Welcome to The Best of Book Riot, our daily round-up of what’s on offer across our site, newsletters, podcasts, and social channels. Not everything is for everyone, but there is something for everyone.
In the fall months, it’s all about dark academia. Give me a creepy school. Give me suspicious students. Give me teachers with secret agendas. I’m looking for a book with all the vibes of a perfect crisp fall day during back-to-school season. But while dark academia is a genre that is really known for the vibes, we need more than a feeling to get us through a whole book, right?
What happens when a library bans Banned Books Week? Well, if you’re Sierra Benjamin, a longtime staff member at the Flathead County Library (MT), you sit outside the library on your days off with a stack of banned books and a sign that says “Banned Books Week is BANNED in your public library!” The library director, Teri Dugan, said that Sierra is allowed to do what she likes in her free time, and that because the library has a number of materials that patrons can check out at any point, they “‘didn’t see a need to necessarily highlight [Banned Books Week].’” Well, maybe they should, because Flathead County has had a few issues with banned and challenged books over the last few years.
I ADORE memoirs of all kinds. Memoir in essays, graphic memoirs, multi-model memoirs—I love them all. Every year, I try to keep track of the new memoirs coming out. I read as many as I can, and I find new favorites every year.
My favorites aren’t always the buzziest books, and I can’t help but think readers might be missing out. Here are a few of the hidden gems that deserve all the love.
I may be hurtling toward 40, but I still love a middle grade adventure story. There are so many good ones out there, it’s not a surprise. Middle grade adventure novels are special, and so many readers will remember a high-stakes, action-packed adventure story that they read as a child which gripped them at the time and has stayed with them ever since. When you’re a kid, so much of your life is scheduled and decided by the adults around you, so it makes sense that stories where children head off on their own, out into the unknown, and have fantastic adventures with new friends, have always appealed to young readers.
Back in 2021 and 2022, I wrote a lot about how book bans weren’t about the books specifically. They’re about the ways those books can be used as a tool to do a lot more damage and they’re one arm of a many-tentacled approach in the march toward authoritarianism. Book removals allow erasure of entire swaths of people—marginalized people specifically—and book challenges and subsequent book bans are a convenient tool for destabilizing and defunding public institutions like schools and libraries.
The argument is straightforward: if you would not have purchased the “inappropriate” material in the first place, then you would not need to spend all of this money on the process of reviewing the material. Taxpayer money is at stake and poorly stewarded from start to finish. It’s a circular argument.