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I used to have a great deal of anxiety around keeping up with others’ reading paces. Social media heightened my awareness of reading habits, and worries that my own were woefully behind. I would be unable to choose a new book to read, so my anxiety would continue to build. Consequently, I would stop reading altogether (outside of schoolwork) for months at a time. The act of photographing and sharing recently released books, which were deemed important to the culture, continued to stress me out for a long time....

Until I picked up The Soulmate Equation. Christina Lauren’s books had been a little hit and miss for me for the past couple years, more due to trope preference and projectile vomiting than anything else (that last one was The Unhoneymooners, BTW). But I needed to read it anyway, so I figured I might as well pick it up. And then, I didn’t stop. I turned and turned the pages, laughing and smiling and groaning and screeching....

The movie that secured the top spot in the most states is It Chapter Two, which came out in 2019, followed by It. It isn’t just recent titles that made the list, though: the third and fourth spots go to Misery from 1990 and The Mist from 2007. The Shining only appears once on this map, in its setting of Colorado. You can check out the full report at USDish....

Adaptation News Angie Thomas’s sophomore novel, the followup to The Hate U Give (which has been a number 1 New York Times Bestseller for 100 weeks), On The Come Up, was released on Tuesday alongside an announcement that it will be adapted by the same team that made the movie of THUG. Nicola Yoon’s sophomore novel, The Sun is Also A Star, was one of my favorite reads last year, and both the teaser and full length trailers dropped this week....

I had several panels marked on my schedule in the NYCC app, but once I got to the Javits Center, all of that flew out of my head and I soaked up the atmosphere. So much geeky goodness! So many friendly people! The press room! Walking around the show floor, my first stop was Boom! comics. They put out some of my favorites, like Lumberjanes, Heavy Vinyl (formerly Hi-Fi Fight Club), and Slam!...

This was Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq’s Kitab al-Tabikh (Book of Dishes). It was brought into acclaimed English translation by Nawal Nasrallah (2007). Nasrallah’s translation appeared as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq’s Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook in 2010. Nasrallah’s medieval cookbooks not only give real, useable recipes, they also help the reader travel in time. In addition to the printed cookbooks, she also is continually adding recipe additions at “In My Iraqi Kitchen....

Yet despite the effort of many readers and professionals in the publishing industry, books featuring characters of color are a minority; including Latinx characters. Part of this dynamic is that authors, editors, and literary agents of color are also a minority in the industry. Why are groups like We Need Diverse Books, Latinx in Publishing, and People of Color in Publishing, working to address this issue? Why does representation matter?...

As you can see, there are no official titles attached to any of these new Marvel movies coming out. They could literally be anything. Now, I consider myself something of an expert on the MCU, so I’ve been deducing clues, putting the pieces together, and after a few weeks of intense study, I believe I have cracked it. Without further ado, here is my thoroughly researched and probably very correct assessment of the release dates of the new Marvel movies coming out....

Meanwhile, BookTok now has a name and a strong sense of community. So strong, in fact, that The New York Times reported on it back in March, emphasising the “crying on video” kind of content, although from my experience on the app, that’s a tiny proportion of the bookish content on TikTok. The Guardian reported on BookTok more recently, zooming in on teens, who make up a huge proportion of the app, but by no means all....

Through the program, WNDB, which advocates for inclusivity in children’s literature, offered educators $2,000 to buy diverse titles, diversify existing collections, host community events focused on diversity, or run any other project that promotes diversity in literature. There were 600 teachers, librarians, and other eligible educators in student-facing roles that applied. From them, WNDB selected 35 applicants and granted them $2,000 each, resulting in $70,000 being given to educators in states like Texas, Washington, and Idaho....

Lists of the worst books of all time are so fascinating to me. Namely because bad is so different from forgettable. Most books that fail to reach the status of “good” fade into obscurity. Most “good” books do too, for that matter. Take His Family by Ernest Poole. It won the Pulitzer Prize yet has a paltry 217 reviews on Goodreads. The New York Public Library has two copies of it....

And for just as long we’ve adapted books for the screen, we have also discussed the question: What makes a good adaptation? Which matters more: the quality of the film itself, or how “accurate” it is to the book it’s based on? Of course there is some complexity, even difficulty, to these questions. Novels and films are different art forms. To expect a 90-minute film, or even a longer TV series, to be an exact rendering of every detail of a book is a bit unreasonable....

What is it? Simply, urban Indian literature is literature by Native American writers set in an urban setting. Put another way, it’s literature by Native American writers that isn’t set on a reservation. As an important note, the label “urban Indian literature” is a critical term coming out of Native American literary studies. However, the word “Indian” on its own as a descriptor for Native North Americans is steeped in violent and racist histories....

Book Riot had a chance to talk to two professionals in the forensics field about how much murder mysteries get wrong in their depiction of forensic science: Justin Brower, Forensic Toxicologist at North Carolina, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner; and Victor Weedn, Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland. Speed of Testing In most shows and books, DNA tests, toxicology reports, and all the other forensic testing under the sun conveniently arrives to help the detective(s) solve the case....

For one thing, as Yi-Jin Yu notes in their discussion of who is considered a Pacific Islander, anyone who identifies as “Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, Northern Mariana Islander, Samoan, Fijian, Micronesian, Carolinian, Palauan, Papua New Guinean, Kosraean, Ponapean (Pohnpelan), Trukese (Chuukese), Yapese, Melanesian, Polynesian, Solomon Islander, Tahitian, Tarawa Islander, Tokelauan or Tongan would fall under the ‘Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander’ classification.” Part of the reason for the issues with the AAPI label is the complex nature of Indigenous Pacific peoples, Asian Americans, and Asians in the Pacific....

But wait, what is that? You are an indie bookstore and you don’t think you are dying? Ha! That’s just because you clearly don’t realize you are again at the mercy of a miraculous intervention (just in the nick of time!!)! In today’s bookstore climate, despite your best efforts to self-destruct, it is Instagram that reared its knight in shining armor head to save you. via GIPHY If you are an indie bookstore and you haven’t ever photographed color-coded shelves using #Bookstagram, you are probably already dead....

I love talking book cover design. Despite the saying not to judge a book by its cover, we do. It’s usually the first thing we see on a book, so it’s only natural that the goal of a designer and publisher is to make that cover appealing. More often than not, the cover design you encounter on the hardcover edition of a book remains the same in its paperback iteration....

But as the years have passed, I’ve learned to embrace reading slumps. I’ve grown to accept that I don’t read as fast as I used to in high school when reading came as easily as breathing. Now, I read at a much slower pace, thanks to college consuming all my free-time. I’m not reading as many books as I used to, and that is perfectly fine. As we grow older, we all take on more responsibilities and the amount of free time we have dwindles down....

Many of these groups, like so many other aspects of the reading world today, have found a presence on Bookstagram. Whether it’s a group reading through the classics, one that forms around a book chosen by the owner of an account, or a separate site hosted on a Facebook group or through Patreon, the Bookstagram book club is a strong presence for anyone in the bookish Instagram world. In addition to the more structured book club options, users often ask for participants in buddy reads or form ad-hoc reading groups after finding others who share their love for similar titles....

1. It’s The Most Famous of The Early Medieval Manuscripts This may sound like circuitous logic, but the Book of Kells has been well known for a very long time. We have a few well-preserved illustrated manuscripts from before the 12th century. The Book of Durrow, Lichfield Gospels, and the Lindisfarne Gospels rank in a similar period, but even among those three, the Book of Kells has a unique position of veneration....