You should read Old Filth, someone said to me about ten years ago. I couldn’t for the life of me, in true Gardam fashion, remember who that friend was until just now—it was the writer Nancy Lemann—but I can think of the people—dear friends—to whom I went on to recommend it myself. I adored the book, stunned I had not heard of Jane Gardam before, and immediately read the next two books of the trilogy: The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends. I then taught Old Filth in a seminar so that I could spend more time with Gardam and study more closely how she creates her magic. She improves, as great writers do, upon rereading. And then reading again.

I found out more about her life. She published her first book at forty-three, and was a mother of three children. In the next thirty years she published twenty-five books: many collections of short stories and many books for children. She was seventy-six when her masterwork Old Filth was published and eighty-five when Last Friends came out. She says that she wrote to survive, working in a green room overlooking her garden, since during this time both her daughter and husband died, her husband having suffered with dementia for several years.

She says that when she first started writing—the morning after she’d dropped her youngest son at his first day of school—she was not interested in what was fashionable or what was publishable. She just wanted to write. She believes that there are no minor characters. Everyone’s as interesting as everyone else.

Gardam’s style combines wit, romance, brevity, and enchantment. As the best artists do, she offers hard truths in a pleasurable way. There is no overindulgence. Sensuous details are side by side with a sharp intelligence. She is the master of the quick brushstroke, painting a room, a city, the feeling of an era, or simply a complex-at-one-glance character. Philosophical musings merge into social commentary, but you notice no intrusion because you are mesmerized by the story. The story is everything. An omniscient voice plays alongside a character’s point of view; there is lightness in tragedy and depth in comedy. A description of Betty Feathers, from the trilogy, could very well apply to Gardam:

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Students in Williamson County, Tennessee, have experienced near non-stop changes to the books and resources available to them this school year. Thanks to Moms for Liberty’s relentless campaigns locally, books continue to be challenged and removed throughout the district.

This week, the district took even more draconian censorship measures. In response to a couple of complaints from parents about books available in the digital library app Epic!, the district removed access to the app for review. Epic! is used at elementary schools throughout the US and provides over 40,000 age-appropriate titles to readers.

Williamson County schools serve 42,000 households. A small number of complaints from right-wing affiliated individuals removed an entire library of material for the school to “review.”

The book that launched the removal of an entire app, disrupting lesson plans and making an entire collection of materials inaccessible to an entire district? An ABC of Equality. This 52-page book offers an alphabet with terms such as B for Belief, G for Gender, and N for No and it’s meant for 4-8 year olds.

Emily West shares a breakdown of the history of Williamson County censorship, and within those comments are responses from a “parent’s rights” group upset that some of the alphabet choices include L for LGBTQ, S for Sex, and T for Transgender. P for Privilege is also, apparently, worthy of removing an entire library collection from students, teachers, and parents so the district can review. The local Moms for Liberty group has shared their thoughts on Twitter in this thread from the advocacy group Williamson Strong.

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It’s National Library Week, and as is tradition, the American Library Association (ALA) highlighted the top ten books challenged in the U.S. over the last year. The list, which includes the reasons for those book challenges, shows what has been clear for over a decade: books with queer characters, characters of color, or book written by queer or authors of color are most challenged.

In addition to rolling out the official list, ALA also launched a new landing page called Unite Against Book Bans. This “national initiative to empower readers everywhere to stand together in the fight against censorship” offers some of the statistics collected by the organization’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

But what’s missing on this new website is any call to action. There are no steps or tools anyone can take to combat censorship in their own community. Instead, visitors are invited to sign up for a mailing list for updates from United Against Book Bans. What those updates might be remains a mystery. It is hard to “raise your voice” by signing up for news updates without any indication of what those news updates might be, and it’s certainly not a tool for speaking up — no letters go to legislators in defense of the freedom to read.

More troubling, though, is that the only other action available on the website is the donate. Donations look like they will go toward the campaign against book challenges, but in fact go to ALA’s 21st Century Fund: a fund without restrictions that can be used for anything within the organization’s purview. Will it go to creating educational resources for fighting book bans? Maybe. It could also go toward creating graphics used to market the sale of banned books swag from their store or toward scholarships that are unrelated to book challenges. None of these are bad, per se, but it’s deceptive to the average “reader” who is begging for some kind of direction to take.

In the 1990s, a tremendous wave of book challenges and bans were under way across the country. Focus on the Family and associated arms of that organization coordinated broad censorship, and in response the ALA offered robust, freely available information to readers about not only the challenges, but where they were coming from and what library workers could do to stand up for themselves and their organizations.

The squeal that I released when I heard that Deanna Raybourn — who writes one of my favorite historical mysteries series (so funny + grump and sunshine pairing!) — was writing a crime book about assassins, could be heard on the moon. I was so excited that the day I was able to get my greedy little hands on an advanced copy I dropped everything and read it. Now you know the danger of consuming a thing you’re so excited about has a higher chance of being disappointing the higher your anticipation is. And mine was high. But I never had any doubts that Raybourn was going to kill this book, because she’s just so funny. I am not only super excited to reveal the cover but to also say that the book met all my expectations and is fun, smart, hilarious, has girl gang vibes (assassin team), and a great dose of revenge.

Check out the awesome cover below by Colleen Reinhart, a synopsis beyond my “omg I loved this to pieces everyone read it” excitement, and read an excerpt introducing you to Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie on their first assignment.

Killers of a Certain Age is a witty, action-packed thriller about four elite assassins — Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie — who also happen to be middle-aged women. After forty years on the job, the ladies are jet-setting on a retirement cruise…until they realize that, this time, they are the targets. But while older women often feel invisible, sometimes that’s their secret weapon. Watch as Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie go on their first assignment (you won’t be able to put the book down!), learn how they got recruited, the organization they work for, and why now they’re the ones on the hit list! These women didn’t spend 40 years training and killing to just sit back; they’re going to come up with a plan and fight back, menopause and backaches and all, they are not going down easy.

Deanna Raybourn is the author of the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Lady Julia Grey series as well as the USA Today bestselling and Edgar Award–nominated Veronica Speedwell mysteries and several standalone works. Her novels blends mystery, history, romance, and have been nominated for myriad awards, including the illustrious Edgar Award.

Visit her online at www.deannaraybourn.com, and on Twitter at @deannaraybourn.

Music can be used to convey just about any thought, theme, message, or emotion you can possibly imagine. For some reason, most people choose to sing about love, which is fine, I guess. But then there are the musicians who decide to write about superheroes instead, which I can personally really appreciate.

I appreciate it so much, in fact, that I decided to outline some of the most common tropes that superhero-themed songs (as opposed to superhero theme songs, which is what we’ll talk about first) fall into. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list, but rather a brief introduction to the topic based on my personal observations.

Like with many superhero-related things, this topic is pretty homogeneous: most of the artists and the heroes they choose to sing about are white men. I didn’t take a survey of every superhero-related song ever recorded (though I did ask my fellow Rioters for suggestions, some of which made it into this post), so I don’t know for sure if this is due to my musical tastes or if it’s a general trend. In any case, let’s put our headphones on and hit the Play button on this whirlwind tour of superhero music references!

Themes

While modern cartoons seem to eschew theme songs, older shows inevitably needed a fast, punchy anthem to get viewers excited. A lot of these are instrumentals (Justice League Unlimited is still the gold standard, and I will fight you on this), but others have lyrics about the greatness of the character you are about to witness, including Spectacular Spider-Man and Teen Titans.

Movies occasionally get a good superhero theme in there, like Queen’s “Flash” (from Flash Gordon) and Vanilla Ice’s “Ninja Rap” (from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II), which is somehow not the worst song I have ever heard.

When I was a kid, I thought my grandma was old. She wore clothes I associated with older ladies and she made cinnamon sugar toast for us when we went over there. She used mothballs! When my grandfather died, it turned out she didn’t know how to pump gas or write a check. And she was in her early 70s! That’s not even old! Why did I think she was old?

Is it just that the times were different and nobody was out there writing think pieces about how moms and grandmothers needed to flaunt their sexuality? Is it because I’m getting closer to my grandmother in age, and when I was a wee, tween, and teen I just lumped “older” into one category? Or is this due to advances in healthcare and quality of living? I mean, my father-in-law is 72 and he’s perfectly capable of climbing a mountain if he wanted to (he doesn’t want to). But then again he’s about 40% robot at this point, having had so many joint replacements.

I might not find the answers I want to those questions, but one thing I do know is that reading keeps the brain young in many ways. Research is still being conducted, but early signs show that reading could even help prevent or reduce the severity of various forms of dementia, which is of particular interest to me because I have the APOE e4 gene, which increases my chance of developing Alzheimer’s.

So allow me to present to you some of the best books for seniors. Experts agree that the earlier a person gets started preparing their brain for senior-ness, the better off they’ll be, so I’ve got my work cut out for me, too.

Self-Help Books

The thing about aging is that you don’t really need a book to tell you how to do it. All you really have to do is continue to not die and you will age, magically! But there are some great books for seniors on how to age healthfully and happily.

The news of “challenging” books has been sweeping the country lately. It has also been covered across most, if not all, media outlets. The main reasoning behind this has been the idea of “thinking about the children and what’s best for them.”

To that I say, with my loudest voice and every inch of my chest, the following:

If you’re a person who’s actively trying to ban books, you’re probably a not-great parent. At the very least, you’re inattentive as hell.

And I can back that statement up. 

But first, a little background as to how I first became aware of the act of trying to ban books. 

Kathi Hofer: “Grandma” Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, published last year by Leipzig’s Spector Books, is a nice-looking hardback about the vernacular art environment Tressa Prisbrey built in Santa Susana, California, a former railroad town now incorporated into Simi Valley. The volume was compiled, introduced, and translated into German by Hofer, an Austrian artist who first encountered Prisbrey’s pencil assemblages in an exhibition at the Los Angeles Public Library.

Prisbrey, the daughter of German immigrants, was married at fifteen to a man almost forty years her senior; they had seven children together before she left him and began an itinerant life with her kids in the late twenties. When she finally settled in Santa Susana in 1946, she met her second husband, and together they bought a plot of land, about a third of an acre in size, which they leveled and was where they parked their trailer after removing its wheels. Prisbrey began building the Bottle Village in 1956, at the age of sixty. Looking for a way to improve the property—to “make it pay”—she chose bottles as a building material because there were plenty of them around, and made daily trips to the local dump to collect other materials. She planted cacti everywhere—hundreds of varieties—because they are “independent, prickly, and ask nothing from anybody” and because, she said, “they remind me of myself.” Her sons handled roofing and doors, but otherwise, every structure in the Bottle Village—sixteen houses total—was built by Prisbrey. For years, she gave guided tours for a small admission fee, and children were often preoccupied by Prisbrey’s white cat and her kittens, who had their own Prisbrey house made from the nose of a plane and whom Prisbrey combed with food coloring: pink, green, and yellow animals roamed the place.

She left it, finally, in 1982, at the age of eighty-six, and died in 1988. But the site, though in disrepair, remains and is protected as a historical landmark. Hofer’s book—an elegant intervention and homage—includes texts, color photographs of the Bottle Village, and a facsimile edition of the essay Prisbrey wrote about her creation in 1960, which she published as a pamphlet and gave (or mailed) to anyone who asked. Reading Prisbrey’s charming, conversational descriptions of her village, you get a sense of what it might’ve been like to tour it with her, and how important that social aspect was to the project. “Oh, this is an interesting place to see,” she says, “and you hear such funny things, too.”

—Kathryn Scanlan, author of “Backsiders”

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

Ten years after Monica Baldwin voluntarily entered an enclosed religious order of Augustinian nuns, she began to think she might have made a mistake. She had entered the order on October 26, 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the World War I, when she was just twenty-one years old. At thirty-one, she hadn’t lost her faith, but she had begun to doubt her vocation; the sacrifices that cloistered life entailed did not come easily to her, and unlike many around her, she hadn’t experienced a “vital encounter” between her soul and God. Eighteen years later, she finally knew for sure: it was time to leave. Granted special dispensation from the Vatican to leave the order but remain a Roman Catholic, Baldwin—who was now forty-nine years old—quit the only adult life she’d known, that of the “strictest possible enclosure,” and emerged back into the world in 1941, into a world that had just plunged, once again, into war.

Baldwin relates the trials and tribulations that followed in her delightful memoir, I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World After Twenty-Eight Years in a Convent. A best seller on its initial release in 1949, it won its author plenty of fans—including the film star Vivian Leigh, who named Baldwin’s book as one of her four favorite titles published that year, in the Sunday Times. It has been reprinted on a number of occasions since. All the same, its popularity has waned over the years, and it’s not a book mentioned often today. I picked it up again as I began my own reentrance into the world, after two years of lockdowns, isolation, and quarantine.

It would be wrong to draw too many parallels between Baldwin’s experience and mine, though. Whereas the hiatus in our lives now has been a largely shared ordeal, the marvel of Baldwin’s situation is its singularity: she missed the entire world between the wars while life went on. Her portrait of Britain in wartime is therefore unique. She’s like an alien visiting Earth, taking nothing around her for granted; it’s all equally fascinating, from the rows of “hatless” young women sitting on trains and smoking cigarettes with their “padded shoulders and purple nails,” to the ravioli she nervously orders from a café lunch menu that seems to her written in gibberish. (When the meal arrives, she remains just as confused—it “might have been anything from cats’ meat to fried spam,” she attests, bemused.) We’re used to accounts of life on the home front that are steeped in the “keep calm and carry on” wartime mentality, so it can be hard to find those that convey the sheer incongruity, as Baldwin’s does, of the experience of a world turned uncanny. This is not to say that I Leap Over the Wall could quite be described as an eerie or a haunting book—if anything, Baldwin’s portrait of a country during one of its darkest hours is lit with an oddly wondrous naivete. Nevertheless, she captures a world turned upside down and inside out, one in which everyone feels displaced and unmoored, and which she observes with eyes wide open. She had spent twenty-eight years trying to disengage from life. “You can’t be completely wrapped up in God (and he is a jealous lover) unless you are unwrapped-up in what this world has to offer you,” she explains. “In convents, this process of unwrapping is effected by a system of remorseless separation from everything that is not God.” Thus her return to the world, which necessarily forces her to “sit up and take notice of what was going on,” nearly drives her crazy.