Happy Friday, book-lovers. Unwind with some Book Riot stuff.

The Best Books About the ’80s and ’90s

Those times are long gone, as my eight-year-old loves to remind me, and so if you’re like me, and want some nostalgic reads or an escape from *waves hands* all of this, grab your favorite snack—bonus points if it’s something that was also around in the ’80s or ’90s (does anyone else remember the candy Bonkers?? SO good, right?)—and let’s take a look at some of the best books about the ’80s and ’90s.

Talking Cats, Magical Villainy, and More Dynamite SF/F Recommendations

Calling all SFF fans! It’s time to add more nerdy fun to your TBRs with four exciting SFF recommendations. I have two more of this week’s releases and two upcoming titles I have read and enjoyed

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

The order is shuffled a bit from last week, but to add a more variety, I’ve included the top five most read books on Goodreads last week in three countries around the world. This time: Denmark, Malaysia, and Portugal. Denmark’s and Portugal’s most read titles this week are both not (yet?) available in English.

Nonfiction About Women in History

I’m always looking for more books about women throughout history. There’s just something special in learning about women’s achievements and the incredible impact we’ve had on the world. But where to start? The incredible number of options can feel overwhelming. So here are a couple books that give an overview, an introduction that inspired readers to do their own research and find out more. 

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

My personal internet this week was chock full of adaptation news, reviews, announcements, teases, reveals, and other digital publicity efforts. And you know what? I was into it. So as a way of covering some of the notable fall adaptations: my personal hype rating of six notable upcoming adaptations, scaled 1 to 10 (1 being this should not exist and 10 being I would drop everything and watch this now if I could).

If I left something you are pumped about off the list, assume not that I am not interested but rather I forgot to bookmark it.

Before the hype meters, mini-reviews of two adaptations that are already out:

House of the Dragon Season 2 (HBO, based on Fire & Blood by George RR Martin)

HotD Season 2 was better than the first season, but still would be probably my 6th favorite season of Game of Thrones television. The two standouts though really do stand out. Emma D’Arcy is giving a stunning performance that blends ambivalence and resolve in a way I certainly have never seen before and frankly would not have thought possible. Like Hamlet, she really doesn’t want to initiate violence, however justified within the code of the story. But this hesitation is conveyed as moral rightness rather than squeamishness.

I was thinking about what I should write for today’s bonus Our Queerest Shelves content, and I realized that I haven’t just updated you on my reading in a while! Obviously, I read queer books all the time, but I don’t always mention them here. Let me know in the comments: would you like me to write more about the queer books I’m reading?

Here are the five queer books I’ve finished recently, including a queer softball team graphic novel, a bisexual cozy fantasy set at a magical zoo, a trans YA thriller, and a nonbinary romance.

Bonus content for paid subscribers continues below.

This content is for members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.

What was the last queer book you read? Let’s chat in the comments!

Here are the posts that, for whatever reason, got the most activity this week:

The Best Books About the ’80s and ’90s

Those times are long gone, as my eight-year-old loves to remind me, and so if you’re like me, and want some nostalgic reads or an escape from *waves hands* all of this, grab your favorite snack—bonus points if it’s something that was also around in the ’80s or ’90s (does anyone else remember the candy Bonkers?? SO good, right?)—and let’s take a look at some of the best books about the ’80s and ’90s.

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

The order is shuffled a bit from last week, but to add a more variety, I’ve included the top five most read books on Goodreads last week in three countries around the world. This time: Denmark, Malaysia, and Portugal. Denmark’s and Portugal’s most read titles this week are both not (yet?) available in English.

The Biggest Book Club Books Coming Out This Fall

There’s a natural breeze and I can smell people cooking soup. And listen, I am all for leaving this hell of a summer behind us. Turns out the book world is, too. As various fall reading lists have been popping up, I’ve selected a few books that I think will be on everyone’s TBRs this fall.

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION at 30

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the theatrical release of The Shawshank Redemption,here is our Book Nerd Movie Club episode about the novella and film. A classic.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. On Saturdays, we round up the biggest stories of the week.

The 100 bestselling books of the past 50 years

Interesting to browse this list of the 100 best-selling books of that last fifty years from The Timesso see just how different the UK market has (and hasn’t been) different than here in the States. I don’t want to spoil it because it is worth it for the surprise, but only would I never have guessed the #1 best-seller, but I wouldn’t have gotten any of the top ten.

Anthropic Sued by Authors for Training Its AI on Their Books

Anthropic is now the third major tech player (after OpenAI and Meta) to be sued by authors for using copyrighted works to train their large language models. In this claim, the Books3 data set, which includes thousands of copyrighted books, is the central target. It was used to train Anthropic’s Claude LLM: this isn’t in dispute, as Anthropic has already admitted it. The question though is this legal? Does it rise to level of piracy? Or does machine-learning have the legal protection of human-learning, in which I can read as many books as I want to learn how to write better. This is probably the most important and interesting question out there in the world of books and reading.

How Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse

The world’s literary powerhouse might be a little much, but Ireland does seem to outpunch its weight when it comes to big-time awards and influence (four Nobels and six Bookers), so why exactly might that be? This article argues that it is sort of everything? From libraries to funding to bookstore to lit mags to readership: Ireland seems to care more, on a per capita basis, about reading and writing than most countries. It would be fascinating to see some sort of breakdown/quantification of this “care,” some formula of public funding and educational dollars and book sales and so on, both for Ireland, and the wider reading and writing world.

Recent & Upcoming Adaptation Hype Meter

My personal internet this week was chock full of adaptation news, reviews, announcements, teases, reveals, and other digital publicity efforts. And you know what? I was into it. So as a way of covering some of the notable fall adaptations: my personal hype rating of six notable upcoming adaptations, scaled 1 to 10 (1 being this should not exist and 10 being I would drop everything and watch this now if I could).

Calling all SFF fans! It’s time to add more nerdy fun to your TBRs with four exciting SFF recommendations. I have two more of this week’s releases and two upcoming titles I have read and enjoyed!

Bookish Goods

New Releases

Like much of the Internet population, I have been thoroughly enjoying all of the “Midwestern Dad” memes popping up around Tim Walz. But I am also very much enjoying this clip of him at the Wisconsin rally telling Republicans, “I sure the hell don’t need you telling us what books we’re going to read.” More of this energy, please!

Libraries & Librarians

News Updates

The Queens Public Library opens a new branch in Far Rockaway.

A group of far-right rioters set the Spellow Hub Library in Liverpool on fire, but an appeal for donations has raised over £120,000 in two days.

Worth Reading

5 strategies to verify facts in the age of AI.

Book Adaptations in the News

Everything to know about the new Game of Thrones prequel spinoff series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

When I get dressed, I become a philosopher-king—not in the sense of presiding over utopia, but in the sense of trying to marry politics and intellect in the perfect imitation of God. Political considerations might include: destination, company, self-image, self-regard, in-group and out-group arrangements. The intellectual ones might involve: the weather, the way I am always too cold no matter the weather, the subway, the blisters on my feet, the laundry. When I get dressed, I have never once considered whether to add a belt. Belts have never struck me as a thing to “add”; pants either need a belt or they don’t. But some girls like to “add” one, and that’s fine too. I do consider the area where a belt might go—that stretch of midsection where the top of my pants meets the bottom of my shirt. It means a lot (to me), where exactly on my body that convergence takes place. If it’s lower, say a few inches below my belly button, I might get slouchier when I stand around, might remember being a kid in the early aughts, and I might in general feel more weighed down by the pull of gravity. If it’s higher up on my torso, I sit up straighter in my chair, I prefer a more substantial shoe, I feel more compact, more professional, more like my mother.

When I get dressed, I think about the last time I washed my hair and whether I’m going to wear my glasses or not. I am too much of a germophobe to wear shoes in the house, so I have no choice but to imagine the theoretical addition of a shoe, which I’ll put on last, when everything else is already a foregone conclusion. Lately, I can’t stop buying socks; it’s a compulsion. Wearing socks with no holes, that haven’t yet become limp from untold numbers of wash-and-dry cycles, has recently become crucial to my feeling of being able to face the world. On the other hand, I wear the same bra every single day, and it is such an essentially bland item of clothing that it feels like putting on my own skin. Nights are a different story: it’s important to invite spontaneity into your evening in whatever way you can.

When I get dressed I am confronted with the protean ecosystem of everything I have, everything I want, and why I have things that I’m not sure I want. Some things that I almost never buy, no matter their purported “quality,” are: dresses or skirts with slits, matching sets, sweaters with puffy shoulders, V-neck cardigans, Birkenstocks, tops where the pattern is printed only on the front and not the back, jeans that are ripped at the knees, and anything described as a “tunic.” I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy these things, I’m just telling you that I don’t want to. One thing I do want is to compose an ode to the tank top. The tank top is the shortest route to luxury—one of the only designer items affordable to those of us on a budget. A beautiful sweater or a handbag from wherever is out of the question, but you might, if it’s your birthday or you take an extra freelance gig, treat yourself to the flimsiest, paper-thinnest $200 tank top, knowing that the construction and the material is worth a fraction of that and feeling unreservedly that every dollar of difference is a delicious indecency. There’s nothing noble about being frivolous. But it can be wonderful to choose to be part of something bigger than you, which has a history and an artistry and—in the best case scenario—a point of view. It can even be worth an inordinate amount of your hard-won money. Anyways, when I get dressed, I reign over my little shelf of needlessly fancy tank tops and I feel alive.

There are some eternal quandaries. If I have to wear a sweater, a button-down shirt becomes untenable. (I don’t ever pop the collar neatly above my sweater, though I have nothing against prep, per se). If I have to wear tights, the prospect of choosing a skirt and a top and a sweater and socks and shoes becomes monstrous to me. If I choose to inflict tights upon myself, I will end up in a longer skirt so that I can avoid at least fifty percent of the lines that all those layers will generate on my body. I want to wear a pointed-toe kitten heel, but it feels impossible to do. If I have to wear a hat for warmth, I usually don’t.

The evening before the fourth annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference in the north-central horse town of Ocala, I was in a buffet line at the VIP dinner, listening to a man describe his first encounter. “I was on an airboat near Turner River Road in the Glades and I saw it there,” he said. “At first, I confused it with a gator because it was hunched over, but then it stood up. It was probably eight feet tall. I could smell it too. I froze. It was like something had taken control over my body.” His story contained a common trope of Bigfoot encounters: awe and fear in the face of a higher power.

I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer.

It bears repeating: I believe in the existence of the Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Wild Man, or, as it is called in South Florida, the Skunk Ape. There have been too many credible accounts and oral histories passed down over thousands of years to discount its/their existence. During my time working as a teacher on the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, I heard from students and elders very detailed and grave encounters with a large humanlike primate in the swamp. In the course of publishing Islandia Journal, a periodical of hidden local folklore and history, I also meet swamp enthusiasts—historians, hunters, hydrologists, et cetera—who describe encounters clearly. Though I’ve never had an encounter myself, I believe these stories intuitively, told by those who have nothing to gain from their telling. Unfortunately, no biological evidence supports the idea that Bigfoot exists. Attendees of the conference wax rhapsodically about what the future holds thanks to eDNA. The discovery of primate DNA in the water or dirt near an encounter location would rekindle the possibility of a biological Bigfoot, but for now, we’re waiting.

This absence of harder proof meant that the conference was, predictably, rife with speculation. At the VIP dinner, I sat next to Monica, one of my few fellow thirtysomethings in attendance.  She was sunburnt and wore small round gold-rimmed glasses. She’d moved to Jacksonville from West Virginia with her partner, Joey, who told me later that she was just there to support Monica’s varying interests. While looking down and shuffling BBQ beans and mac and cheese around her styrofoam plate, Monica asked if I’d heard about the latest paranormal goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch in the Utah desert. Talking about large objects under mesas and anomalies in the sky, she gestured wildly. This struck me as off-base: we were at a Bigfoot conference, not storming Area 51. “It’s all connected,” she said, before explaining that Bigfoot tracks disappearing into dry creek beds weren’t the product of hoaxes but rather because Bigfoot travels using interdimensional portals. I expressed some doubt. “You can either close your mind,” she told me, “or open it to the very real possibility of infinite dimensions.”

Popop, who came home to raise me after his release from Holmesburg Prison in ’88, would have never let a white man in a white coat lay a hand on the D, let alone the vas deferens, had he the context to differentiate between the two. He never mentioned any experiments either. If he had, he wouldn’t have seen the wanton use of his body as some epic reveal of treachery but another quotidian instance he might describe by way of an exasperated sigh, shrug, or “Duh, dickhead” hurled at some scholar with the “real” details, or social reformer come to reimagine us in their image, to correct our supposedly devious sexual habits before it was too late, which often meant well before our twelfth birthdays. Given the early onset encroachments of power, that old black adage on suspicion and physicians was never an abstraction at home.

I got snipped anyway.

And I was late, by any reasonable measure, thirty-two with too many kids climbing up my leg, three boys and one girl whose temperaments have long since broken and rebuilt me in their images, the first of whom arrived too soon after his mother stopped taking birth control and forgot to tell me. And I’ve never met people more averse to independent play. Shouts of “Daddy!” and “Dada!” puncture my every attempt to think, coming on as tickles or itty-bitty terrors between each typed word, and so I write this from two worlds at once, where promises of the near future—the local pool or doggie park, Rita’s Water Ice, the school track, the bike trail, or playing Diablo and Super Smash Bros.—defang the demands on my attention for ten or so minutes at a time. The interstices allow collective laughter over new word enunciations—a six-year-old’s “feastidious,” or a question of the utmost importance: Who taught the twins to say “Fresh to def?” My daughter, twelve, takes credit, and my oldest son, two years her senior, is above it all until we remind him how the ticklish remain so, even chin hair deep into puberty. It’s there, between the laughter and all my pleading—“Stop, no, don’t” and “Put that dog down!” and “Stop chokin each other!”—that I give myself over to thought, which is writing, and in this case or every case, correlated with what the children mean to me, and what I might mean to them, and what it meant to ensure that I might conceive children nevermore.

The doctor was quite brown, if that counts for anything in this context, and not one of those people whose entire personality is dedicated to the hatred of children, who seem to be multiplying on every blunt “side” of the political spectrum. Gentler than most lovers, he cupped my testicles and said that everything would be all right. And in this man’s supple embrace I drifted off into a blissful nondream of future agency.

In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?”

But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of.

Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as public events pressed in on his imagination.

I think I am temperamentally a mystic. I feel very drawn to this form of experience and this mode of conceptualizing and, in particular, the deepening and layering of concepts with experience and experience with concepts that can be seen in mystical traditions. Skepticism is not an instinctual or default response for me. If someone tells me something, I am inclined to believe it, no matter how strange it sounds. Maybe I’m just gullible, particularly when it comes to profound experiences that I have never really had, or never had in the way that I would really like. Maybe I’m just a bad philosopher. The thought has certainly crossed my mind.

For example, I believe that Julian of Norwich had Showings, or revelations of Christ; that George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was carried up to heaven; that William Blake was visited by Angels in his dark little dwelling off the Strand in London; that Wordsworth had a total sensuous apprehension of the divine in nature during his ascent of Mount Snowdon; and that Philip K. Dick had an intellectual intuition of the divine in February 1974. This list could be continued. In fact, it could be nicely endless.

I don’t doubt these things, at least not at first, and I sometimes wonder whether I (as someone who teaches philosophy as a day job) should always be cultivating skepticism or praising the power of critical thinking. There is a defensive myopia to the obsession with critique, a refusal to see what you can’t make sense of, blocking the view of any strange new phenomenon with a misty drizzle of passive aggressive questions. At this point in history, it is at least arguable that understanding is as important as critique, and patient, kind-hearted, sympathetic observation more helpful than endless personal opinions, as we live in a world entirely saturated by suspicion and fueled by vicious judgments of each other. I’m not arguing for dogmatism, but I sometimes wonder whether philosophy’s obsession with critique risks becoming a form of obsessional self-protection against strange and novel forms of experience. My wish is to give leeway for strange new intensities of experience with which we can push back against the pressure of reality. All the way to ecstasy.

When asked if there was “a close intimacy” between him and his sister, André Weil replied, “Very much so. My sister as a child always followed me, and my grandmother, who liked to drop into German occasionally, used to say that she was a veritable Kopiermaschine.” Biographers have emphasized—overly so, according to André Weil—the episode described by his sister in a May 1942 letter to Father Perrin, known as her “Spiritual Autobiography”: “At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair which come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me.”

The largest part of the known correspondence between Simone and André Weil dates from the period when André was imprisoned for being absent without leave from his military duties; he was held first in Le Havre, then Rouen, from February to early May 1940. These circumstances gave Simone Weil an opportunity to explore scientific, and particularly mathematical, questions that were significant to her. In particular, one must note the importance given to the crisis of incommensurables in her correspondence. The reason this moment in the history of thought plays a central role at this point in Simone Weil’s reflection on science is well defined by André Weil in a letter dated March 28, 1940: “A proportion is what is named; the fact that there are relations that aren’t nameable (and nameable is a relation between whole numbers), that there have been λόγοι ἄλόγοι, the word itself is so deeply moving that I can’t believe that in a period so essentially dramatic … such an extraordinary event could have been seen as a mere scientific discovery … what you say about proportion suggests that, at the beginnings of Greek thought, there was such an intense feeling of the disproportion between thought and world (and, as you say, between man and God) that they had to build a bridge over this abyss at all costs. That they thought they found it … in mathematics is nothing if not credible.”

The crisis of reason that Simone Weil apprehended in contemporary physics led her to revisit the birth of the scientific spirit. The relationship between this crisis of science as a crisis of reason and her interest in the question of incommensurables is clear. Rationalizing irrationals was at the heart of the mathematical problem of incommensurables. According to Simone Weil’s interpretation, the same difficulty was encountered in her day with quantum theory (see her study “Classical Science and After,” as well as the article “Reflections on Quantum Theory”). How do we rationalize what appears—according to her interpretation—to be an “irrational” of this theory, in particular its uses of discontinuity and probability, notions on which the new physics rested? Could the crisis of reason, which is also a crisis of the notion of truth in contemporary physics, cause the same mental aberrations as the one produced by incommensurability, an aberration that led the Sophists to be skeptical of Logos and truth? Simone Weil’s references to Plato and her constant appeal to a new Eudoxus represent a desire to escape the skepticism of a new sophistry. She would write to her brother: “The popularization of this discovery casts discredit upon the notion of truth that has lasted to this day; it … contributed to the appearance of the idea that one can equally well demonstrate two contradictory theories; the Sophists spread this point of view among the masses, along with knowledge of an inferior quality, exclusively aimed at the conquest of power.” This marriage of a purely operative and combinatory science with the quest for power is what Simone Weil feared.

Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill “learned to use a gun at eleven, got his first motorcycle at twelve, his first sailboat at fifteen, started studying medicine at sixteen, by twenty-three he was a sociologist, by thirty-eight a millionaire adman, and by forty he was broke,” the Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero once wrote. Fogwill was born outside Buenos Aires in 1941 and lived until 2010; as Guerriero illustrates, he was precocious as a young man, but it wasn’t until 1980, at the age of thirty-nine, after he’d lost the fortune he made in advertising, that his story “Muchacha Punk” won a prestigious writing contest and his literary career took off. In 1982, he wrote his most famous novel, Los pichiciegos. Set during the Falklands War and published while the conflict was ongoing, this sardonic exploration of the absurdities of war, a kind of Slaughterhouse-Five for Argentina, was an immediate sensation, and it cemented Fogwill as a touchstone for the literary resistance to the military dictatorship. A writer of short stories, novels, poems, and cultural criticism, he went on to publish more than twenty books across a thirty-year career.

Drawing on his background in advertising, Fogwill cultivated an iconoclastic public persona and turned his surname—Fogwill, just so, like Prince or Madonna—into a brand. He pursued controversy and manufactured scandal, relentlessly excoriating the sanctimony of the institutional and cultural elite. He wrote high-profile columns attacking and satirizing both the military dictatorship and what he called the “horror show” of Argentina’s transition to a neoliberal democracy. Described by contemporaries as “a holy terror,” with an “almost alien intelligence,” Fogwill’s exhibitionism belied, as Francisco Garamona writes, “an unassailable body of work, an idea, an inimitable way of being, and above all, an ethics.” Known as a generous friend and mentor, he guided younger writers and helped launch the careers of figures as notable as Osvaldo Lamborghini and César Aira.

Like his persona, Fogwill’s writing is provocative and irreverent. He absorbed the different strands of the Argentine tradition and produced a literature that defies classification: a literature of ideas and the body, the political and the personal, the ordinary and the ineffable. Nimbly traversing form and genre, he employs myriad styles while maintaining a singular and inimitable sensibility.

Before I dive into your bi-weekly mystery goodness—which includes new releases, backlist titles featuring cold settings, and news—I have a new mystery film for you to watch. If you’re in the mood for a heist comedy starring Matt Damon, you can now stream The Instigators on Apple TV+. Watch the trailer here.

Bookish Goods

New Releases

Know somebody who’s looking for a new gig? Book Riot is hiring an ad operations associate. Now let’s kick off the weekend with a round-up of the week’s best.

Utah Bans 13 Books From Schools Statewide

After passing one of the most restrictive book banning measures in the country, the state of Utah has released its list of books to be banned from schools across the state. House Bill 29 allows parents to challenge books they deem “sensitive material” while also outright banning books from public schools if those books have been deemed “objective sensitive material” or “pornographic” per state code in at least three school districts or two school districts and five charter schools statewide.

Overrated Sci-Fi Classics (and What to Read Instead)

Sci-fi fans’ staunch devotion to some things can make it hard to break away from books considered “classics.” In some ways, this makes sense: sci-fi as a genre has had to struggle against a lot of snobbery. Ursula Le Guin (among others) has openly rallied against this snobbery, but even in the contemporary heyday sci-fi seems to be enjoying, it’s there. So I get that saying some of the books widely considered to be sci-fi classics are overrated might cause some heat.

Regardless, sci-fi isn’t immune to certain issues — like racism and sexism, to name just two — that plague other facets of older literature. As sci-fi writer Carla Ra points out, this is simply part of how cultural production evolves. Importantly, she also notes that it’s possible to still enjoy older works even as we “notice the troublesome parts as something that we should, as a society, reject and get over.” In that spirit, read the sci-fi “classics” if you want. But I’ll offer you some contemporary works which I believe resonate more meaningfully with our current moment.

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

There are no new titles on the bestseller lists this week, but there are still some things worth noting. Let’s start with the most fun to the least. First off, Gravity Falls was a cartoon that ended in 2016, but a new Gravity Falls book (The Book of Bill by Alex Hirsch) just came out, and it made the Publishers Weekly and USA Today overall top ten bestseller lists. I love this show, so it makes me happy to see it’s still got a strong contingent of fans.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Before we get into the news, Book Riot is hiring an ad operations associate. Check it out, share with friends, and apply if you’re a good fit.

Authors Get In on Literary Activism

Book bans—and the issues of intellectual freedom and civil rights for people of color and the LGBTQ+ community that book bans aim to suppress—are on the ballot this November, and authors are getting in on the action. Roxane Gay and Gabrielle Zevin are among a group of well-known writers hosting Authors for Harris, a virtual reading being held on Monday, August 12th. Registration fees for the event serve as a fundraiser for the Harris-Walz ticket. (Did you know Walz signed a law banning book bans in the Minnesota?) We love two-fer, and what could be better than seeing your favorite authors read their work while you support candidates with a proven track record of fighting book bans and defending freedom? May their efforts succeed.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Thrillers

What do we mean now when we say a book is a thriller? For authors like Alma Katsu, the question is existential. Observing changes in readers’ preferences over the last decade or so, Katsu notes that the need for “increasingly frenetic, twisty stories” has given way to “greater tolerance from both readers and publishers for a slightly slower pace, but the need for unforeseeable plot complications.” So, what happened in the last 10ish years? My unhesitating answer would have been: Gone Girl, which came out in early 2012 and kicked off a trend of thrillers with unreliable narrators and shocking plot twists that is still going hard today.

Katsu pins the push for ever-increasing twisty-turny-ness on another early-aughts phenomenon that lingers on: binge-watching brought to us by Netflix, the 2013 debut of “House of Cards.” That would never have occurred to me when the book-related catalyst is so readily available, but it makes just as much sense, and the truth is probably that it’s both. Always nice to have a smart person with an insider’s perspective challenge my tidy explanation.

Out Now in Paperback

We’re hitting the point in an election year when new releases slow down because publishers (wisely) don’t want to compete with the news cycle, so it’s a great time to catch up on books you missed last year as they come out in paperback. The Guardian has rounded up some of the month’s best paperback releases, and friends, the getting is good. We’re talking Jesmyn Ward. We’re talking The Iliad as translated by Emily Wilson, who was the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English. We’re talking Mona Awad’s dark-and-twisty modern fairytales. And that’s just to name a few! Stock your last-gasp-of-summer beach bag and get to turning those pages.