolism. It was a freak accident: a minuscule air bubble traveled from his IV to his lungs while he was lying in the hospital with a stomach ulcer. This uncommonly gentle man died a uniquely terrifying death: gasping for air that filled his lungs but couldn’t reach his bloodstream. A nurse found him crumpled on the bathroom floor, purple in the face, eyes wide open.

This car had been his desideratum incarnate. Before he even purchased it, he got a scale model the size of a kitten, with functional doors, windows, headlights. Boyishly he showed it to us, his teenage nephews, when he came over to our house. Once he bought the car he drove it mostly shirtless, wearing sunglasses, drinking Red Bull. He affixed the metal company sticker of his employer—Standard Elevator—to a spot on the central console. Long after he died, the pleasant, neutral scent of his body odor remained in the car, despite my brother’s attempts to dispel it with various kinds of air fresheners. I always thought this smell matched the car’s aesthetic: a campy machismo, cartoonishly buff, dense without being hefty or overbearing. This was a car that knew what a silly shape it cut on the highway—and liked it. Driving it, you would wave to other drivers of other FJ Cruisers, some of whom would even wave back.

Anthe (ಅಂತೆ) is one of my favorite words in the Kannada language. Somewhat meaningless by itself, it adds so much nuance and emotion when appended to a sentence that we Kannadigas cannot carry on a conversation without using it. Depending on the context and the speaker’s tone, anthe can convey an expression of surprise or the understanding that gossip is being shared. It could mean “so it happened,” “that’s how it is,” “apparently,” or “it seems.” The latter comes closest to a direct translation, but is a frustratingly simple choice. Anthe will only ever half-heartedly migrate to English.

Banu Mushtaq, whose short stories I have been translating recently, and whose “Red Lungi” appears in the Summer 2024 issue of The Paris Review, employs anthe generously. Mushtaq’s characters use anthe when reporting something someone said verbatim or when guessing how something might have happened. In another instance, she uses echo words with anthe, another common characteristic of the Kannada language: one character utters anthe-kanthe to refer to hearsay. There are also a whole lot of ellipses in Mushtaq’s stories … her sentences often trail off … like so … She mixes up her tenses here and there. It is always deliberate, this nod to the idea that time is not linear. The awareness that we inhabit different time zones and dimensions and live in stories within stories is commonplace in India. These narrative tools give Mushtaq’s work a sense of orality, as if she is sitting across from you and telling you the story.

Whenever Mushtaq and I do talk in real life, she is narrating, she is reporting, she is discussing the oppressive political scene in India, she is going back to her youth, laughing about that one time there was a fatwa issued against her for a story—they wanted her to stop writing, she told them to go to hell—she is constantly relaying anecdotes and thinking out loud and living through stories. There is more anthe in her urgency to convey everything all at once than I can hope to store in my notes.

My favorite function of the word is how its repetition in every other sentence, each differently intoned, allows a musicality to slip into daily speech. It gives everyday Kannada its impu, or melody.

My father and O. J. Simpson were passing ships in red Corvettes in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Circa 1977, the sunroofs of their nearly identical luxury cars open for maximum exposure, they would wave to one another like carnival jesters, my sister in the back seat squeamish at the irony, their white wives occupying the front seats in a Siamese dream, twin stars in the fantasy no one is aware of until it arrives in images. Such gestures were the requisite scenic signifiers for that era of post–New Negro black entertainers faced with the hedonism of psychedelia, blaxploitation, and the amphetamined economy of the Reagan years. They were transitioning from taboos to tabloids to well-adjusted, literal tokens, having made it to some sense of after all or ever after in a fairy tale blurring the wasteland upheld by the lucky-bland amusements of almost-suburbanites. Unkempt and illicit ambitions were their freedom and retribution.

My father earned his living writing love songs that were ventriloquized by pop stars and peers such as Ray Charles; he agonized over the banality of spectacle in lyrics that rendered the banal uplifting. O. J. cradled footballs and ran very fast when chased, bowlegged, baffled at his own momentum. He accrued enough of it to become the first black athlete to garner corporate endorsements from companies like Hertz. He’d open in the typical format of vintage commercials, by reciting semi-didactic pleasantries as adspeak. Then he’d embody his embargoed alter ego, his own personal starship and space shuttle, and ramp up to cinematic sprinting through an airport terminal, wearing a three-piece suit and landing in a hideous car that made the Corvette with the top down seem like an inaccessible yearning, all while maintaining the plastic smile of a catalogue model. O. J.’s sad and vaguely distracted gaze revealed a self-deprecating narcissism contracted during the transition from being bullied as a child to outrunning everyone and every limitation he’d ever known. This was before it was acknowledged that the cerebrum of football players and boxers are often severely damaged and inflamed by the time they retire—and likely throughout their careers—in ways that can trigger bouts of rage, dementia, confusion, memory lapse, erratic dissociation. The talent, the miracle of divine intervention, that grants them access to white America’s lifestyle, in turn holds them hostage in pathologized exceptionalism. This makes it easier to understand the fatigued and dejected glaze over O. J.’s gaze as a mask dressing a festering internal wound.

My father’s gaze was similar, confident but strained and distant, almost plaintive. He’d spent some years as a welterweight boxer, which may or may not have contributed to his struggle with bipolar disorder and the constancy of lithium prescriptions of varying strengths—pharmaceutical cocktails, which, in addition to tempering his mood swings, siphoned the vigor from him, bending his will toward a docility more unnerving than rage. O. J’s double consciousness remained slicker and more protected; he made his icy sublimated anger into his signature charm even as it remained in part involuntary. As I write this, O. J.’s remains are being cremated in Las Vegas, and scientists have requested the opportunity to examine his brain for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The Simpson family is refusing. O. J. himself was convinced that he did suffer a level of chronic swelling consistent with the condition and severe enough to compromise his cognition and memory. There is no logical way to deny his intuition about this, considering the length of his career (he spent eleven years in the NFL and was a collegiate player before that) and the minimal number of blows to the head required to trigger a lifetime of chronic swelling. While considering O. J. and my father as twin victims of their own ambitions, I wonder how many blows to the skull, how many subtle fractures my father endured, and would I want to look inside and see the tissues ballooning for myself, would I allow doctors to dissect his brain for proof or defer to suspicion and leave space for the sacred/sacrosanct black-and-blank mystery of our destiny? I can’t be sure.

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!

Bonus content for paid subscribers continues below.

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.