Welcome to The Best of Book Riot. Here’s your weekend highlight reel of the week’s most popular stories.
But as we roll into our fifth year of ongoing book censorship, what do we actually know about the books being targeted? Pulling from both ALA and PEN’s Top Ten Lists, as well as the titles on the official state banned lists from Utah and South Carolina between 2021 and 2026, here’s some insight of note. Florida’s unofficial list is not included here because it is not official state documentation; however, the books that have been banned as a result of the unofficial list are incorporated in both ALA and PEN’s data. Note that ALA’s data covers five full years, while PEN’s accounts cover four full school years. Their fifth year of data, covering the 2025-2026 school year, will be released in the fall.
A total of 11 lists were evaluated: five from ALA, four from PEN, one from Utah, and one from South Carolina. The word “banned” is used to describe all of these books, as ultimately, the books being tracked as “challenged” by the ALA are most frequently challenged as a means of having them banned (be it by relocation, restriction, redaction, or outright removal–the things that PEN tracks and that the state lists demand).
Christie published a whopping 66 novels in her lifetime. Popular as she may be, not all of them can be classics. Many of them remain semi-hidden jewels, with only the most die-hard of fans having heard of and read them.
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Here, I gathered my picks for Agatha Christie’s most underrated novels.
There’s nothing worse than reading a book you love so much that you feel the intense need to talk to someone about it, but you can’t find anyone who’s read it. You’re then left with all those thoughts and love, with nowhere to put them.
The horror books on this list are very much those for me. They’ve all got under 10,000 ratings on Goodreads, but they deserve way, way more. These books promise narratives of nightmares turned premonitions, schoolteachers confronted with ancient evils, and black holes. They’re the best horror books you haven’t read, but you really, really should!
Finding myself with a lot of unexpected time on my hands, I decided to indulge the mild curiosity about Daredevil: Born Again that I acquired after reading an Entertainment Weekly piece about Matthew Lillard’s role in the series.
You might think that all this makes it sound like I only watched the show because I was unemployed. This is correct. I don’t care about Daredevil. I didn’t watch the original Netflix series and, aside from that time I roasted all of his ’60s-era villains, I haven’t read the comics. (No, I don’t want recommendations, but if you do, Jess Plummer has you covered). I went into the series with only a general knowledge of the “Born Again” storyline it was named after, the memory of my social media feeds exploding with grief after Foggy Nelson’s death, and this middling NPR review of the first season to guide me.
There’s something thrilling about reading an amazing debut book and thinking about all the incredible books an author will write in the future. Debut books are special because they are often the books of an author’s heart. Most of the time, debut books aren’t written on a deadline or because of a contract. They are a story the author has to tell.
In romance, especially in the past, lots of writers really honed their storytelling skills by churning out mass market paperbacks. In looking for the best debut romance books, I discovered that a lot of the greatest writers have debuts that I found lackluster. But the debut romance novels below are dazzling diamonds in the rough. They range from a gothic romance in the 1960s to a queer sports romance from last year. But what they have in common is excellent writing, superior plotting, and a unique quality that adds something to the romance genre.