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The library card, common sense media reviewers.

A mysterious library card affects four lives.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

This book follows a group of four young strangers

Lots of bad behavior: shoplifting, vandalism, tagg

A threat with a razor blade.

Numerous candy brands mentioned.

A reference to a mother who died of a drug overdos

Parents need to know that this book follows a group of four young strangers who are struggling through life for very different reasons, and that some of them serve as better role models than others -- at least initially. One, an inner-city dweller, spends his spare time spray-painting graffiti with a friend. Another…

Positive Messages

This book follows a group of four young strangers who are struggling through life for very different reasons

Positive Role Models

Lots of bad behavior: shoplifting, vandalism, tagging, mooning, mouthing off to adults.

Violence & Scariness

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

A reference to a mother who died of a drug overdose.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Where to Read

Community reviews.

Parents say (3)
Kids say (4)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Great handbook for delinquents!

Good book for middle grades, what's the story.

Mongoose is a young teen who is being led down the road to serious delinquency by his best friend Weasel. From shoplifting to vandalism, their crimes are getting bigger, as are Weasel's plans to drop out and live on the streets. When they find the card Weasel tosses it away. But it keeps reappearing, and Mongoose finally steps into a library for the first time in his life to find out about a strange bug he encountered while spray painting a tree. When he hands the card to the librarian on the way in, she says, "No, this is not to let you in. It's to let a book out." The book she gives him is called "I Wonder," and it contains far more than just the bug he was looking for.

Brenda is a TV addict, and when her parents decide to participate in a week long Great TV Turn-Off, she is completely lost. When she finds the card she hangs on to it because its blue rectangle reminds her of the TV set. But when she sleepwalks her way to the library, she finds a letter addressed to her which guides her to her own biography. She is fascinated to read about her own early childhood, but the words abruptly end after the first time she turns on the TV, and the rest of the pages are blank. So she becomes maniacally determined to fill them

Sonseray is homeless, living in a car with his father. Though he appears hardened and is constantly in trouble, his mother's death from a drug overdose years ago has left a hole in his life that he just can't fill, no matter what he does. But Miss Storytime at the library has a surprise for him.

April's new life on the mushroom farm her parents bought is less than appealing. When she goes on a hike trying to escape the ever present smell of the horse manure that the mushrooms grow in, she connects up with a bookmobile that is being hijacked by a teenaged runaway.

Is It Any Good?

Each story here is a small gem, and each is an imaginative, offbeat, and often poignant reminder of the power of books and libraries. And, of course, of the wisdom of librarians, who know that placing just the right book in a child's hands can change his life forever.

Jerry Spinelli has had a strange career. For a long time he was a competent toiler in the orchards of children's literature, producing a number of perfectly decent novels, nothing special or unusual, but enjoyable. Then, like a bolt from the blue, came Maniac Magee, a novel so far superior to anything else he had done that I had to wonder what profound change had come over him. It earned him a Newbery Medal and a place in the pantheon of truly great children's novels. I thought he had ascended to a new level of writing, and eagerly awaited his next. But when it came it was another of his perfectly respectable, not-going-to-set-the-world-on-fire novels. So it seemed that maybe he just had this one, truly great novel in him, and now that it was out, he could go back to being a mere mortal.

But wait. While The Library Card is not on the same level with Maniac Magee (maybe that's not really possible or fair to expect), it is far better than his ordinary books. Like Bruce Brooks's What Hearts , its structure is of four related novellas. What ties these stories together, however, is a mysterious blue library card that has a powerful impact on the life of whoever finds it. It leads its possessors to a library whose enigmatic librarian seems to know more about them than they know themselves.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the power of books, reading, libraries, and librarians and the affect they can have on even the most difficult lives.

Have you ever read a book that changed the way you thought about your life?

What about it spoke to you?

Book Details

Author : Jerry Spinelli
Genre : Short Stories
Book type : Fiction
Publisher : Scholastic Inc.
Publication date : November 14, 2004
Number of pages : 148
Last updated : June 23, 2015

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THE LIBRARY CARD

by Jerry Spinelli ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1997

Spinelli (The Bathwater Gang Gets Down to Business, 1992, etc.) has spun four disparate stories linked through the inanimate object that appears in each—a library card. As is true of the omniscient librarian who appears in some of the stories, the library card is supernatural. It imposes itself first on Mongoose, or Jamie, who with his 12-year-old friend shoplifts candy and makes mischief until he is pulled into an intoxicating world of learning. In "Brenda," broadly comic events occur when a TV-crazy teen has the plug pulled for a week. After such desperate moments as when she puts the rabbit ears of an absent television into her mouth, hoping to pick up signals, she begins to catch up on her life. In "Sonseray," a homeless drifter pays back his mean and lonely nephew by withholding details of the boy's dead mother, an unusual and powerful piece of cruelty. The last story shows two unlikely friends making a match. The realistic characters are funny and profound at times, and the prose occasionally invites readers to linger over a description. Spinelli is a shrewd storyteller, balancing lighter moments with provocative ones to meaningful effect. (Fiction. 8-14)

Pub Date: April 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-590-46731-X

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Scholastic

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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More by Jerry Spinelli

BOOK REVIEW

by Jerry Spinelli

by Jerry Spinelli ; illustrated by Larry Day

THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL

From the school for good and evil series , vol. 1.

by Soman Chainani ; illustrated by Iacopo Bruno ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2013

Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.

Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.

Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).

Pub Date: May 14, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

NURA AND THE IMMORTAL PALACE

by M.T. Khan ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2022

An enthralling fantasy debut exploring exploitation by those in power.

Will 12-year-old Nura be able to outsmart the trickster jinn and save herself and her friends?

Nura lives in the fictional Pakistani town of Meerabagh, where she has worked mining mica to help support her family of five—her mother, herself, and her three younger siblings—since her father’s death. In the mines she has the company of her best friend, Faisal, who is teased by other kids for his stutter, and she enjoys small pleasures like splurging on gulab jamun. Although Maa wants Nura to stop working and attend school, she has no interest in classroom learning and hopes to save up to send her younger siblings to school instead so they can break the family’s cycle of poverty. Following a mining accident in which Faisal and others are lost in the rubble, Nura goes to the rescue. In her quest, she is plunged into the magical, glittering jinn realm, where nothing is as it seems. The author seamlessly weaves into the worldbuilding of the story commentary on real-life problems such as the ravages of child labor and systems that perpetuate inequities. An informative author’s note further explores present-day global cycles of oppression as well as the life-changing power of education. This action-packed story set in a Muslim community moves at a fast pace, with evocative writing that brings the fantasy world to life and lyrical imagery to describe emotions.

Pub Date: July 5, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-7595-5795-6

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022

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Elena Reads and Reviews

A young book lover shares her thoughts on the diverse stories she's reading.

Review: The Library Card Shows How Something Simple Can Change Lives

When I picked up the book The Library Card , it looked really interesting. And the summary on the back cover made me want to read more.

The story is told from the perspective of of four young people. Even though they all are totally different and have never met, two things are the same about them: none of them really fit in. And, a mysterious blue library card shows up right when they need it.

In this compelling book, by Jerry Spinelli, four ordinary people find a library card, not knowing it will change their lives forever. This blue library card is not for just checking out books, it is a ticket to freedom, to a new perspective on life, to a world they never imagined.

Suddenly, the boy who vandalized his school spends more time with a book than with a spray can. Mongoose starts reading I Wonder every night, memorizing the facts about whale tongue’s and cicadas.

And the girl who was addicted to TV now realizes she has the ability to turn it off and find the real her, all because of a library card. Brenda starts to play outside more and starts remembering all the things she did as a kid.

I recommend The Library Card to readers ages nine to 12. I love bittersweet reads, and if you do too, this one is for you. There are so many sad, but also happy parts in the book, times when you will want to cry, but jump for joy, too.

I really LOVED this book! Definitely 4 out of 4 roses!

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Elena, this sounds like a great read! Do you remember the first time you got your library card? In general, do you think kids your age use their local library enough?

I got my library card in fourth grade. Before then, I used my dad’s, but now I like being able to manage my own account. I feel that libraries are very underused, now that less kids are reading books. Although there are a few readers, not many kids are into books. I think I want my blog to help more kids see the magic of reading.

I love reading your blog, and although I am older (66 – really older), your blog makes me want to read the books and pass them along to those young readers who may enjoy them. Thanks – and keep it up, Roz – one of the Bookstock volunteers

Sent from my iPhone

That makes me so happy to here! Thank you!

25+ Book Review Templates and Ideas to Organize Your Thoughts

Danika Ellis

Danika spends most of her time talking about queer women books at the Lesbrary. Blog: The Lesbrary Twitter: @DanikaEllis

View All posts by Danika Ellis

When I was a kid I loved reading, but I hated book reports. It felt impossible to boil a book down to a few lines or even a page of writing. Besides, by the time I had to write the report, I had already forgotten a lot. It never ceases to be painful to try to pull my thoughts and opinions out of my head and put them on the page, especially in a coherent way.

As an adult, I continue to usually find writing book reviews painful . And yet, I maintain a book blog with reviews of all the (bi and lesbian) books I read. Why? For one thing, I want to raise the visibility of these books — or, in the case of a book I loathed, warn other readers of what to expect. It helps me to build community with other book lovers. It’s also a great way to force myself pay attention to how I’m feeling while I’m reading a book and what my thoughts are afterwards. I have learned to take notes as I go, so I have something to refer to by the time I write a review, and it has me notice what a book is doing well (and what it isn’t). The review at the end helps me to organize my thoughts. I also find that I remember more once I’ve written a review.

Once you’ve decided it’s worthwhile to write a review, though, how do you get started? It can be a daunting task. The good news is, book reviews can adapt to whatever you want them to be. A book review can be a tweet with a thumbs up or thumbs down emoji, maybe with a sentence or two of your thoughts; it can also be an in-depth essay on the themes of the book and its influence on literature. Most are going to fall somewhere between those two! Let go of the idea of trying to create the One True Book Review. Everyone is looking for something different, and there is space for GIF-filled squee fests about a book and thoughtful, meditative explorations of a work.

This post offers a variety of book reviews elements that you can mix and match to create a book review template that works for you. Before you get started, though, there are some questions worth addressing.

Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Book Review Template

Where will you be posting your book reviews.

An Instagram book review will likely look different from a blog book review. Consider which platform you will be using for your book review. You can adapt it for different platforms, or link to your original review, but it’s a good starting point. Instagram reviews tend to be a lot shorter than blog reviews, for instance.

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Will you be using the same template every time?

Some book reviewers have a go-to book review template. Others have a different one for each genre, while another group doesn’t use a template at all and just reacts to whatever each book brings up.

Heading or no headings?

When choosing which book review elements to mix and match, you can also decide whether to include a header for each section (like Plot, Characterization, Writing, etc). Headers make reviews easier to browse, but they may not have the professional, essay-style look that you’re going for.

Why are you writing a review?

When selecting which elements to include in your review, consider what the purpose is. Do you want to better remember the plot by writing about it? You probably want to include a plot summary, then. Do you want to help readers decide whether they should read this book? A pros and cons list might be helpful. Are you trying to track something about your reading, like an attempt to read more books in translation or more books by authors of color? Are you trying to buy fewer books and read off your TBR shelf instead? These are all things you can note in a review, usually in a point-form basic information block at the beginning.

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Book Review Templates and Formats

Essay-style.

This is a multi-paragraph review, usually with no headers. It’s the same format most newspapers and academics use for book reviews. Many essay-style reviews use informal categories in their writing, often discussing setting, writing, characters, and plot in their own paragraphs. They usually also discuss the big themes/messages of a story. Here are some questions to consider when writing an essay-style review:

What is the author trying to do? Don’t evaluate a romance novel based on a mystery novel’s criteria. First try to think about what the book was attempting to do, then try to evaluate if they achieved it. You can still note if you didn’t like it, but it’s good to know what it was aiming for first.

What are some of the themes of the story? What big message should the reader take away? Did you agree with what the book seemed to be saying? Why or why not?

How is this story relevant to the world? What is it saying about the time it was written in? About human nature? About society or current issues? Depending on the book, there may be more or less to dig into here.

What did this book make you think about? It may be that the themes in the book were just a launching off point. How did they inspire your own thinking? How did this book change you?

A Classic Book Review

This is probably the most common kind of book review template. It uses a few criteria, usually including Setting, Writing, Characters, and Plot (for a novel). The review then goes into some detail about each element, describing what the book did well, and where it fell short.

The advantage of this format is that it’s very straightforward and applies to almost any fiction read. It can also be adapted–you will likely have more to say about the plot in a mystery/thriller than a character study of a novel. A drawback, though, is that it can feel limiting. You might have thoughts that don’t neatly fit into these categories, or you could feel like you don’t have enough to say about some of the categories.

Pros and Cons

A common format for a Goodreads review is some variation of pros and cons. This might be “What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like” or “Reasons to Bump This Up Your TBR/Reasons to Bump This Down On Your TBR.” This is a very flexible system that can accommodate anything from a few bullet points each to paragraphs each. It gives a good at-a-glance impression of your thoughts (more cons than pros is a pretty good indication you didn’t like it). It also is broad enough that almost all your thoughts can likely be organized into those headings.

This is also a format that is easily mix and matched with the elements listed below. A brief review might give the title, author, genre, some brief selling points of the novel, and then a pros and cons list. Some reviews also include a “verdict” at the end. An example of this format:

The Tea Dragon Society by Katie O’Neill

🌟 Fantasy All-Ages Comic 💫 Adorable pet dragons ✨ A diverse cast

Pros: This book has beautiful artwork. It is a soothing read, and all the character are supportive of each other. This is a story about friendship and kindness.

Cons: Don’t expect a fast-moving plot or a lot of conflict. This is a very gentle read.

Another approach to the review is not, strictly speaking, a book review template at all. Instead, it’s something like “5 Reasons to Read TITLE by Author” or “The # Most Shocking Plot Twists in X Series.” An advantage of this format is that it can be very to-the-point: if you want to convince people to read a book, it makes sense to just write a list of reasons they should read the book. It may also be more likely to get clicked on–traditional book reviews often get less views than more general posts.

On the other hand, listicles can come off as gimmicky or click-bait. You’ll have to decide for yourself if the book matches this format, and whether you are writing this out of genuine enthusiasm or are just trying to bend a review to be more clickable.

Your Own Original Rating System

Lots of reviewers decide to make their own review format based on what matters to them. This is often accompanied by a ratings system. For instance, the BookTube channel Book Roast uses the CAWPILE system:

CAWPILE is an acronym for the criteria she rates: Characters, Atmosphere, Writing, Plot, Intrigue, Logic, Enjoyment. Each of those are rated 1–10, and the average given is the overall rating. By making your own ratings/review system, you can prioritize what matters to you.

My favorite rating system is Njeri’s from Onyx Pages , because it shows exactly what she’s looking for from books, and it helps her to think about and speak about the things she values:

A “Live Tweet” or Chronological Review

Another format possibility is live tweeting (or updating as you go on Goodreads, or whatever your platform of choice is). This has you document your initial thoughts as you read, and it’s usually informal and often silly. You can add what you’re loving, what you’re hating, and what questions you have as you go.

This is a fun format for when you’re reading a popular book for the first time. That way, other people can cackle at how unprepared you are as you read it. This requires you to remember to always have your phone on you as you read, to get your authentic thoughts as they happen, but it saves on having to write a more in-depth review. Alternately, some people include both a “first impressions” section and a more in-depth analysis section in their final review.

Get Creative

There are plenty of book review templates to choose from and elements to mix-and-match, but you can also respond in a completely original way. You could create a work of art in response to the book! Here are some options:

Writing a song , a short story, or a poem
Writing a letter to the author or the main character (you don’t have to send it to the author!)
Writing an “interview” of a character from the book, talk show style
Making a visual response, like a collage or painting
Making a book diorama, like your elementary school days!

Mix-and-Match Elements of a Book Review

Most book reviews are made up of a few different parts, which can be combined in lots of different ways. Here is a selection to choose from! These might also give you ideas for your own elements. Don’t take on too much, though! It can easily become an overwhelming amount of information for readers.

Information

Usually a book review starts with some basic information about the book. What you consider basic information, though, is up for interpretation! Consider what you and your audience will think is important. Here are some ideas:

The title and author (pretty important)
The book’s cover
Format (audiobook, comic, poetry, etc)
Genre (this can be broad, like SFF, or narrow, like Silkpunk or Dark Academia)
Content warnings
Source (where did you get the book? Was is borrowed from the library, bought, or were you sent an ARC?)
Synopsis/plot summary (your own or the publisher’s)
What kind of representation there is in the novel (including race, disability, LGBTQ characters, etc)
Anything you’re tracking in your reading, including: authors of color, authors’ country, if a book is in translation, etc

Review Elements

Once you’ve established your basic information, you’re into the review itself! Some of these are small additions to a review, while others are a little more time-intensive.

Bullet point elements:

Rating (star rating, thumbs up/down, recommend/wouldn’t recommend, or your own scale)
Who would like it/Who wouldn’t like it
Read-alikes (or movies and TV shows like the book)
Describe the book using an emoji or emojis
Describe the book using a gif or gifs
Favorite line(s) from the book
New vocabulary/the most beautiful words in the novel
How it made you feel (in a sentence or two)
One word or one sentence review
Bullet points listing the selling points of a book
BooksandLala’s Scary, Unsettling, and Intrigue ratings, for horror
World-building, for fantasy and science fiction titles
Art, for comics
Narration, for audiobooks
Romance, for…romance
Heat level, for erotica

Visual elements:

Design a graphic (usually incorporating the cover, your star rating, and some other basic info)
Take a selfie of yourself holding the book, with your expression as the review
Make a mood board
Design your own book cover
Make fan art

Elements to incorporate into a review:

Quick/initial thoughts (often while reading or immediately after reading), then a more in-depth review (common on Goodreads)
A list of facts about the book or a character from the book
Book club questions about the book
Spoiler/non-spoiler sections
Research: look up interviews with the author and critique of the book, incorporate it (cited!) into your review
Links to other resources, such as interviews or other reviews — especially #OwnVoices reviews
A story of your own, whether it’s your experience reading the book, or something it reminded you of

This is not a complete list! There are so many ways to write a book review, and it should reflect your own relationship with books, as well as your audience. If you’re looking for more ways to keep track of your reading, you’ll also like 50+ Beautiful Bujo Spread Ideas to Track Your Reading .

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Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews

The Library Card

Mongoose and Weasel are sure that they have the whole thing sorted out. School is dumb, playing by the rules is dumb, and breaking the rules is extremely cool. They aren't kids anymore and cannot be scared into cooperation by teachers and principals. When Mongoose rips off the Mini-Mart for the first time he feels like a king and he joins Weasel in discussions of what they will both do when they get their first cars and when they leave school at the age of sixteen.

Then Mongoose finds a library card. On a whim Mongoose goes to the library, something he has never done before and he discovers something extraordinary. He finds out that there is an enormous world out there full of remarkable things and all he has to do is to open a book and he can read all about animals, people, places, distant galaxies, and so much more. In short Weasel?s narrow little world of fancy cars, petty theft, and vandalism starts to loose its attraction.

For another child, Brenda, a library card frees her from an all consuming addiction with television. Brenda's family are participating in the "Great TV Turn-Off" and she really starts to think that she is going to loose her mind if she can't watch TV again and soon. Then a small blue library card turns up seemingly by magic, and Brenda discovers that there is another Brenda somewhere inside herself, a Brenda who loves the color yellow and whose favorite snack is Rice Krispies treats.

For Sonseray a library card gives him the chance to find something he has been looking for for years and perhaps, now that he has found it, the rage and anger within in him will recede and let him have a normal life.

Finally there is April who is given the small blue library card by a girl who is on the verge of losing herself. On it April writes her name and address and the girl, Nanette, uses the card to ask for help when the world seems very dark and lonely.

It is remarkable to see how Jerry Spinelli can make a library card suddenly seem so much more than a rectangle of blue card. For these four children it is a lifeline, and for all of them it gives them something that they all desperately need. Beautifully crafted, moving, sometimes disturbing, and always thought-provoking, these four stories are a joy to read.

Review Written by Marya Jansen-Gruber

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The Library Card › Customer reviews

Customer reviews.

The Library Card

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

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Booklist, Booklist Online, Booklist Reader

The best book reviews, readers' advisory, and collection development guidance from the experts at the American Library Association.

For over 100 years Booklist magazine has helped tens of thousands of librarians as a book review source, and readers’ advisory, collection development, and professional development resource. Booklist magazine delivers 8,000+ recommended-only reviews of books, audiobooks, and reference sources each year, spanning every age and genre.

Booklist Online includes a growing archive from more than 25 years of reviews, as well as a wealth of free content offering the latest news and views on books and media. Now you can read the digital editions of Booklist - online or through a mobile device.

Booklist Reader brings Booklist ’s quality reviews, read-alikes, top 10 lists, author interviews, and more directly to patrons.You can order print copies of Booklist Reader and share issues digitally as part of your Booklist subscription. You can try these tips for how patrons can use Booklist Reader as a book-browsing guide and see examples of libraries serving communities with Booklist Reader !

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Library of Congress
Research Guides
Main Reading Room

Finding Book Reviews Online

Sources for general book reviews.

Introduction

General Inquiries : Ask a Librarian

Have a question? Need assistance? Use our online form to ask a librarian for help.

Chat with a librarian , Monday through Friday, 12-4pm Eastern Time (except Federal Holidays).

Before you start your search you should know the title and author of the book being reviewed. The date of publication will sometimes also be required. Some databases offer a search option to limit search results to book reviews. Where not present, adding a keyword search that includes the phrase "book review" should help. Reviews of popular books are typically published close to their publication dates; find them via book-related websites and indexes that cover general interest periodicals. Reviews of scholarly books may take months to appear in scholarly journals. For more databases that cover scholarly journals, visit the Library of Congress E-Resources Online Catalog .

Free Web Resources
Book Review Databases
Selected General Databases
Historical Book Review Databases

Free contemporary book reviews are widely available on the web. The sources listed below are some of the most common places to find them.

Amazon.com External Amazon.com offers book reviews of many of the book titles it sells. Some reviews are by professionals; many are by readers. Find a book and scroll down its entry to read the reviews, where present. For balance, try a variety of positive and negative reviews.
Barnes & Noble External Barnes and Noble includes professional book reviews with the descriptions of many of the books it sells.
Complete Review External The Complete Review contains a selected listing of old and new book titles with reviews and links to more reviews.
GoodReads Reviews External GoodReads offers millions of book reviews contributed by its community members which include librarians, journalists, and many other readers.
Kirkus Reviews External Kirkus Reviews includes reviews new and forthcoming fiction, non-fiction and Young Adult (YA) books. Kirkus also has a print magazine available by subscription.
Library Journal Reviews+ External Library Journal reviews books on a wide array of popular and scholarly topics expected to interest a broad spectrum of libraries. Reviews from the most recent 24 months are free online.
LibraryThing Reviews External LibraryThing Reviews are written by members of the LibraryThing community of readers and book collectors. Reviews are grouped in various ways, including by genre or may be searched by author or title.
New York Times Book Review (free selections) External A free collection of book reviews published in The New York Times since 1981. A more extensive paid subscription database is also available.
School Library Journal Reviews+ External Features reviews from School Library Journal from the most recent twenty-four months. Browse by genre, grade level, award winners and other criteria.

Subscription databases are great sources for current and recent book reviews. Many also include historical coverage.

Children's Literature Review, Vols 1-216

These more general subscription databases cover a wide array of periodicals which include book reviews. Using the phrase "book review" in your search can be effective if no check-box option for book reviews is available in the database's search function.

Some researchers seek reviews that are decades or even centuries old, for example, to see how a book written in the 19th Century was reviewed when it was first released. This listing includes general and book review resources. For the general sources, be sure to Include the phrase "book review" in your search if no check-box option for book reviews is available.

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 (Series 1 and Series 2)
American Business: Agricultural Newspapers
American Business: Mercantile Newspapers
American Gazettes: Newspapers of Record
American Politics: Campaign Newspapers
American Religion: Denominational Newspapers
Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690-1876: From Colonies to Nation
Early American Newspapers, Series 2, 1758-1900: The New Republic
Early American Newspapers, Series 3, 1783-1922: From Farm to City
Early American Newspapers, Series 4, 1756-1922: The Rise of Industry
Early American Newspapers, Series 5, 1777-1922: An Emerging World Power
Early American Newspapers, Series 6, 1741-1922: Compromise and Disunion
Early American Newspapers, Series 7: 1773-1922: Reform and Retrenchment
Early American Newspapers, Series 8, 1844-1922: A Nation in Transition
Early American Newspapers, Series 9, 1832-1922: Protest and Prosperity
Early American Newspapers, Series 11, 1803-1899: From Agrarian Republic to World Power
Early American Newspapers, Series 12, 1821-1900: The Specialized Press
Early American Newspapers, Series 13, 1803-1916: The American West
Early American Newspapers, Series 14, 1807-1880: The Expansion of Urban America
Early American Newspapers, Series 15, 1822-1879: Immigrant Communities
Early American Newspapers, Series 16, 1800-1877: Industry and the Environment
Early American Newspapers Series 17, 1844-1922: American Heartland
Early American Newspapers, Series 18, 1825-1879: Racial Awakening in the Northeast

C19 Index draws on the strength of established indexes such as the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC), The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index, Periodicals Index Online and the Cumulative Index to Niles' Register 18111849 to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.7 million books and official publications, 70,000 archival collections and 20.9 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers. C19 Index now provides integrated access to 13 bibliographic indexes, including more than three million records from British Periodicals Collections I and II, together with the expanded online edition of the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (DNCJ).

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Last Updated: May 31, 2024 8:50 AM
URL: https://guides.loc.gov/finding-book-reviews

Articles & Databases

Explore our collection of hundreds of online resources and databases. Use our free online content to help with your research, whether it's finding a single article, tracing a family tree, learning a new language, or anything in between.

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Book Review Index Online is a comprehensive source for book reviews from 1965 to the present and covers review published in nearly 500 periodicals and newspapers.

Want the FREE Summer Reading Guide? CLICK HERE!

Everything you should know about Hoopla

I am a library lover to the core.

Whenever we’ve moved (which has been MANY times), getting a library card is one of my top priorities and I usually have it in hand even before I have a new driver’s license.

And, naturally, I want to make sure I’m taking advantage of all the services my library offers.

One of those services is Hoopla .

If you’re new to Hoopla, here’s how it works!

Hoopla is a digital borrowing service for libraries that provides access to audiobooks, ebooks, music, movies, magazines and tv shows. Borrow and enjoy all of this digital content on any of your personal devices, including iPads, iPhones, Android devices, Nooks, Kindle Fire, PC, AppleTV, Roku, FireTV and Chromecast.

You may already be familiar with Libby , which is one of the most common digital library services. Here’s how Libby and Hoopla are different.

Libby is a platform, and libraries are responsible for purchasing and adding content to their library’s Libby system.

So your library may have a very sad little collection of audiobooks or ebooks on Libby or your library might have an enormous, robust collection with many copies of the most popular titles. It’s 100% dependent on how much money your library chooses to allocate to their Libby selection.

Hoopla, on the other hand, is a standard set of materials. So as long as your library uses Hoopla, you’ll have pretty much the same materials in your Hoopla account as anyone else anywhere in the country (this isn’t 100% true, but close enough that most people won’t see a difference between their Hoopla catalog and another library’s Hoopla catalog).

The other main difference is that Libby materials work just like regular library books. There is a set number of copies and if they’re checked out, you’ll have to wait in a hold line until they’re returned.

Hoopla instead limits YOU to a certain number of checkouts per month (this number depends on your library – my current library limit is 5 Hoopla checkouts per month, but I’ve used libraries with a 3/month limit and others with a 15/month limit. Again, this is dependent on your library’s budget).

But because they’re limiting your number of checkouts, there aren’t hold lines – every item in the Hoopla library is available for checkout at any moment. You’ll never have to wait! This is one reason that people LOVE Hoopla.

You can favorite items on Hoopla so you don’t lose track of what you want to read, watch or listen to.

And you can turn on Kid settings so that only kid-friendly materials are shown in search results.

The length of checkout time varies depending on the material – movies are usually only checked out for 2-3 days, while audiobooks and ebooks are usually 14-21 days.

Does my library offer access to Hoopla?

So. . . .that all sounds great. Now how do you know if your library offers Hoopla?

If you want to use Hoopla, you can sign up for a free account. As part of that sign-up, it’ll use your current location to see if your library offers it (if it does, you just add your library card number and pin and you’re ready to roll!).

You can also look at this map which shows all the libraries that have Hoopla access.

If your library DOESN’T offer Hoopla, you can certainly request that they join.

What devices can I use Hoopla Digital on?

You can use the Hoopla library through a browser on your computer or tablet, or they have apps for the Apple store, Google Play, Amazon, Apple TV, Chromecast and more, so it’s really simple to use on any device you have.

The bad news is that it’s a pretty terrible skill – the reviews are awful and I’ve personally never been able to get it to work.

Have you used Hoopla? Or do you have questions about Hoopla works? I’d love to help!

If you liked this post about Hoopla, you might like these posts too:

Why I LOVE the Libby app
All about using Scribd for audiobooks
My top 10 most recommended books

Photos by Heather Mildenstein

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

10 Picture Books about Voting and Elections

24 Wonderful Books about Grandparents

How to Make Yoto Podcast Cards

5 Books I’m Currently Reading (+ My Team’s Picks!)

Fourth quarter reading, 33 comments.

We love hoopla! My 7 yr old, especially, uses it so much to listen to the Boxcar Children every afternoon. I first read Boxcar with my son and then switched to the audiobooks after you wrote about how your kids liked them. Thank you!

I used to use Hoopla when the Salt Lake County Library had it, but it doesn’t look like there is currently much access in Utah. What library are you accessing it from?

I still have access through my North Carolina library card!

davis county utah has it. i just started using it and love it.

We love Hoopla! My library has 5 checkouts/month and we use it exclusively for audiobooks for the kids. We also use our Alexa devices to play Hoopla and have not had problems with that? We have to say, Alexa ask Hoopla to list my titles and then we select one to play. Hoopla only lets you listen on one device at a time, so if you are currently using your phone to listen to Hoopla, you won’t be able to listen on the Alexa. Otherwise, we’ve had good luck with it.

I listen to books through my phone as I am driving to and from work everyday, but I can also pull the same book up on my Roku at home and it will pick up where I left off in the car.

Does Hoopla work with a Kindle? Thanks!

Unfortunately no.

That’s not entirely true. It doesn’t work with a kindle ereader like paperwhite but it does with with kindle fire …

That’s correct – I should have clarified I meant a kindle ereader (and Amazon should have picked a different name for their tablets than for their ereaders).

Can you request an Author that you would like to be added to Hoopla?

This is the key difference for me between Libby and Hoopla. With Libby you can easily read an ebook on your Kindle reader, and you can’t with Hoopla. :-(. It keeps me from using Hoopla for ebooks. I only borrow audiobooks from Hoopla.

I just listened to all of the Harry Potter books via Hoopla! The wait was crazy long on Overdrive, so it was perfect to snag them from Hoopla.

We have sign-ins for all four people in our family on Hoopla. Here’s a tip for juggling multiple accounts that all need unique email addresses, which Hoopla does. We have one standard email address we use for things like this, and you can add the plus sign and then some extra characters before the @ sign to get a new “unique” email address that still goes to your standard email. Hoopla thinks it’s a new email address, but email providers (at least gmail) ignore anything after the plus sign so it still goes to your normal email.

I do this for my kids because they don’t have email of their own. So we have, for example, [email protected] for a kid named Polly (not real) and [email protected] for another kid (also not real). Each email is linked to their own library card, so this isn’t gaming the system to get extra checkouts, it’s just giving me easy-to-remember “unique” email addresses so I can easily sign the whole family up for Hoopla.

Gee, that’s a long explanation. Not sure if it’s helpful to anyone…

Super helpful! I’m definitely going to start doing this. Thanks for sharing!

Wow. That was actually really helpful. Do you know if each user gets the max amount of checkouts per month? Or is it the max amount of checkouts for the whole household account?

How do I access audiobooks on Hoopla? Does my library just not offer them?

You use the filter button and filter for Audiobooks

Hoopla says the book can be downloaded. I download the book so where does it go ? I can locate the download. Thanks

Can I read Hoopla books with white words on a black background?

IF I MOVE TO A NEW STATE AND SIGN WITH THEIR HOOPLA DO I LOSE ALL THE STORED INFORMATION FROM MY OLD LIBRARY LIKE FAVORITE AUTHORS, MY READING HISTORY ETC.?

I listened to and returned my audio books within a week. Changed my mind on others. Now it says I have reached my limit of four. I returned three. Do I have to wait three weeks to check out audio books?

Yes – libraries set a monthly limit on Hoopla checkouts because they pay for every checkout, whether you read/listen or not. In order to keep it from blowing their budget, they don’t offer unlimited checkouts and you’ll have to wait for your checkouts to refresh at the beginning of the month.

I’m watching a series of educational course guitar and Tai chi. This has been going fine except now I have reached the borrowing limit. How is this suppost to work if I’m learning a skill that requires me to log on mulitiple times during the week?

My Hoopla offerings went from a plethora of audiobooks that interest to nil. Is my library censoring?

I think that’s unlikely, but I’d talk to your library and find out what changed.

Hi there!! Great post! I was just introduced to hoopla so I’m excited to get started! However, my account doesn’t offer Audiobooks. Any idea why that is? I use Libby and listen to audiobooks there so I wouldn’t think it’d be a matter of my library not having audiobooks. Any ideas?

Because Hoopla DOES NOT work on Kindle Paperwhite, I am sunk. It is very frustrating because libraries now use Hoopla and have very little in e books other than using Hoopla. If you read in bed like I do, then my ipad is too heavy to hold for arthritic hands. SO—-spend money on another device……………UGH!! So for me it is very frustrating!!!!! My public libraries use to have lots of e books that worked on Kindle….but not any longer.

So if my library does not use Hoopla can I find a library near me that uses it and purchase a library card so I can use their Hoopla? It sounds amazing!

I’ve downloaded hoopla, but there isn’t even categories for ebooks or audio books. It’s my library not offering them?

Yes – they can choose to only have the movies/music/tv shows section available to patrons.

How is flex borrowing different from my usual 4 audiobooks a month? Does the limit of 4 items include music and movies too, or is it 4 of each kind of media?

I checked out an audiobook and started listening in the car but now it says I’m offline and doesn’t show my downloaded book and I can’t listen. And ideas?

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The Library Card summary | The Library Card four level analysis

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The Library Card summary and four level analysis

About the author richard wright.

Richard Wright (1908-1960) is an African- American writer. He is one of the influential novelists, short story as well as non-fictional writers. Most of the works are about racism i.e. black and white people in America.

Summary of The Library Card by Richard Wright

The Library Card is an autobiographical story. The story focuses on the importance of education that helps us understand ourselves, others, the mysteries of the world, and the essence of life. Moreover, it shows the racial discrimination between the white and the black people in America.

Once, the writer read a newspaper editorial in the lobby of a bank. The writer is negro (black). He found the article about H.L. Mencken. H.L. Mencken was a popular white writer. Mencken was badly denounced (hated) by the white people. The writer had never read such a bitter criticism to the white writer by the white race. It was because the boy had had a bitter experience of social and color discrimination. White people had never shown any sympathy for the black. Rather black people were taken as out-castes or animals. Therefore, Richard Wright was curious to know the reason for their hatred of Mencken. So, he was highly inspired to read Mencken's books. He wanted to go to the library to get the books by Mencken.

During the time, blacks were deprived of their rights, freedom, education, equality, justice, and other opportunities. They were not permitted to use the library. Being black, the writer didn't have a library card of his own. He started serving many white men by collecting books from the library thinking that he could get a chance to use a library card.

One day, the writer's boss Mr. Falk, an Irish Catholic, gave him his two library cards. He warned the boy (writer) to use the card properly so that he would not get in trouble. However, the white librarian refused to lend the books without the permission letter of the owner of the cards. Anyway, the boy used his creative mind and forged a note i.e. the white man's name on the card, and collected books from the library.

The writer firstly read "Prefaces" and "Prejudices" by Mencken. Initially, because of his limited knowledge and poor English, he could not understand the books. However, he soon realized that words could be more powerful than any weapons. He returned those books and borrowed the other ones. His reading helped him to understand more about life and people. He became quite intelligent. He realized the sufferings of slaves, suppression, and oppression of cruel law by the white against the black. The hatred of the white men arose bitter feelings in his conscious mind and heart. Finally, he became a successful writer and scholar to fight against racial discrimination and prejudices of the whites over blacks in America.

Application of four levels of The Library Card

Literal comprehension of the library card.

As a Negro boy, the writer worked in the lower post of a white office. One day, he read the editorial part of the newspaper and found out that the white popular writer Mencken had been criticized by the white race.

Since he had the bitter experience of white domination over black, he was eager to read and know the books by Mencken. Being black, he was not given a library card. So, he started working on collecting books about white men so that he guessed that he could get a library card. Fortunately, one day his boss Mr. Falk provided him with two library cards. Then the writer went to the library but the white librarian refused to lend the book without the permission of the original cardholder.

Then, he forged the card and placed white's name and signature, so that he borrowed two books by Mencken. Initially, he faced many difficulties to understand the themes of the books but gradually his reading got progressed. Now he was habituated to reading more and more books. He understood himself, and others and became conscious of how black people are discriminated against, oppressed, and dominated by the whites in America.

Finally, he became one of the renowned black writers and scholars to fight against white domination and cruel behavior over blacks in America.

Interpretation of The Library Card

The story "Library Card" clearly states the importance of education. Human beings are no better than other animals without education. Social, cultural, and economical problems, politics, freedom, justice, and discrimination. inequality and subordination can be known by getting an education. In addition, this story talks about the racial discrimination in America where blacks are deprived of rights, education, justice, and equality. But it also teaches us that where there is a will, there is a way.

The writer struggles much to reading the books and finally becomes a successful writer and scholar understanding himself, others, and the essence of life.

Critical Thinking of The Library Card

The story ‘The Library Card’ highlights the supreme value of education assuming that book is the source of knowledge and life is understood by the possession of knowledge.

Richard Wright is from ordinary Negro who becomes a successful writer and critic by reading several books. Similarly, this story realistically represents the racial discrimination, injustices, and prejudices by whites against blacks in America. However, some ideas in the story are less convincing and more controversial. If the Negro boy was uneducated and ignorant, how could he read the newspaper editorial critically? How could he forge the letter exactly if he was suppressed and exploited by the whites?

Assimilation of The Library Card

The Library Card has greatly influenced me. I have come to know that delight gained from knowledge (education) is much worthier than the delight gained from money (wealth).

In fact, education helps us understand ourselves, others, the mysteries of the world, and the essence of life. One can be successful to know about justice, freedom, and equality through the possession of education. So, I am highly impressed by this text and determined to continue my further education.

Summarize the plot of the Library Card in one sentence.

Richard Wright as a Negro boy struggles a lot to study the books by Mencken and other many books so that he understands how black people are enslaved, dominated, and exploited by the whites and becomes a successful critic and writer to fight against cruel behavior, injustice, inequality and domination exercised by whites over black people in America.

Retell the plot of "Library Card" in a single paragraph.

As a Negro boy, the writer works in the lower white's office. One day, he reads a newspaper editorial in the lobby of a bank and finds out that H. L. Mencken is a popular white writer who has been criticized by the white community. The writer is eager to know and read the books by Mencken. Since he is black having no library card, it is a very challenging task for him to borrow books of Mencken from the library. However, he struggles a lot, and one day his boss Mr. Falk gives him a library card. Then, he forges the card and collects the books of Mencken. As he starts reading the books, he realizes that words are more powerful than weapons. So, he is eager to read many books. Finally, he realizes that black people are bitterly behaved by whites. He becomes quite an intelligent, critic, and successful writer in fighting against white domination and cruel manner toward blacks in America, by gaining knowledge, or education. So, this story shows the supreme value of education in our life.

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A user enjoys reading a book on her phone thanks to her free library card for Libby

Libraries are offering free digital library cards to homebound readers

Updated February 2023

Since launching our Instant Digital Card (IDC) service, over 1.5 million free library cards for Libby have been created! Instant Digital Card provides access to your library’s ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and more using just a valid phone number. In 2022 alone, over 326,000 digital library cards were issued to readers all over the United States.

During COVID-19, libraries have connected with their communities and provided access to digital content through Libby . In addition, library systems are using OverDrive’s Instant Digital Card feature to provide access to new readers. Your community could be next.

Public libraries offering free digital library cards with IDC

As families continue to spend time at home, it’s important to find ways to entertain both yourselves and children. The public library’s ability to offer thousands of digital books provides endless opportunities for readers of all ages. Whether it’s the latest thriller for mom, a classic fantasy novel for dad, or a Read-Along title for the youngest child, libraries have ebooks and audiobooks perfect for the whole family. Instant Digital Card feature assures readers can get them without leaving their house.

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Combining Instant Digital Card with the no cost and low cost content currently available in OverDrive Marketplace is a great way to stay connected with your community. We’re continuing to work with publishers to make as much content available for your patrons as possible, so be sure to follow OverDrive on Twitter , Facebook and our Blog for the latest updates.

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The 1 00 Best Books of the 21st Century

As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

Many of us find joy in looking back and taking stock of our reading lives, which is why we here at The New York Times Book Review decided to mark the first 25 years of this century with an ambitious project: to take a first swing at determining the most important, influential books of the era. In collaboration with the Upshot, we sent a survey to hundreds of literary luminaries , asking them to name the 10 best books published since Jan. 1, 2000.

Stephen King took part. So did Bonnie Garmus, Claudia Rankine, James Patterson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elin Hilderbrand, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Roxane Gay, Marlon James, Sarah MacLean, Min Jin Lee, Jonathan Lethem and Jenna Bush Hager, to name just a few . And you can also take part! Vote here and let us know what your top 10 books of the century are.

We hope you’ll discover a book you’ve always meant to read, or encounter a beloved favorite you’d like to pick up again. Above all, we hope you’re as inspired and dazzled as we are by the breadth of subjects, voices, opinions, experiences and imagination represented here.

The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

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Tree of Smoke

Denis Johnson 2007

Like the project of the title — an intelligence report that the newly minted C.I.A. operative William “Skip” Sands comes to find both quixotic and useless — the Vietnam-era warfare of Johnson’s rueful, soulful novel lives in shadows, diversions and half-truths. There are no heroes here among the lawless colonels, assassinated priests and faith-stricken NGO nurses; only villainy and vast indifference.

Liked it? Try “ Missionaries ,” by Phil Klay or “ Hystopia ,” by David Means.

Interested? Read our review . Then reserve it at your local library or buy it from Amazon , Apple , Barnes & Noble or Bookshop .

How to Be Both

Ali Smith 2014

This elegant double helix of a novel entwines the stories of a fictional modern-day British girl and a real-life 15th-century Italian painter. A more conventional book might have explored the ways the past and present mirror each other, but Smith is after something much more radical. “How to Be Both” is a passionate, dialectical critique of the binaries that define and confine us. Not only male and female, but also real and imaginary, poetry and prose, living and dead. The way to be “both” is to recognize the extent to which everything already is. — A.O. Scott, critic at large for The Times

Liked it? Try “ Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi ,” by Geoff Dyer or “ The Argonauts ,” by Maggie Nelson.

Ann Patchett 2001

A famed opera singer performs for a Japanese executive’s birthday at a luxe private home in South America; it’s that kind of party. But when a group of young guerrillas swoops in and takes everyone in the house hostage, Patchett’s exquisitely calibrated novel — inspired by a real incident — becomes a piano wire of tension, vibrating on high.

My wife and I share books we love with our kids, and after I raved about “Bel Canto” — the voice, the setting, the way romance and suspense are so perfectly braided — I gave copies to my kids, and they all loved it, too. My son was in high school then, and he became a kind of lit-pusher, pressing his beloved copy into friends’ hands. We used to call him the Keeper of the Bel Canto. — Jess Walter, author of “Beautiful Ruins”

Liked it? Try “ Nocturnes ,” by Kazuo Ishiguro or “ The Piano Tuner ,” by Daniel Mason.

Men We Reaped

Jesmyn Ward 2013

Sandwiched between her two National Book Award-winning novels, Ward’s memoir carries more than fiction’s force in its aching elegy for five young Black men (a brother, a cousin, three friends) whose untimely exits from her life came violently and without warning. Their deaths — from suicide and homicide, addiction and accident — place the hidden contours of race, justice and cruel circumstance in stark relief.

Liked it? Try “ Breathe: A Letter to My Sons ,” by Imani Perry or “ Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir ,” by Natasha Trethewey.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Saidiya Hartman 2019

A beautiful, meticulously researched exploration of the lives of Black girls whom early-20th-century laws designated as “wayward” for such crimes as having serial lovers, or an excess of desire, or a style of comportment that was outside white norms. Hartman grapples with “the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known” about poor Black women, but from the few traces she uncovers in the historical record, she manages to sketch moving portraits, restoring joy and freedom and movement to what, in other hands, might have been mere statistics. — Laila Lalami, author of “The Other Americans”

Liked it? Try “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,” by Christina Sharpe or “ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake ,” by Tiya Miles.

Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel 2012

The title comes from an old English legal phrase for summoning men who have been accused of treason to trial; in the court’s eyes, effectively, they are already dead. But Mantel’s tour-de-force portrait of Thomas Cromwell, the second installment in her vaunted “Wolf Hall” series, thrums with thrilling, obstinate life: a lowborn statesman on the rise; a king in love (and out of love, and in love again); a mad roundelay of power plays, poisoned loyalties and fateful realignments. It’s only empires, after all.

Liked it? Try “ This Is Happiness ,” by Niall Williams or “ The Western Wind ,” by Samantha Harvey.

Zadie Smith 2005

Consider it a bold reinvention of “Howards End,” or take Smith’s sprawling third novel as its own golden thing: a tale of two professors — one proudly liberal, the other staunchly right-wing — whose respective families’ rivalries and friendships unspool over nearly 450 provocative, subplot-mad pages.

“You don’t have favorites among your children, but you do have allies.”

Let’s admit it: Family is often a kind of war, even if telepathically conducted. — Alexandra Jacobs, book critic for The Times

Liked it? Try “ Crossroads ,” by Jonathan Franzen.

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel 2014

Increasingly, and for obvious reasons, end-times novels are not hard to find. But few have conjured the strange luck of surviving an apocalypse — civilization preserved via the ad hoc Shakespeare of a traveling theater troupe; entire human ecosystems contained in an abandoned airport — with as much spooky melancholic beauty as Mandel does in her beguiling fourth novel.

Liked it? Try “ Severance ,” by Ling Ma or “ The Passage ,” by Justin Cronin.

The Days of Abandonment

Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein 2005

There is something scandalous about this picture of a sensible, adult woman almost deranged by the breakup of her marriage, to the point of neglecting her children. The psychodrama is naked — sometimes hard to read, at other moments approaching farce. Just as Ferrante drew an indelible portrait of female friendship in her quartet of Neapolitan novels, here, she brings her all-seeing eye to female solitude.

“The circle of an empty day is brutal, and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”

It so simply encapsulates how solitude can, with the inexorable passage of time, calcify into loneliness and then despair. — Alexandra Jacobs

Liked it? Try “ Eileen ,” by Ottessa Moshfegh or “ Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation ,” by Rachel Cusk.

The Human Stain

Philip Roth 2000

Set during the Clinton impeachment imbroglio, this is partly a furious indictment of what would later be called cancel culture, partly an inquiry into the paradoxes of class, sex and race in America. A college professor named Coleman Silk is persecuted for making supposedly racist remarks in class. Nathan Zuckerman, his neighbor (and Roth’s trusty alter ego), learns that Silk, a fellow son of Newark, is a Black man who has spent most of his adult life passing for white. Of all the Zuckerman novels, this one may be the most incendiary, and the most unsettling. — A.O. Scott

Liked it? Try “ Vladimir ,” by Julia May Jonas or “ Blue Angel ,” by Francine Prose.

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen 2015

Penned as a book-length confession from a nameless North Vietnamese spy as Saigon falls and new duties in America beckon, Nguyen’s richly faceted novel seems to swallow multiple genres whole, like a satisfied python: political thriller and personal history, cracked metafiction and tar-black comedy.

Liked it? Try “ Man of My Time ,” by Dalia Sofer or “ Tomás Nevinson ,” by Javier Marías; translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

Book cover for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

Hisham Matar 2016

Though its Pulitzer Prize was bestowed in the category of biography, Matar’s account of searching for the father he lost to a 1990 kidnapping in Cairo functions equally as absorbing detective story, personal elegy and acute portrait of doomed geopolitics — all merged, somehow, with the discipline and cinematic verve of a novel.

Liked it? Try “ A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy ,” by Nathan Thrall, “ House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East ,” by Anthony Shadid or “ My Father’s Fortune ,” by Michael Frayn.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Brevity, thy name is Lydia Davis. If her work has become a byword for short (nay, microdose) fiction, this collection proves why it is also hard to shake; a conflagration of odd little umami bombs — sometimes several pages, sometimes no more than a sentence — whose casual, almost careless wordsmithery defies their deadpan resonance.

Liked it? Try “ Ninety-Nine Stories of God ,” by Joy Williams or “ Tell Me: Thirty Stories ,” by Mary Robison.

Detransition, Baby

Torrey Peters 2021

Love is lost, found and reconfigured in Peters’s penetrating, darkly humorous debut novel. But when the novel’s messy triangular romance — between two trans characters and a cis-gendered woman — becomes an unlikely story about parenthood, the plot deepens, and so does its emotional resonance: a poignant and gratifyingly cleareyed portrait of found family.

Peters’s sly wit and observational genius, her ability to balance so many intimate realities, cultural forces and zeitgeisty happenings made my head spin. It got me hot, cracked me up, punched my heart with grief and understanding. I’m in awe of her abilities, and will re-read this book periodically just to remember how it’s done. — Michelle Tea, author of “Against Memoir”

Liked it? Try “ I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition ,” by Lucy Sante or “ Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta ,” by James Hannaham.

Frederick Douglass

David W. Blight 2018

It is not hard to throw a rock and hit a Great Man biography; Blight’s earns its stripes by smartly and judiciously excavating the flesh-and-bone man beneath the myth. Though Douglass famously wrote three autobiographies of his own, there turned out to be much between the lines that is illuminated here with rigor, flair and refreshing candor.

Liked it? Try “ The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family ,” by Kerri K. Greenidge or “Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865,” by James Oakes.

George Saunders 2000

An ersatz caveman languishes at a theme park; a dead maiden aunt comes back to screaming, scatological life; a bachelor barber born with no toes dreams of true love, or at least of getting his toe-nubs licked. The stories in Saunders’s second collection are profane, unsettling and patently absurd. They’re also freighted with bittersweet humanity, and rendered in language so strange and wonderful, it sings.

Liked it? Try “ Swamplandia! ,” by Karen Russell or “ Friday Black ,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

The Emperor of All Maladies

Siddhartha Mukherjee 2010

The subtitle, “A Biography of Cancer,” provides some helpful context for what lies between the covers of Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, though it hardly conveys the extraordinary ambition and empathy of his telling, as the trained oncologist weaves together disparate strands of large-scale history, biology and devastating personal anecdote.

Liked it? Try “ Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End ,” by Atul Gawande, “ Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery ,” by Henry Marsh or “ I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life ,” by Ed Yong.

When We Cease to Understand the World

Benjamín Labatut; translated by Adrian Nathan West 2021

You don’t have to know anything about quantum theory to start reading this book, a deeply researched, exquisitely imagined group portrait of tormented geniuses. By the end, you’ll know enough to be terrified. Labatut is interested in how the pursuit of scientific certainty can lead to, or arise from, states of extreme psychological and spiritual upheaval. His characters — Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, among others — discover a universe that defies rational comprehension. After them, “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.” That may sound abstract, but in Labatut’s hands the story of quantum physics is violent, suspenseful and finally heartbreaking. — A.O. Scott

Liked it? Try “ The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality ,” by William Egginton, “ The Noise of Time ,” by Julian Barnes or “The End of Days,” by Jenny Erpenbeck; translated by Susan Bernofsky.

Hurricane Season

Fernanda Melchor; translated by Sophie Hughes 2020

Her sentences are sloping hills; her paragraphs, whole mountains. It’s no wonder that Melchor was dubbed a sort of south-of-the-border Faulkner for her baroque and often brutally harrowing tale of poverty, paranoia and murder (also: witches, or at least the idea of them) in a fictional Mexican village. When a young girl impregnated by her pedophile stepfather unwittingly lands there, her arrival is the spark that lights a tinderbox.

Liked it? Try “ Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice ,” by Cristina Rivera Garza or “ Fever Dream ,” by Samanta Schweblin; translated by Megan McDowell.

John Jeremiah Sullivan 2011

When this book of essays came out, it bookended a fading genre: collected pieces written on deadline by “pulpheads,” or magazine writers. Whether it’s Sullivan’s visit to a Christian rock festival, his profile of Axl Rose or a tribute to an early American botanist, he brings to his subjects not just depth, but an open-hearted curiosity. Indeed, if this book feels as if it’s from a different time, perhaps that’s because of its generous receptivity to other ways of being, which offers both reader and subject a kind of grace.

Liked it? Try “ Sunshine State ,” by Sarah Gerard, “ Consider the Lobster ,” by David Foster Wallace or “ Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It ,” by Geoff Dyer.

The Story of the Lost Child

Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein 2015

All things, even modern literature’s most fraught female friendship, must come to an end. As the now middle-aged Elena and Lila continue the dance of envy and devotion forged in their scrappy Neapolitan youth, the conclusion of Ferrante’s four-book saga defies the laws of diminishing returns, illuminating the twined psychologies of its central pair — intractable, indelible, inseparable — in one last blast of X-ray prose.

Liked it? Try “The Years That Followed,” by Catherine Dunne or “From the Land of the Moon,” by Milena Agus; translated by Ann Goldstein.

A Manual for Cleaning Women

Lucia Berlin 2015

Berlin began writing in the 1960s, and collections of her careworn, haunted, messily alluring yet casually droll short stories were published in the 1980s and ’90s. But it wasn’t until 2015, when the best were collected into a volume called “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” that her prodigious talent was recognized. Berlin writes about harried and divorced single women, many of them in working-class jobs, with uncanny grace. She is the real deal. — Dwight Garner, book critic for The Times

“I hate to see anything lovely by myself.”

It’s so true, to me at least, and I have heard no other writer express it. — Dwight Garner

Liked it? Try “ The Flamethrowers ,” by Rachel Kushner or “ The Complete Stories ,” by Clarice Lispector; translated by Katrina Dodson.

Jon Fosse; translated by Damion Searls 2022

You may not be champing at the bit to read a seven-part, nearly 700-page novel written in a single stream-of-consciousness sentence with few paragraph breaks and two central characters with the same name. But this Norwegian masterpiece, by the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the kind of soul-cleansing work that seems to silence the cacophony of the modern world — a pair of noise-canceling headphones in book form. The narrator, a painter named Asle, drives out to visit his doppelgänger, Asle, an ailing alcoholic. Then the narrator takes a boat ride to have Christmas dinner with some friends. That, more or less, is the plot. But throughout, Fosse’s searching reflections on God, art and death are at once haunting and deeply comforting.

I had not read Fosse before he won the Nobel Prize, and I wanted to catch up. Luckily for me, the critic Merve Emre (who has championed his work) is my colleague at Wesleyan, so I asked her where to start. I was hoping for a shortcut, but she sternly told me that there was nothing to do but to read the seven-volume “Septology” translated by Damion Searls. Luckily for me, I had 30 hours of plane travel in the next week or so, and I had a Kindle.

Reading “Septology” in the cocoon of a plane was one of the great aesthetic experiences of my life. The hypnotic effects of the book were amplified by my confinement, and the paucity of distractions helped me settle into its exquisite rhythms. The repetitive patterns of Fosse’s prose made its emotional waves, when they came, so much more powerful. — Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University

Liked it? Try “ Armand V ,” by Dag Solstad; translated by Steven T. Murray.

An American Marriage

Tayari Jones 2018

Life changes in an instant for Celestial and Roy, the young Black newlyweds at the beating, uncomfortably realistic heart of Jones’s fourth novel. On a mostly ordinary night, during a hotel stay near his Louisiana hometown, Roy is accused of rape. He is then swiftly and wrongfully convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison. The couple’s complicated future unfolds, often in letters, across two worlds. The stain of racism covers both places.

Liked it? Try “ Hello Beautiful ,” by Ann Napolitano or “ Stay with Me ,” by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin 2022

The title is Shakespeare; the terrain, more or less, is video games. Neither of those bare facts telegraphs the emotional and narrative breadth of Zevin’s breakout novel, her fifth for adults. As the childhood friendship between two future game-makers blooms into a rich creative collaboration and, later, alienation, the book becomes a dazzling disquisition on art, ambition and the endurance of platonic love.

Liked it? Try “ Normal People ,” by Sally Rooney or “ Super Sad True Love Story ,” by Gary Shteyngart.

Mohsin Hamid 2017

The modern world and all its issues can feel heavy — too heavy for the fancies of fiction. Hamid’s quietly luminous novel, about a pair of lovers in a war-ravaged Middle Eastern country who find that certain doors can open portals, literally, to other lands, works in a kind of minor-key magical realism that bears its weight beautifully.

Liked it? Try “ The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida ,” by Shehan Karunatilaka or “ A Burning ,” by Megha Majumdar.

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout 2008

When this novel-in-stories won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009, it was a victory for crotchety, unapologetic women everywhere, especially ones who weren’t, as Olive herself might have put it, spring chickens. The patron saint of plain-spokenness — and the titular character of Strout’s 13 tales — is a long-married Mainer with regrets, hopes and a lobster boat’s worth of quiet empathy. Her small-town travails instantly became stand-ins for something much bigger, even universal.

Liked it? Try “ Tom Lake ,” by Ann Patchett or “ Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage ,” by Alice Munro.

The Passage of Power

Robert Caro 2012

The fourth volume of Caro’s epic chronicle of Lyndon Johnson’s life and times is a political biography elevated to the level of great literature. His L.B.J. is a figure of Shakespearean magnitude, whose sudden ascension from the abject humiliations of the vice presidency to the summit of political power is a turn of fortune worthy of a Greek myth. Caro makes you feel the shock of J.F.K.’s assassination, and brings you inside Johnson’s head on the blood-drenched day when his lifelong dream finally comes true. It’s an astonishing and unforgettable book. — Tom Perrotta, author of “The Leftovers”

Liked it? Try “ G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century ,” by Beverly Gage, “ King: A Life ,” by Jonathan Eig or “ American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer ,” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

Secondhand Time

Svetlana Alexievich; translated by Bela Shayevich 2016

Of all the 20th century’s grand failed experiments, few came to more inglorious ends than the aspiring empire known, for a scant seven decades, as the U.S.S.R. The death of the dream of Communism reverberates through the Nobel-winning Alexievich’s oral history, and her unflinching portrait of the people who survived the Soviet state (or didn’t) — ex-prisoners, Communist Party officials, ordinary citizens of all stripes — makes for an excoriating, eye-opening read.

Liked it? Try “ Gulag ,” by Anne Applebaum or “ Is Journalism Worth Dying For? Final Dispatches ,” by Anna Politkovskaya; translated by Arch Tait.

The Copenhagen Trilogy

Tove Ditlevsen; translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman 2021

Ditlevsen’s memoirs were first published in Denmark in the 1960s and ’70s, but most English-language readers didn’t encounter them until they appeared in a single translated volume more than five decades later. The books detail Ditlevsen’s hardscrabble childhood, her flourishing early career as a poet and her catastrophic addictions, which left her wedded to a psychotic doctor and hopelessly dependent on opioids by her 30s. But her writing, however dire her circumstances, projects a breathtaking clarity and candidness, and it nails what is so inexplicable about human nature.

Liked it? Try “ The End of Eddy ,” by Édouard Louis; translated by Michael Lucey.

All Aunt Hagar’s Children

Edward P. Jones 2006

Jones’s follow-up to his Pulitzer-anointed historical novel, “The Known World,” forsakes a single narrative for 14 interconnected stories, disparate in both direction and tone. His tales of 20th-century Black life in and around Washington, D.C., are haunted by cumulative loss and touched, at times, by dark magical realism — one character meets the Devil himself in a Safeway parking lot — but girded too by loveliness, and something like hope.

“It was, I later learned about myself, as if my heart, on the path that was my life, had come to a puddle in the road and had faltered, hesitated, trying to decide whether to walk over the puddle or around it, or even to go back.”

The metaphor is right at the edge of corniness, but it's rendered with such specificity that it catches you off guard, and the temporal complexity — the way the perspective moves forward, backward and sideways in time — captures an essential truth about memory and regret. — A.O. Scott

Liked it? Try “ The Office of Historical Corrections ,” by Danielle Evans or “ Perish ,” by LaToya Watkins.

The New Jim Crow

Michelle Alexander 2010

One year into Barack Obama’s first presidential term, Alexander, a civil rights attorney and former Supreme Court clerk, peeled back the hopey-changey scrim of early-aughts America to reveal the systematic legal prejudice that still endures in a country whose biggest lie might be “with liberty and justice for all.” In doing so, her book managed to do what the most urgent nonfiction aims for but rarely achieves: change hearts, minds and even public policy.

Liked it? Try “ Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America ,” by James Forman Jr., “ America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s ,” by Elizabeth Hinton or “ Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent ,” by Isabel Wilkerson.

Interested? Reserve it at your local library or buy it from Amazon , Apple , Barnes & Noble or Bookshop .

Sigrid Nunez 2018

After suffering the loss of an old friend and adopting his Great Dane, the book’s heroine muses on death, friendship, and the gifts and burdens of a literary life. Out of these fragments a philosophy of grief springs like a rabbit out of a hat; Nunez is a magician. — Ada Calhoun, author of “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me”

“The Friend” is a perfect novel about the size of grief and love, and like the dog at the book’s center, the book takes up more space than you expect. It’s my favorite kind of masterpiece — one you can put into anyone’s hand. — Emma Straub, author of “This Time Tomorrow”

Liked it? Try “ Autumn ,” by Ali Smith or “ Stay True: A Memoir ,” by Hua Hsu.

Far From the Tree

Andrew Solomon 2012

In this extraordinary book — a combination of masterly reporting and vivid storytelling — Solomon examines the experience of parents raising exceptional children. I have often returned to it over the years, reading it for its depth of understanding and its illumination of the particulars that make up the fabric of family. — Meg Wolitzer, author of “The Interestings”

Liked it? Try “ Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us ,” by Rachel Aviv or “ NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity ,” by Steven Silberman.

We the Animals

Justin Torres 2011

The hummingbird weight of this novella — it barely tops 130 pages — belies the cherry-bomb impact of its prose. Tracing the coming-of-age of three mixed-race brothers in a derelict upstate New York town, Torres writes in the incantatory royal we of a sort of sibling wolfpack, each boy buffeted by their parents’ obscure grown-up traumas and their own enduring (if not quite unshakable) bonds.

Liked it? Try “ Shuggie Bain ,” by Douglas Stuart, “ Fire Shut Up in My Bones ,” by Charles Blow or “ On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous ,” by Ocean Vuong.

The Plot Against America

Philip Roth 2004

What if, in the 1940 presidential election, Charles Lindbergh — aviation hero, America-firster and Nazi sympathizer — had defeated Franklin Roosevelt? Specifically, what would have happened to Philip Roth, the younger son of a middle-class Jewish family in Newark, N.J.? From those counterfactual questions, the adult Roth spun a tour de force of memory and history. Ever since the 2016 election his imaginary American past has pulled closer and closer to present-day reality. — A.O. Scott

Liked it? Try “ Biography of X ,” by Catherine Lacey or “ The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family ,” by Joshua Cohen.

The Great Believers

Rebecca Makkai 2018

It’s mid-1980s Chicago, and young men — beautiful, recalcitrant boys, full of promise and pure life force — are dying, felled by a strange virus. Makkai’s recounting of a circle of friends who die one by one, interspersed with a circa-2015 Parisian subplot, is indubitably an AIDS story, but one that skirts po-faced solemnity and cliché at nearly every turn: a bighearted, deeply generous book whose resonance echoes across decades of loss and liberation.

Liked it? Try “ The Interestings ,” by Meg Wolitzer, “ A Little Life ,” by Hanya Yanagihara or “ The Emperor’s Children ,” by Claire Messud.

Mary Gaitskill 2005

Set primarily in a 1980s New York crackling with brittle glamour and real menace, “Veronica” is, on the face of it, the story of two very different women — the fragile former model Alison and the older, harder Veronica, fueled by fury and frustrated intelligence. It's a fearless, lacerating book, scornful of pieties and with innate respect for the reader’s intelligence and adult judgment.

Liked it? Try “ The Quick and the Dead ,” by Joy Williams, “ Look at Me ,” by Jennifer Egan or “ Lightning Field ,” by Dana Spiotta.

Ben Lerner 2014

How closely does Ben Lerner, the very clever author of “10:04,” overlap with its unnamed narrator, himself a poet-novelist who bears a remarkable resemblance to the man pictured on its biography page? Definitive answers are scant in this metaphysical turducken of a novel, which is nominally about the attempts of a Brooklyn author, burdened with a hefty publishing advance, to finish his second book. But the delights of Lerner’s shimmering self-reflexive prose, lightly dusted with photographs and illustrations, are endless.

“Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.”

“10:04” is filled with sentences that cut this close to the bone. Comedy blends with intimations of the darkest aspects of our natures, and of everyday life. Who can shave anymore without recalling this “Sweeney Todd”-like observation? — Dwight Garner

Liked it? Try “ The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. ,” by Adelle Waldman, “ Open City ,” by Teju Cole or “ How Should a Person Be? ,” by Sheila Heti.

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver 2022

In transplanting “David Copperfield” from Victorian England to modern-day Appalachia, Kingsolver gives the old Dickensian magic her own spin. She reminds us that a novel can be wildly entertaining — funny, profane, sentimental, suspenseful — and still have a social conscience. And also that the injustices Dickens railed against are still very much with us: old poison in new bottles. — A.O. Scott

Liked it? Try “ James ,” by Percival Everett or “ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store ,” by James McBride.

Book cover for Heavy: An American Memoir

Kiese Laymon 2018

What is the psychic weight of secrets and lies? In his unvarnished memoir, Laymon explores the cumulative mass of a past that has brought him to this point: his Blackness; his fraught relationship to food; his family, riven by loss and addiction and, in his mother’s case, a kind of pathological perfectionism. What emerges is a work of raw emotional power and fierce poetry.

Liked it? Try “ Men We Reaped ,” by Jesmyn Ward or “ Another Word for Love ,” by Carvell Wallace.

Jeffrey Eugenides 2002

Years before pronouns became the stuff of dinner-table debates and email signatures, “Middlesex” offered the singular gift of an intersex hero — “sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!” — whose otherwise fairly ordinary Midwestern life becomes a radiant lens on recent history, from the burning of Smyrna to the plush suburbia of midcentury Grosse Pointe, Mich. When the teenage Calliope, born to doting Greek American parents, learns that she is not in fact a budding young lesbian but biologically male, it’s less science than assiduously buried family secrets that tell the improbable, remarkable tale.

Liked it? Try “ The Nix ,” by Nathan Hill, “ The Heart’s Invisible Furies ,” by John Boyne or “ The Signature of All Things ,” by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Hua Hsu 2022

An unlikely college friendship — Ken loves preppy polo shirts and Pearl Jam, Hua prefers Xeroxed zines and Pavement — blossoms in 1990s Berkeley, then is abruptly fissured by Ken’s murder in a random carjacking. Around those bare facts, Hsu’s understated memoir builds a glimmering fortress of memory in which youth and identity live alongside terrible, senseless loss.

Liked it? Try “ Truth & Beauty: A Friendship ,” by Ann Patchett, “ The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions ,” by Jonathan Rosen or “ Just Kids ,” by Patti Smith.

Nickel and Dimed

Barbara Ehrenreich 2001

Waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, retail clerk: Ehrenreich didn’t just report on these low-wage jobs; she actually worked them, trying to construct a life around merciless managers and wildly unpredictable schedules, while also getting paid a pittance for it. Through it all, Ehrenreich combined a profound sense of moral outrage with self-deprecating candor and bone-dry wit. — Jennifer Szalai, nonfiction book critic for The Times

Liked it? Try “ Poverty, by America ,” by Matthew Desmond or “ The Working Poor: Invisible in America ,” by David K. Shipler.

The Flamethrowers

Rachel Kushner 2013

Motorcycle racing across the arid salt flats of Utah; art-star posturing in the downtown demimonde of 1970s New York; anarchist punk collectives and dappled villas in Italy: It’s all connected (if hardly contained) in Kushner’s brash, elastic chronicle of a would-be artist nicknamed Reno whose lust for experience often outstrips both sense and sentiment. The book’s ambitions rise to meet her, a churning bedazzlement of a novel whose unruly engine thrums and roars.

Liked it? Try “ City on Fire ,” by Garth Risk Hallberg or “ The Girls ,” by Emma Cline.

The Looming Tower

Lawrence Wright 2006

What happened in New York City one incongruously sunny morning in September was never, of course, the product of some spontaneous plan. Wright’s meticulous history operates as a sort of panopticon on the events leading up to that fateful day, spanning more than five decades and a geopolitical guest list that includes everyone from the counterterrorism chief of the F.B.I. to the anonymous foot soldiers of Al Qaeda.

Liked it? Try “ Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 ,” by Steve Coll or “ MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman ,” by Ben Hubbard.

Tenth of December

George Saunders 2013

For all of their linguistic invention and anarchic glee, Saunders’s stories are held together by a strict understanding of the form and its requirements. Take plot: In “Tenth of December,” his fourth and best collection, readers will encounter an abduction, a rape, a chemically induced suicide, the suppressed rage of a milquetoast or two, a veteran’s post-traumatic impulse to burn down his mother’s house — all of it buffeted by gusts of such merriment and tender regard and daffy good cheer that you realize only in retrospect how dark these morality tales really are.

Nobody writes like George Saunders. He has cultivated a genuinely original voice, one that is hilarious and profound, tender and monstrous, otherworldly and deeply familiar, much like the American psyche itself. With each of these stories, you feel in the hands of a master — because you are. — Matthew Desmond, author of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City”

Liked it? Try “Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories,” by Lauren Groff, “ Oblivion: Stories ,” by David Foster Wallace or “ The Nimrod Flipout: Stories ,” by Etgar Keret, translated by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston.

Alice Munro 2004

On one level, the title of Munro’s 11th short-story collection refers to a pet goat that goes missing from its owners’ property; but — this being Munro — the deeper reference is to an unhappy wife in the same story, who dreams of leaving her husband someday. Munro’s stories are like that, with shadow meanings and resonant echoes, as if she has struck a chime and set the reverberations down in writing.

Liked it? Try “ Homesickness ,” by Colin Barrett or “ The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore .”

Train Dreams

Denis Johnson 2011

Call it a backwoods tragedy, stripped to the bone, or a spare requiem for the American West: Johnson’s lean but potent novella carves its narrative from the forests and dust-bowl valleys of Spokane in the early decades of the 20th century, following a day laborer named Robert Grainier as he processes the sudden loss of his young family and bears witness to the real-time formation of a raw, insatiable nation.

Liked it? Try “ That Old Ace in the Hole ,” by Annie Proulx or “ Night Boat to Tangier ,” by Kevin Barry.

Life After Life

Kate Atkinson 2013

Can we get life “right”? Are there choices that would lead, finally, to justice or happiness or save us from pain? Atkinson wrestles with these questions in her brilliant “Life After Life” — a historical novel, a speculative novel, a tale of time travel, a moving portrait of life before, during and in the aftermath of war. It gobbles up genres and blends them together until they become a single, seamless work of art. I love this goddamn book. — Victor LaValle, author of “Lone Women”

“‘Fox Corner — that’s what we should call the house. No one else has a house with that name and shouldn’t that be the point?’

‘Really?’ Hugh said doubtfully. ‘It’s a little whimsical, isn’t it? It sounds like a children’s story. The House at Fox Corner. ’

‘A little whimsy never hurt anyone.’

‘Strictly speaking, though,’ Hugh said, ‘can a house be a corner? Isn’t it at one?’

So this is marriage, Sylvie thought.”

“Her brilliant ear. Her humor. Her openness. Her peculiar gifts. Some of her books are perfect. The rest are merely superb.” — Amy Bloom, writer

Liked it? Try “Light Perpetual,” by Francis Spufford or “ Neverhome ,” by Laird Hunt.

Hernan Diaz 2022

How many ways can you tell the same story? Which one is true? These questions and their ethical implications hover over Diaz’s second novel. It starts out as a tale of wealth and power in 1920s New York — something Theodore Dreiser or Edith Wharton might have taken up — and leaps forward in time, across the boroughs and down the social ladder, breathing new vitality into the weary tropes of historical fiction. — A.O. Scott

Be prepared for some serious mind games! Set in New York City in the 1920s and ’30s, the story of a Manhattan financier and his high-society wife is told through four “books” — a novel, a manuscript, a memoir and a journal. But which version should you trust? Is there even one true reality?

As we sift our way through these competing narratives, Diaz serves us clues and red herrings in equal measure. We know we are being gamed, but we’re not sure exactly which character is gaming us. While each reader will draw their own conclusion when they reach the end of this complex and thrilling book, what is never disputed is the ease with which money and power can bend reality itself. — Dua Lipa, singer and songwriter behind the Service95 Book Club

Liked it? Try “ This Strange Eventful History ,” by Claire Messud or “ The Luminaries ,” by Eleanor Catton.

The Vegetarian

Han Kang; translated by Deborah Smith 2016

One ordinary day, a young housewife in contemporary Seoul wakes up from a disturbing dream and simply decides to … stop eating meat. As her small rebellion spirals, Han’s lean, feverish novel becomes a surreal meditation on not just what the body needs, but what a soul demands.

“I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.”

“The Vegetarian” is a short novel with a mysterious, otherworldly air. It feels haunted, oppressive … It’s a story about hungers and starvation and desire, and how these become intertwined.” — Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of “Mexican Gothic”

Liked it? Try “ My Year of Rest and Relaxation ,” by Ottessa Moshfegh or “ Convenience Store Woman ,” by Sayaka Murata; translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

Book cover for Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Marjane Satrapi 2003

Drawn in stark black-and-white panels, Satrapi’s graphic novel is a moving account of her early life in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and her formative years abroad in Europe. The first of its two parts details the impacts of war and theocracy on both her family and her community: torture, death on the battlefield, constant raids, supply shortages and a growing black market. Part 2 chronicles her rebellious, traumatic years as a teenager in Vienna, as well as her return to a depressingly restrictive Tehran. Devastating — but also formally inventive, inspiring and often funny — “Persepolis” is a model of visual storytelling and personal narrative.

Liked it? Try “ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/books/review/martyr-kaveh-akbar.html '>Martyr! ,” by Kaveh Akbar or “ Disoriental ,” by Négar Djavadi; translated by Tina Kover.

Interested? Read our review . Then reserve it at your local library or buy it from Amazon , Barnes & Noble or Bookshop .

Toni Morrison 2008

Mercies are few and far between in Morrison’s ninth novel, set on the remote colonial land of a 17th-century farmer amid his various slaves and indentured servants (even the acquisition of a wife, imported from England, is strictly transactional). Disease runs rampant and children die needlessly; inequity is everywhere. And yet! The Morrison magic, towering and magisterial, endures.

Liked it? Try “ Year of Wonders ,” by Geraldine Brooks or “ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois ,” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt 2013

For a time, it seemed as if Tartt’s vaunted 1992 debut, “The Secret History,” might be her only legacy, a once-in-a-career comet zinging across the literary sky. Then, more than a decade after the coolish reception to her 2002 follow-up, “The Little Friend,” came “The Goldfinch” — a coming-of-age novel as narratively rich and riveting as the little bird in the Dutch painting it takes its title from is small and humble. That 13-year-old Theo Decker survives the museum bombing that kills his mother is a minor miracle; the tiny, priceless souvenir he inadvertently grabs from the rubble becomes both a talisman and an albatross in this heady, haunted symphony of a novel.

Liked it? Try “ Freedom ,” by Jonathan Franzen or “ Demon Copperhead ,” by Barbara Kingsolver.

The Argonauts

Maggie Nelson 2015

Call it a memoir if you must, but this is a book about the necessity — and also the thrill, the terror, the risk and reward — of defying categories. Nelson is a poet and critic, well versed in pop culture and cultural theory. The text she interprets here is her own body. An account of her pregnancy, her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and the early stages of motherhood, “The Argonauts” explores queer identity, gender politics and the meaning of family. What makes Nelson such a valuable writer is her willingness to follow the sometimes contradictory rhythms of her own thinking in prose that is sharp, supple and disarmingly heartfelt. — A.O. Scott

Liked it? Try “My 1980s and Other Essays,” by Wayne Koestenbaum, “ No One Is Talking About This ,” by Patricia Lockwood or “ On Immunity ,” by Eula Biss.

The Fifth Season

N.K. Jemisin 2015

“The Fifth Season” weaves its story in polyphonic voice, utilizing a clever story structure to move deftly through generational time. Jemisin delivers this bit of high craft in a fresh, unstuffy voice — something rare in high fantasy, which can take its Tolkien roots too seriously. From its heartbreaking opening (a mother’s murdered child) to its shattering conclusion, Jemisin shows the power of what good fantasy fiction can do. “The Fifth Season” explores loss, grief and personhood on an intimate level. But it also takes on themes of discrimination, human breeding and ecological collapse with an unflinching eye and a particular nuance. Jemisin weaves a world both horrifyingly familiar and unsettlingly alien. — Rebecca Roanhorse, author of “Mirrored Heavens”

Liked it? Try “ American War ,” by Omar El Akkad or “ The Year of the Flood ,” by Margaret Atwood.

Book cover for Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Tony Judt 2005

By the time this book was published in 2005, there had already been innumerable volumes covering Europe’s history since the end of World War II. Yet none of them were quite like Judt’s: commanding and capacious, yet also attentive to those stubborn details that are so resistant to abstract theories and seductive myths. The writing, like the thinking, is clear, direct and vivid. And even as Judt was ruthless when reflecting on Europe’s past, he maintained a sense of contingency throughout, never succumbing to the comfortable certainty of despair. — Jennifer Szalai

Liked it? Try “ We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland ,” by Fintan O’Toole, “ Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin ,” by Timothy D. Snyder or “ To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 ,” by Adam Hochschild.

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Marlon James 2014

“Brief”? For a work spanning nearly 700 pages, that word is, at best, a winky misdirection. To skip even a paragraph, though, would be to forgo the vertiginous pleasures of James’s semi-historical novel, in which the attempted assassination of an unnamed reggae superstar who strongly resembles Bob Marley collides with C.I.A. conspiracy, international drug cartels and the vibrant, violent Technicolor of post-independence Jamaica.

Liked it? Try “ Telex From Cuba ,” by Rachel Kushner or “ Brief Encounters With Che Guevara ,” by Ben Fountain.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan 2021

Not a word is wasted in Keegan’s small, burnished gem of a novel, a sort of Dickensian miniature centered on the son of an unwed mother who has grown up to become a respectable coal and timber merchant with a family of his own in 1985 Ireland. Moralistically, though, it might as well be the Middle Ages as he reckons with the ongoing sins of the Catholic Church and the everyday tragedies wrought by repression, fear and rank hypocrisy.

This is the book I would like to have written because its sentences portray a life — in all its silences, subtleties and defenses — that I would hope to live if its circumstances were mine. It’s never idle, I guess, to be asked what we would give up for another. — Claudia Rankine, author of “Citizen”

Liked it? Try “ The Rachel Incident ,” by Caroline O’Donoghue or “ Mothers and Sons ,” by Colm Tóibín.

H Is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald 2015

I read “H Is for Hawk” when I was writing my own memoir, and it awakened me to the power of the genre. It is a book supposedly about training a hawk named Mabel but really about wonder and loss, discovery and death. We discover a thing, then we lose it. The discovering and the losing are two halves of the same whole. Macdonald knows this and she shows us, weaving the loss of her father through the partial taming (and taming is always partial) of this hawk. — Tara Westover, author of “Educated”

“There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer.”

Chosen by Tara Westover.

Liked it? Try “ The Friend ,” by Sigrid Nunez or “Braiding Sweetgrass,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan 2010

In the good old pre-digital days, artists used to cram 15 or 20 two-and-a-half-minute songs onto a single vinyl LP. Egan accomplished a similar feat of compression in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a compact, chronologically splintered rock opera with (as they say nowadays) no skips. The 13 linked stories jump from past to present to future while reshuffling a handful of vivid characters. The themes are mighty but the mood is funny, wistful and intimate, as startling and familiar as your favorite pop album. — A.O. Scott

Liked it? Try “ Girl, Woman, Other ,” by Bernardine Evaristo, “ Doxology ,” by Nell Zink or “ Telegraph Avenue ,” by Michael Chabon.

The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño; translated by Natasha Wimmer 2007

“The Savage Detectives” is brash, hilarious, beautiful, moving. It’s also over 600 pages long, which is why I know that my memory of reading it in a single sitting is definitely not true. Still, the fact that it feels that way is telling. I was not the same writer I’d been before reading it, not the same person. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, the wayward poets whose youth is chronicled in “Detectives,” became personal heroes, and everything I’ve written since has been shaped by Bolaño’s masterpiece. — Daniel Alarcón, author of “At Night We Walk in Circles”

Liked it? Try “ The Old Drift ,” by Namwali Serpell or “The Literary Conference,” by César Aira; translated by Katherine Silver.

Annie Ernaux; translated by Alison L. Strayer 2018

Spanning decades, this is an outlier in Ernaux’s oeuvre; unlike her other books, with their tight close-ups on moments in her life, here such intimacies are embedded in the larger sweep of social history. She moves between the chorus of conventional wisdom and the specifics of her own experiences, showing how even an artist with such a singular vision could recognize herself as a creature of her cohort and her culture. Most moving to me is how she begins and ends by listing images she can still recall — a merry-go-round in the park; graffiti in a restroom — that have been inscribed into her memory, yet are ultimately ephemeral. — Jennifer Szalai

Liked it? Try “ Leaving the Atocha Station ,” by Ben Lerner, “ All Fours ,” by Miranda July or “Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories,” by Colombe Schneck; translated by Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer.

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates 2015

Framed, like James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” as both instruction and warning to a young relative on “how one should live within a Black body,” Coates’s book-length letter to his 15-year-old son lands like forked lightning. In pages suffused with both fury and tenderness, his memoir-manifesto delineates a world in which the political remains mortally, maddeningly inseparable from the personal.

Liked it? Try “ American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin ,” by Terrance Hayes, “ Don’t Call Us Dead ,” by Danez Smith or “ Black Folk Could Fly ,” by Randall Kenan.

Book cover for Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel 2006

“A queer business.” That’s how Bechdel describes her closeted father’s death after he steps in the path of a Sunbeam Bread truck. The phrase also applies to her family’s funeral home concern; their own Victorian, Addams-like dwelling; and this marvelous graphic memoir of growing up gay and O.C.D.-afflicted (which generated a remarkable Broadway musical). You forget, returning to “Fun Home,” that the only color used is a dreamy gray-blue; that’s how vivid and particular the story is. Even the corpses crackle with life. — Alexandra Jacobs

I read “Fun Home” with creative writing students in a course I teach at Dartmouth College called “Investigative Memoir.” The first time I taught it, a student wrote in their anonymous course evaluation, “I should not have been exposed to this” — the censorious voice tends to be passive. The last time I taught it, a student said that if they’d found this in their high school library — in a state in which such books are now all but illegal in high school libraries — it would have changed their life. I’m long past my schooling, but “Fun Home” still changes my life every time I return. — Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War”

Liked it? Try “ Blankets ,” by Craig Thompson, “ My Dirty Dumb Eyes ,” by Lisa Hanawalt or “ Small Fry ,” by Lisa Brennan-Jobs.

Claudia Rankine 2014

“I, too, am America,” Langston Hughes wrote, and with “Citizen” Rankine stakes the same claim, as ambivalently and as defiantly as Hughes did. This collection — which appeared two years after Trayvon Martin’s death, and pointedly displays a hoodie on its cover like the one Martin wore when he was killed — lays out a damning indictment of American racism through a mix of free verse, essayistic prose poems and visual art; a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in both poetry and criticism (the first book ever nominated in two categories), it took home the prize in poetry in a deserving recognition of Rankine’s subtle, supple literary gifts.

Liked it? Try “ Voyage of the Sable Venus: And Other Poems ,” by Robin Coste Lewis, “How to be Drawn,” by Terrance Hayes or “ Ordinary Notes ,” by Christina Sharpe.

Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward 2011

As Hurricane Katrina bears down on the already battered bayou town of Bois Sauvage, Miss., a motherless 15-year-old girl named Esch, newly pregnant with a baby of her own, stands in the eye of numerous storms she can’t control: her father’s drinking, her brothers’ restlessness, an older boy’s easy dismissal of her love. There’s a biblical force to Ward’s prose, so swirling and heady it feels like a summoning.

Liked it? Try “ Southern Cross the Dog ,” by Bill Cheng or “ The Yellow House: A Memoir ,” by Sarah Broom.

The Line of Beauty

Alan Hollinghurst 2004

Oh, to be the live-in houseguest of a wealthy friend! And to find, as Hollinghurst’s young middle-class hero does in early-1980s London, that a whole intoxicating world of heedless privilege and sexual awakening awaits. As the timeline implies, though, the specter of AIDS looms not far behind, perched like a gargoyle amid glittering evocations of cocaine and Henry James. Lust, money, literature, power: Rarely has a novel made it all seem so gorgeous, and so annihilating.

Liked it? Try “ Necessary Errors ,” by Caleb Crain.

White Teeth

Zadie Smith 2000

“Full stories are as rare as honesty,” one character confides in “White Teeth,” though Smith’s debut novel, in all its chaotic, prismatic glory, does its level best to try. As her bravura book unfurls, its central narrative of a friendship between a white Londoner and a Bengali Muslim seems to divide and regenerate like starfish limbs; and so, in one stroke, a literary supernova was born.

Liked it? Try “ Lionel Asbo: State of England ,” by Martin Amis or “ Americanah ,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Jesmyn Ward 2017

Road trips aren’t supposed to be like this: an addled addict mother dragging her 13-year-old son and his toddler sister across Mississippi to retrieve their father from prison, and feeding her worst habits along the way. Grief and generational trauma haunt the novel, as do actual ghosts, the unrestful spirits of men badly done by. But Ward’s unflinching prose is not a punishment; it loops and soars in bruising, beautiful arias.

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and it beats like your heart. Same Time.”

“This passage from ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ means so much to me. Richie says it to the protagonist, Jojo. He’s a specter, a child ghost, a deeply wounded wanderer, and yet also so wise.” — Imani Perry, author of “Breathe” and “South to America”

Liked it? Try “ The Turner House ,” by Angela Flournoy or “ Lincoln in the Bardo ,” by George Saunders.

The Last Samurai

Helen DeWitt 2000

Sibylla, an American expat in Britain, is a brilliant scholar: omnivore, polyglot, interdisciplinary theorist — all of it. Her young son, Ludo, is a hothouse prodigy, mastering the “Odyssey” and Japanese grammar, fixated on the films of Akira Kurosawa. Two questions arise: 1) Who is the real genius? 2) Who is Ludo’s father? Ludo’s search for the answer to No. 2 propels the plot of this funny, cruel, compassionate, typographically bananas novel. I won’t spoil anything, except to say that the answer to No. 1 is Helen DeWitt. — A.O. Scott

Liked it? Try “ The Instructions ,” by Adam Levin.

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell 2004

Mitchell’s almost comically ambitious novel is indeed a kind of cumulus: a wild and woolly condensation of ideas, styles and far-flung milieus whose only true commonality is the reincarnated soul at its center. The book’s six nesting narratives — from 1850s New Zealand through 1930s Belgium, groovy California, recent-ish England, dystopian Korea and Hawaii — also often feel like a postmodern puzzle-box that whirls and clicks as its great world(s) spin, throwing off sparks of pulp, philosophy and fervid humanism.

Liked it? Try “ Same Bed Different Dreams ,” by Ed Park or “ Specimen Days ,” by Michael Cunningham.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2013

This is a love story — but what a love story! Crisscrossing continents, families and recent decades, “Americanah” centers on a Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, who discovers what it means to be Black by immigrating to the United States, and acquires boutique celebrity blogging about it. (In the sequel, she’d have a Substack.) Ifemelu’s entanglements with various men undergird a rich and rough tapestry of life in Barack Obama’s America and beyond. And Adichie’s sustained examination of absurd social rituals — like the painful relaxation of professionally “unacceptable” hair, for example — is revolutionary. — Alexandra Jacobs

Liked it? Try “ We Need New Names ,” by NoViolet Bulawayo, “ Netherland ,” by Joseph O’Neill or “ Behold the Dreamers ,” by Imbolo Mbue.

Ian McEwan 2002

Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done, or so the saying goes. But what a naïve, peevish 13-year-old named Briony Tallis sets in motion when she sees her older sister flirting with the son of a servant in hopelessly stratified pre-war England surpasses disastrous; it’s catastrophic. It’s also a testament to the piercing elegance of McEwan’s prose that “Atonement” makes us care so much.

Liked it? Try “ The Sense of an Ending ,” by Julian Barnes, “ Brooklyn ,” by Colm Toíbín or “ Life Class ,” by Pat Barker.

Random Family

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc 2003

More than 20 years after it was published, “Random Family” still remains unmatched in depth and power and grace. A profound, achingly beautiful work of narrative nonfiction, it is the standard-bearer of embedded reportage. LeBlanc gave her all to this book, writing about people experiencing deep hardship in their full, lush humanity. — Matthew Desmond, author of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City”

I hate “Random Family.” It robbed us nonfiction writers of all our excuses: Well, it’s easier for fiction writers to achieve that level of interiority. Until “Random Family” entered the chat. It’s easier to create emotion on screen. Until “Random Family” entered the chat. It’s impossible to capture and understand a community if you’re an outsider. Until “Random Family” entered the chat.

Based on a decade of painstaking reporting in a social micro-world, it is a book of total immersion, profound empathy, rigorous storytelling, assiduous factualness, page-turning revelation and literary rizz. I hate “Random Family” because it took away all the excuses. I adore it because it raised the sky. — Anand Giridharadas, author of “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy”

Liked it? Try “ Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City ,” by Andrea Elliott or “ When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era ,” by Donovan X. Ramsey.

The Overstory

Richard Powers 2018

We may never see a poem as lovely as a tree, but a novel about trees — they are both the stealth protagonists and the beating, fine-grained heart of this strange, marvelous book — becomes its own kind of poetry, biology lesson and impassioned environmental polemic in Powers’s hands. To know that our botanical friends are capable of communication and sacrifice, sex and memory, is mind-altering. It is also, you might say, credit overdue: Without wood pulp, after all, what would the books we love be made of?

Liked it? Try “ Greenwood ,” by Michael Christie or “ Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures ,” by Merlin Sheldrake.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Alice Munro 2001

Munro’s stories apply pointillistic detail and scrupulous psychological insight to render their characters’ lives in full, at lengths that test the boundaries of the term “short fiction.” (Only one story in this book is below 30 pages, and the longest is over 50.) The collection touches on many of Munro’s lifelong themes — family secrets, sudden reversals of fortune, sexual tensions and the unreliability of memory — culminating in a standout story about a man confronting his senile wife’s attachment to a fellow resident at her nursing home.

Liked it? Try “ So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men ,” by Claire Keegan or “ Nora Webster ,” by Colm Tóibín.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Katherine Boo 2012

If the smash movie “Slumdog Millionaire” gave the world a feel-good story of transcending caste in India via pluck and sheer improbable luck, Boo’s nonfiction exploration of several interconnected lives on the squalid outskirts of Mumbai is its sobering, necessary corrective. The casual violence and perfidy she finds there is staggering; the poverty and disease, beyond bleak. In place of triumph-of-the-human-spirit bromides, though, what the book delivers is its own kind of cinema, harsh and true.

Liked it? Try “ Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea ,” by Barbara Demick or “ Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide ,” by Tahir Hamut Izgil; translated by Joshua L. Freeman.

Book cover for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Matthew Desmond 2016

Like Barbara Ehrenreich or Michelle Alexander, Desmond has a knack for crystallizing the ills of a patently unequal America — here it’s the housing crisis, as told through eight Milwaukee families — in clear, imperative terms. If reading his nightmarish exposé of a system in which race and poverty are shamelessly weaponized and eviction costs less than accountability feels like outrage fuel, it’s prescriptive, too; to look away would be its own kind of crime.

Liked it? Try “ Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America ,” by Barbara Ehrenreich or “ Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive ,” by Stephanie Land.

Percival Everett 2001

More than 20 years before it was made into an Oscar-winning movie, Everett’s deft literary satire imagined a world in which a cerebral novelist and professor named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison finds mainstream success only when he deigns to produce the most broad and ghettoized portrayal of Black pain. If only the ensuing decades had made the whole concept feel laughably obsolete; alas, all the 2023 screen adaptation merited was a title change: “American Fiction.”

Liked it? Try “ Yellowface ,” by R.F. Kuang or “ The Sellout ,” by Paul Beatty.

Say Nothing

Patrick Radden Keefe 2019

“Say Nothing” is an amazing accomplishment — a definitive, impeccably researched history of the Troubles, a grim, gripping thriller, an illuminating portrait of extraordinary people who did unspeakable things, driven by what they saw as the justness of their cause. Those of us who lived in the U.K. in the last three decades of the 20th century know the names and the events — we were all affected, in some way or another, by the bombs, the bomb threats, the assassinations and attempted assassinations. What we didn’t know was what it felt like to be on the inside of a particularly bleak period of history. This book is, I think, unquestionably one of the greatest literary achievements of the 21st century. — Nick Hornby, author of “High Fidelity”

Liked it? Try “ A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them ,” by Timothy Egan or “ We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption ,” by Justin Fenton.

Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders 2017

A father mourns his young son, dead of typhoid; a president mourns his country riven by civil war. In Saunders’s indelible portrait, set in a graveyard populated by garrulous spirits, these images collide and coalesce, transforming Lincoln’s private grief — his 11-year-old boy, Willie, died in the White House in 1862 — into a nation’s, a polyphony of voices and stories. The only novel to date by a writer revered for his satirical short stories, this book marks less a change of course than a foregrounding of what has distinguished his work all along — a generosity of spirit, an ear acutely tuned to human suffering.

Liked it? Try “ Sing, Unburied, Sing ,” by Jesmyn Ward, “ Grief Is the Thing With Feathers ,” by Max Porter or “ Hamnet ,” by Maggie O’Farrell.

The Sellout

Paul Beatty 2015

Part of this wild satire on matters racial, post-racial, maybe-racial and Definitely Not Racial in American life concerns a group known as the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals. One of them has produced an expurgated edition of an American classic titled “The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.” Beatty’s method is the exact opposite: In his hands, everything sacred is profaned, from the Supreme Court to the Little Rascals. “The Sellout” is explosively funny and not a little bit dangerous: an incendiary device disguised as a whoopee cushion, or maybe vice versa. — A.O. Scott

Some voices are so sharp they slice right through reality to reveal everything we’ve been hiding or ignoring or didn’t know was there. This novel cut into me — as a writer and reader and American. It’s fearless and funny and unlike anything else I’ve read. — Charles Yu, author of “Interior Chinatown”

Liked it? Try “ Harry Sylvester Bird ,” by Chinelo Okparanta or “ We Cast a Shadow ,” by Maurice Carlos Ruffin.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon 2000

Set during the first heyday of the American comic book industry, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, Chabon’s exuberant epic centers on the Brooklyn-raised Sammy Clay and his Czech immigrant cousin, Joe Kavalier, who together pour their hopes and fears into a successful comic series even as life delivers them some nearly unbearable tragedies. Besotted with language and brimming with pop culture, political relevance and bravura storytelling, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001.

“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” combines eloquent prose, captivating characters, a deeply researched setting and an adventure that previously only belonged to the pulps. High art and low art and who the heck cares? Chabon opened the doors not just for comic book nerds, but for every kind of nerd, including this gay one. Chabon’s book made me the writer I am, and I’m still dazzled by it: the century's first masterpiece. — Andrew Sean Greer, author of “Less”

Liked it? Try “ Carter Beats the Devil ,” by Glen David Gold or “ The Fortress of Solitude ,” by Jonathan Lethem.

Min Jin Lee 2017

“History has failed us, but no matter.” So begins Lee’s novel, the rich and roiling chronicle of a Korean family passing through four generations of war, colonization and personal strife. There are slick mobsters and disabled fishermen, forbidden loves and secret losses. And of course, pachinko, the pinball-ish game whose popularity often supplies a financial lifeline for the book’s characters — gamblers at life like all of us, if hardly guaranteed a win.

Liked it? Try “ Homegoing ,” by Yaa Gyasi, “ The Covenant of Water ,” by Abraham Verghese or “ Kantika ,” by Elizabeth Graver.

Rachel Cusk 2015

This novel is the first and best in Cusk’s philosophical, unsettling and semi-autobiographical Outline trilogy, which also includes the novels “Transit” and “Kudos.” In this one an English writer flies to Athens to teach at a workshop. Along the way, and once there, she falls into intense and resonant conversations about art, intimacy, life and love. Cusk deals, brilliantly, in uncomfortable truths. — Dwight Garner

Liked it? Try “ Checkout 19 ,” by Claire-Louise Bennett or “ Topics of Conversation ,” by Miranda Popkey.

Cormac McCarthy 2006

There is nothing green or growing in McCarthy’s masterpiece of dystopian fiction, the story of an unnamed man and his young son migrating over a newly post-apocalyptic earth where the only remaining life forms are desperate humans who have mostly descended into marauding cannibalism. Yet McCarthy renders his deathscape in curious, riveting detail punctuated by flashes of a lost world from the man’s memory that become colorful myths for his son. In the end, “The Road” is a paean to parental love: A father nurtures and protects his child with ingenuity and tenderness, a triumph that feels redemptive even in a world without hope. — Jennifer Egan, author of “A Visit From the Goon Squad”

Liked it? Try “ On Such a Full Sea ,” by Chang-rae Lee or “ The Buried Giant ,” by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion 2005

Having for decades cast a famously cool and implacable eye on everything from the Manson family to El Salvador, Didion suddenly found herself in a hellscape much closer to home: the abrupt death of her partner in life and art, John Gregory Dunne, even as their only child lay unconscious in a nearby hospital room. (That daughter, Quintana Roo, would be gone soon too, though her passing does not fall within these pages.) Dismantled by shock and grief, the patron saint of ruthless clarity did the only thing she could do: She wrote her way through it.

Liked it? Try “ When Breath Becomes Air ,” by Paul Kalanithi, “ Crying in H Mart ,” by Michelle Zauner or “ Notes on Grief ,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz 2007

Díaz’s first novel landed like a meteorite in 2007, dazzling critics and prize juries with its mix of Dominican history, coming-of-age tale, comic-book tropes, Tolkien geekery and Spanglish slang. The central plotline follows the nerdy, overweight Oscar de León through childhood, college and a stint in the Dominican Republic, where he falls disastrously in love. Sharply rendered set pieces abound, but the real draw is the author’s voice: brainy yet inviting, mordantly funny, sui generis.

Liked it? Try “ Deacon King Kong ,” by James McBride or “ The Russian Debutante’s Handbook ,” by Gary Shteyngart.

Marilynne Robinson 2004

The first installment in what is so far a tetralogy — followed by “Home,” “Lila” and “Jack” — “Gilead” takes its title from the fictional town in Iowa where the Boughton and Ames families reside. And also from the Book of Jeremiah, which names a place where healing may or may not be found: “Is there no balm in Gilead?” For John Ames, who narrates this novel, the answer seems to be yes. An elderly Congregationalist minister who has recently become a husband and father, he finds fulfillment in both vocation and family. Robinson allows him, and us, the full measure of his hard-earned joy, but she also has an acute sense of the reality of sin. If this book is a celebration of the quiet decency of small-town life (and mainline Protestantism) in the 1950s, it is equally an unsparing critique of how the moral fervor and religious vision of the abolitionist movement curdled, a century later, into complacency. — A.O. Scott

“Then he put his hat back on and stalked off into the trees again and left us standing there in that glistening river, amazed at ourselves and shining like the apostles. I mention this because it seems to me transformations just that abrupt do occur in this life, and they occur unsought and unawaited, and they beggar your hopes and your deserving.”

From a dog-eared, battered, underlined copy of Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead,” I offer the following quote which undoes me every time I read it — transformation and its possibility is so much a part of what I read for. — Kate DiCamillo, novelist

Liked it? Try “Tinkers,” by Paul Harding or “ Zorrie ,” by Laird Hunt.

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro 2005

Kathy, Ruth and Tommy are boarders at an elite English school called Hailsham. Supervised by a group of “guardians,” the friends share music and rumors while navigating the shifting loyalties and heartbreaks of growing up. It’s all achingly familiar — at times, even funny. But things begin to feel first off, then sinister and, ultimately, tragic. As in so much of the best dystopian fiction, the power of “Never Let Me Go” to move and disturb arises from the persistence of human warmth in a chilly universe — and in its ability to make us see ourselves through its uncanny mirror. Is Ishiguro commenting on biotechnology, reproductive science, the cognitive dissonance necessary for life under late-stage capitalism? He’d never be so didactic as to tell you. What lies at the heart of this beautiful book is not social satire, but deep compassion.

Liked it? Try “ Station Eleven ,” by Emily St. John Mandel, “ Oryx and Crake ,” by Margaret Atwood or “ Scattered All Over the Earth ,” by Yoko Tawada; translated by Margaret Mitsutani.

W.G. Sebald; translated by Anthea Bell 2001

Sebald scarcely lived long enough to see the publication of his final novel; within weeks of its release, he died from a congenital heart condition at 57. But what a swan song it is: the discursive, dreamlike recollections of Jacques Austerlitz, a man who was once a small refugee of the kindertransport in wartime Prague, raised by strangers in Wales. Like the namesake Paris train station of its protagonist, the book is a marvel of elegant construction, haunted by memory and motion.

Liked it? Try “ Transit ,” by Rachel Cusk or “ Flights ,” by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Jennifer Croft.

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead 2016

“The Underground Railroad” is a profound revelation of the intricate aspects of slavery and nebulous shapes of freedom featuring an indomitable female protagonist: Cora from Georgia. The novel seamlessly combines history, horror and fantasy with philosophical speculation and cultural criticism to tell a compulsively readable, terror-laden narrative of a girl with a fierce inner spark who follows the mysterious path of her mother, Mabel, the only person ever known to have escaped from the Randall plantations.

I could hardly make it through this plaintively brutal novel. Neither could I put it down. “The Underground Railroad” bleeds truth in a way that few treatments of slavery can, fiction or nonfiction. Whitehead’s portrayals of human motivation, interaction and emotional range astonish in their complexity. Here brutality is bone deep and vulnerability is ocean wide, yet bravery and hope shine through in Cora’s insistence on escape. I rooted for Cora in a way that I never had for a character, my heart breaking with each violation of her spirit. Just as Cora inherits her mother’s symbolic victory garden, we readers of Whitehead’s imaginary world can inherit Cora’s courage. — Tiya Miles, author of “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake”

“Mabel had packed for her adventure. A machete. Flint and tinder. She stole a cabin mate’s shoes, which were in better shape. For weeks, her empty garden testified to her miracle. Before she lit out she dug up every yam from their plot, a cumbersome load and ill-advised for a journey that required a fleet foot. The lumps and burrows in the dirt were a reminder to all who walked by. Then one morning they were all smoothed over. Cora got on her knees and planted anew. It was her inheritance.”

Chosen by Tiya Miles.

Liked it? Try “ The Prophets ,” by Robert Jones Jr., “ Washington Black ,” by Esi Edugyan or “ The American Daughters ,” by Maurice Carlos Ruffin.

Roberto Bolaño; translated by Natasha Wimmer 2008

Bolaño’s feverish, vertiginous novel opens with an epigraph from Baudelaire — “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom” — and then proceeds, over the course of some 900 pages, to call into being an entire world governed in equal parts by boredom and the deepest horror. The book (published posthumously) is divided into five loosely conjoined sections, following characters who are drawn for varying reasons to the fictional Mexican city of Santa Teresa: a group of academics obsessed with an obscure novelist, a doddering philosophy professor, a lovelorn police officer and an American reporter investigating the serial murders of women in a case with echoes of the real-life femicide that has plagued Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In Natasha Wimmer’s spotless translation, Bolaño’s novel is profound, mysterious, teeming and giddy: Reading it, you go from feeling like a tornado watcher to feeling swept up in the vortex, and finally suspect you might be the tornado yourself.

Liked it? Try “ Compass ,” by Mathias Énard; translated by Charlotte Mandell.

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen 2001

With its satirical take on mental health, self-improvement and instant gratification, Franzen’s comic novel of family disintegration is as scathingly entertaining today as it was when it was published at the turn of the millennium. The story, about a Midwestern matron named Enid Lambert who is determined to bring her three adult children home for what might be their father’s last Christmas, touches on everything from yuppie excess to foodie culture to Eastern Europe’s unbridled economy after the fall of communism — but it is held together, always, by family ties. The novel jumps deftly from character to character, and the reader’s sympathies jump with it; in a novel as alert to human failings as this one is, it is to Franzen’s enduring credit that his genuine affection for all of the characters shines through.

Sometimes we have a totemic connection to a book that deepens our appreciation. I had Jonathan Franzen's brand-new doorstop of a hardcover with me when I was trapped in an office park hotel outside Denver after 9/11. The marvelous, moving, often very funny novel kept me company when I needed company most. As Franzen himself wrote, “Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.” — Chris Bohjalian, author of “The Flight Attendant”

Liked it? Try “ Middlesex ,” by Jeffrey Eugenides, “ Commonwealth ,” by Ann Patchett or “ The Bee Sting ,” by Paul Murray.

The Known World

Edward P. Jones 2003

This novel, about a Black farmer, bootmaker and former slave named Henry Townsend, is a humane epic and a staggering feat of wily American storytelling. Set in Virginia during the antebellum era, the milieu — politics, moods, manners — is starkly and intensely realized. When Henry becomes the proprietor of a plantation, with slaves of his own, the moral sands shift under the reader’s feet. Grief piles upon grief. But there is a glowing humanity at work here as well. Moments of humor and unlikely good will bubble up organically. Jones is a confident storyteller, and in “The Known World” that confidence casts a spell. This is a large novel that moves nimbly, and stays with the reader for a long time. — Dwight Garner

Liked it? Try “ The Water Dancer ,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates or “ A Mercy ,” by Toni Morrison.

Hilary Mantel 2009

It was hard choosing the books for my list, but the first and easiest choice I made was “Wolf Hall.” (“The Mirror and the Light,” the third book in Mantel’s trilogy, was the second easiest.)

We see the past the way we see the stars, dimly, through a dull blurry scrim of atmosphere, but Mantel was like an orbital telescope: She saw history with cold, hard, absolute clarity. In “Wolf Hall” she took a starchy historical personage, Thomas Cromwell, and saw the vivid, relentless, blind-spotted, memory-haunted, grandly alive human being he must have been. Then she used him as a lens to show us the age he lived in, the vast, intricate spider web of power and money and love and need — right up until the moment the spider got him. — Lev Grossman, author of “The Bright Sword”

Liked it? Try “ The Lion House: The Coming of a King ,” by Christopher de Bellaigue or “ The Books of Jacob ,” by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Jennifer Croft.

The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson 2010

Wilkerson’s intimate, stirring, meticulously researched and myth-dispelling book, which details the Great Migration of Black Americans from South to North and West from 1915 to 1970, is the most vital and compulsively readable work of history in recent memory. This migration, she writes, “would become perhaps the biggest underreported story of the 20th century. It was vast. It was leaderless. It crept along so many thousands of currents over so long a stretch of time as to be difficult for the press truly to capture while it was under way.” Wilkerson blends the stories of individual men and women with a masterful grasp of the big picture, and a great deal of literary finesse. “The Warmth of Other Suns” reads like a novel. It bears down on the reader like a locomotive. — Dwight Garner

Liked it? Try “ The Twelve Tribes of Hattie ,” by Ayana Mathis, “ All Aunt Hagar’s Children ,” by Edward P. Jones or “ Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance ,” by Mia Bay.

My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein 2012

The first volume of what would become Ferrante’s riveting four-book series of Neapolitan novels introduced readers to two girls growing up in a poor, violent neighborhood in Naples, Italy: the diligent, dutiful Elena and her charismatic, wilder friend Lila, who despite her fierce intelligence is seemingly constrained by her family’s meager means. From there the book (like the series as a whole) expands as propulsively as the early universe, encompassing ideas about art and politics, class and gender, philosophy and fate, all through a dedicated focus on the conflicted, competitive friendship between Elena and Lila as they grow into complicated adults. It’s impossible to say how closely the series tracks the author’s life — Ferrante writes under a pseudonym — but no matter: “My Brilliant Friend” is entrenched as one of the premier examples of so-called autofiction, a category that has dominated the literature of the 21st century. Reading this uncompromising, unforgettable novel is like riding a bike on gravel: It’s gritty and slippery and nerve-racking, all at the same time.

Liked it? Try “ The Book of Goose ,” by Yiyun Li, “ Cold Enough for Snow ,” by Jessica Au or “ Lies and Sorcery ,” by Elsa Morante; translated by Jenny McPhee.

I haven’t read any of these books yet ...

If you’ve read a book on the list, be sure to check the box under its entry, and your final count will appear here. (We’ll save your progress.)

... but I’m sure there’s something for me.

Keep track of the books you want to read by checking the box under their entries.

Methodology

In collaboration with the Upshot — the department at The Times focused on data and analytical journalism — the Book Review sent a survey to hundreds of novelists, nonfiction writers, academics, book editors, journalists, critics, publishers, poets, translators, booksellers, librarians and other literary luminaries, asking them to pick their 10 best books of the 21st century.

We let them each define “best” in their own way. For some, this simply meant “favorite.” For others, it meant books that would endure for generations.

The only rules: Any book chosen had to be published in the United States, in English, on or after Jan. 1, 2000. (Yes, translations counted!)

After casting their ballots, respondents were given the option to answer a series of prompts where they chose their preferred book between two randomly selected titles. We combined data from these prompts with the vote tallies to create the list of the top 100 books.

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Miss Morgan's book brigade : a novel

The novel’s plot is recounted in alternating chapters, told from the perspectives of two librarians, in two different eras: Jessie Carson during World War I and Wendy Peterson during the late 1980s. Each of them has a connection to the New York Public Library, and to the work of a remarkable woman, from whom little was expected.

During the Gilded Age, Anne Morgan, daughter of J. P. Morgan, banker and financier, led a very privileged life. However, she was aware of other people's lives and became a staunch crusader for better working conditions and benefits for everyone--especially for women. Even though she may have been regarded as a type of dilettante, she ignored snide comments and fought for what she believed in. One of her most important activities took place during World War I. She created an organization, American Committee for Devastated France ( Comité Américain pour les Régions Dévastées de France) aka CARD. Members called themselves Cards. Their main purpose was to help France recover from the devastation of World War I, and that help was based on women who volunteered to provide whatever services they could. The far-reaching effects of war are evident in the fact that, more than 100 years after the end of World War I, one particular part of France, the Red Zone is still defined as uninhabitable for humans.

Author Janet Skeslien Charles spent years researching and uncovering the relatively unknown history of some extraordinary women, several who were awarded the Croix de Guerre medal. She has written a novel of historical fiction that beautifully weaves the lives of real and imagined people who worked endlessly under the most dire conditions, and pays homage to what they achieved as volunteers. In addition she skillfully evokes the realities of war and how those conditions can erode the determination of even the strongest individuals. One example was the work of Jessie "Kit" Carson who changed the face and function of public libraries in France that endures to this day. Janet Skeslien Charles states: "One of my goals in writing this book was to show the courage of the Cards and how they remained until the people in the region were again self-sufficient. With American, British, Canadian, and French volunteers, there was an incredible exchange of knowledge. Thanks to their curiosity, generosity, and open-mindedness, Cards accomplished great things during and after World War I, in France and at home."

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You have exceeded your limit for simultaneous device logins.

Your current subscription allows you to be actively logged in on up to three (3) devices simultaneously. click on continue below to log out of other sessions and log in on this device., 27 exceptional ya books | slj 2024 stars so far.

It's been a great year for YA so far! These starred titles include everything from contemporary coming-of-age stories to high-stakes fantasy to diverse romances, and more.

AHMED, Samira. This Book Won’t Burn . Little, Brown. Gr 10 Up –Ripped from the headlines, Ahmed’s latest novel frames the fight against book banning as a hopeful endeavor in active civic engagement. A wide audience would benefit from reading it.

CALLEN, Rocky. Crashing into You . Holt. Gr 10 Up –This novel should hold an important place in teen libraries.

CHEE, Traci. Kindling . HarperCollins. Gr 10 Up –A heartrending, must-read fantasy about youth searching for home and learning to survive a world not designed for them.

COLE, Olivia A. Ariel Crashes a Train . Random/Labyrinth Road. Gr 9 Up –This deeply compassionate and sharp-edged dive into OCD is a must for all collections.

GOMERA-TAVAREZ, Camille. The Girl, the Ring, & the Baseball Bat . Levine Querido. Gr 9 Up –This magical realism novel is filled with vivid details, wit, relatable characters, and pride in Latinx culture. A perfect addition to any teen collection.

HAMMONDS, Jas. Thirsty . Roaring Brook. Gr 10 Up –A profound must-read about facing ugly truths and starting to heal. Recommended for any library serving older teens.

IXTA, Carolina. Shut Up, This Is Serious . HarperCollins/Quill Tree. Gr 9 Up –Readers will be inspired by the main character’s path to healing but not before this coming-of-age story of two Latina girls makes them ugly cry.

JAHREN, Hope. Adventures of Mary Jane . Delacorte. Gr 7 Up –This imaginative retelling of the story of Huck Finn’s red-headed sweetheart is a rollicking adventure full of rich characterizations that will be enjoyed by readers regardless of whether they have read the book that inspired it.

KHORRAM, Adib. The Breakup Lists . Dial. Gr 10 Up –A heartwarming romance where creating authentic connections takes center stage.

KÖLSCH, Freddie. Now, Conjurers . Union Square & Co. Gr 10 Up –This novel succeeds in weaving an original tale of teens facing down insurmountable odds to fight evil and avenge their fallen friend. A first purchase for YA collections.

LE, Vanessa. The Last Bloodcarver. Roaring Brook. Gr 7 Up –An unequivocal first purchase that will resonate especially deeply with immigrant and diasporic teens struggling to see themselves in media.

LEE, Stacey. Kill Her Twice . Putnam. Gr 9 Up –Whether teens enjoy mysteries, historical fiction, or both, this is one to get into their hands.

LITTLE BADGER, Darcie. Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe . illus. by Rovina Cai. Levine Querido. Gr 8 Up –A wonderful addition to the Elatsoe universe with vital representation, worthy of any YA collection. Highly recommended.

LUCIER, Makiia. Dragonfruit . HarperCollins/Clarion. Gr 7 Up –A deeply satisfying stand-alone readers will race through, and a rare Pacific Island–inspired fantasy that belongs in all YA collections.

MCCAULEY, Kyrie. Bad Graces . HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen. Gr 9 Up –A modern, twisted dark fairy tale, perfect for fans of Krystal Sutherland and established fans of McCauley.

MOLDAVSKY, Goldy. Just Say Yes . Holt. Gr 8 Up –A great romance with characters who have relatable anxieties and fears. A first purchase for any library serving teens, but especially where there might be a need for a lighter companion to The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.

NICHOLLS, Sally. Yours from the Tower . Candlewick/Walker. Gr 7 Up –A delightful, addictive epistolary tale of female friendship and romance.

NOVOA, Gabe Cole. Most Ardently: A Pride & Prejudice Remix . Feiwel & Friends. Gr 8 Up –Brimming with wit and chemistry, this queer revision of a much-beloved source text is nothing short of masterful.

OH, Axie. ASAP . HarperTeen. Gr 8 Up –A vibrant and dynamic story, this first purchase focuses on women and girls supporting one another in the male-dominated K-pop industry.

SCHWARTZ, Leanne. To a Darker Shore . Page Street. Gr 9 Up –A phenomenal work, weaving together elements of fantasy, self-discovery, and the quest for identity, making it a compelling read for teens grappling with their identity.

SUTHERLAND, Krystal. The Invocations . Penguin/ Nancy Paulsen. Gr 9 Up –Hand this beautifully written, dark, twisty occult novel to mature readers who like a little LGBTQIA+ romance with their witchcraft and necromancy.

TAN, June CL. Darker by Four . HarperTeen. Gr 8 Up –A book that deserves both its own anime adaptation and a spot on the shelves of any library with fantasy-loving teens.

THIRU, Dinesh. Into the Sunken City . HarperTeen. Gr 9 Up –Addictively pulse-pounding deep-sea future fiction, this is highly recommended as a first purchase for all collections.

UNDERHILL, Edward. This Day Changes Everything . Wednesday Bks. Gr 8 Up –A wonderful teen rom-com adventure reminiscent of Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s “Dash & Lily” series and Today Tonight Tomorrow by Rachel Lynn Solomon.

VAN NAME, Sarah. These Bodies Between Us . Delacorte. Gr 9 Up –A beautiful and sometimes haunting narrative that will appeal to readers of realistic and fantasy fiction.

WESTON, Kate. Diary of a Confused Feminist . S. & S. Gr 9 Up –A first buy for dealing with topics often seen as taboo, from periods to mental health, in an honest and engaging story that leaves room for sequels.

WILLIAMS, LaDarrion. Blood at the Root . Random/Labyrinth Road. Gr 10 Up –A novel long overdue. Highly recommended for teen collections, particularly for readers wanting stories centering Black characters and experiences.

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A US appeals court will review its prior order keeping banned books on shelves in a Texas county

FILE - Llano resident Emily Decker protests outside a Llano County Commissioner’s Court meeting at the Llano County Law Enforcement Center, April 13, 2023, in Llano, Texas. A federal appeals court in New Orleans is taking another look at its own order requiring Llano County, Texas, to keep eight books on public library shelves that deal with subjects including sex, gender identity and racism. County officials had removed over a dozen books from its shelves amid complaints about the subject matter. (Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman via AP, File)

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal appeals court in New Orleans is taking another look at its own order requiring a Texas county to keep eight books on public library shelves that deal with subjects including sex, gender identity and racism.

Llano County officials had removed 17 books from its shelves amid complaints about the subject matter. Seven library patrons claimed the books were illegally removed in a lawsuit against county officials. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled last year that the books must be returned. Attorneys for Llano County say the books were returned while they appeal Pittman’s order.

While the library patrons say removing the books constitutes an illegal government squelching of viewpoints, county officials have argued that they have broad authority to decide which books belong on library shelves and that those decisions are a form of constitutionally protected government speech.

On June 6, a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split three ways on the case, resulting in an order that eight of the books had to be kept on the shelves, while nine others could be kept off.

That order was vacated Wednesday evening after a majority of the 17-member court granted Llano County officials a new hearing before the full court. The order did not state reasons and the hearing hasn’t yet been scheduled.

In his 2023 ruling, Pitman, nominated to the federal bench by former President Barack Obama, ruled that the library plaintiffs had shown Llano officials were “driven by their antipathy to the ideas in the banned books.” The works ranged from children’s books to award-winning nonfiction, including “They Called Themselves the K.K.K: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group,” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; and “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health,” by Robie Harris.

Pitman was largely upheld by the 5th Circuit panel that ruled June 6. The main opinion was by Judge Jacques Wiener, nominated to the court by former President George H. W. Bush. Wiener said the books were clearly removed at the behest of county officials who disagreed with the books’ messages.

Judge Leslie Southwick, a nominee of former President George W. Bush, largely agreed but said some of the removals might stand a court test as the case progresses, noting that some of the books dealt more with “juvenile, flatulent humor” than weightier subjects.

Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, a nominee of former President Donald Trump, dissented fully, saying his colleagues “have appointed themselves co-chairs of every public library board across the Fifth Circuit.”

The circuit covers federal courts in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

The decision to rehear the case was a victory for Llano County, whose lawyers argued that there were numerous errors in the June 6 opinion, including the incorrect claim that the books had not been returned the shelves pending appeals.

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Mat-Su book review committee concludes, some books returned to shelves

A picture of the Mat-Su Borough School District Center

A citizen’s committee charged with reviewing challenged books for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District has completed its work. The committee reviewed 35 books over the last year and voted to permanently remove 19 from school libraries. A lawsuit over the removed books is ongoing, and is set to go to trial next year.

The Mat-Su School Board has not taken action on all committee recommendations, but has voted to remove seven so far.

In the spring of 2023, Mat-Su residents raised questions to school board members about whether certain library books violated obscenity statutes. The 56 challenged books were pulled from shelves last spring while the committee conducted its review.

District officials said the volume of book challenges overwhelmed the existing review process, and the school board picked members for a new committee to review the books. Prior to the formation of the citizen’s committee, the review process called for the person who challenged the book to meet with the librarian and principal at the school, and could escalate to review by a six-person committee, all while the book remained in circulation.

At a June school board meeting, Superintendent Randy Trani said the district has worked to streamline their book review process and the citizens committee is no longer needed.

“If a person, say a parent, has a concern about a book, it’s not a process that takes months and months and months, that it’s much more streamlined. So we’re trying to make an effort so we don’t end up in this situation again,” Trani said.

The board’s current policy on public complaints concerning instructional materials says that complaints about books brought to the school board will be determined by the superintendent or the superintendent’s designee, and can be appealed to the school board.

At the committee’s final meeting last month, members voted to remove three out of the four books they reviewed, including Tricks by Ellen Hopkins, Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott and a graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The committee voted to retain Perfect by Ellen Hopkins at high schools only.

The Northern Justice Project and American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska sued the district last November on behalf of six students and two parents, claiming that the books should have remained on shelves while the review took place. Although 28 books have been returned to shelves, Savannah Fletcher with the Northern Justice Project said the eight plaintiffs are still seeking damages from the district.

“First of all, there are still the books that were fully banned. So now that they have been reviewed, they have been banned, and we have not yet determined as a team which of those we agree with,” Fletcher said. “There are a couple of we’ve already stated we were not disputing, but not all of them necessarily, do we think we’re properly banned outright.”

Another 15 challenged books are no longer in the district’s collection, and the committee did not review two books that will be left to the district administration to determine if they will be removed. The school board is expected to vote on the committee’s final recommendations at their next meeting on Aug. 7.

Tim Rockey, Alaska Public Media - Anchorage

Tim Rockey is the producer of Alaska News Nightly and covers education for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at [email protected] or 907-550-8487. Read more about Tim here .

How Does the World’s Largest Library Decide What Becomes History?

From ancient clay tablets to TV shows to video games, the U.S. Library of Congress preserves far more than just books

By Sarah Wild

Black and white photo of a woman examining a small drawer she's pulled out, amidst rows of tiny drawers

A woman using the card catalog at the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress around 1940.

Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo

The world’s oldest known library, the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, in what is today Iraq, was created in the seventh century B.C.E. to store clay tablets used for recordkeeping. Its librarians preserved 30,000 of them—including the 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh . And Egypt’s Great Library of Alexandria acquired an enormous collection: In the third century B.C.E., the law required travelers arriving at the city’s bustling seaport to hand over any books in their possession to library scribes, who would return a copy of the book to the owner and keep the originals. Such texts helped make the library a beacon of knowledge and learning in the ancient world.

Today the U.S. Library of Congress continues the tradition of conserving knowledge with one of the largest library collections ever compiled. It is home to more than 175 million works humans have produced, from e-books to ancient scrolls, which it aims to preserve for future generations.

The library’s role as the research arm of the U.S. Congress and a preserver of primary sources in American history means it has some of the U.S.’s most important documents, including a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. But its scope extends far beyond the country’s borders; items such as 2,000-year-old Mesopotamian clay tablets and 18th-century Iranian prayer scrolls (written on parchment made from gazelle skins) are among its artifacts—along with Atari video games . Approximately half its collection is not in English.

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Produced in Iran in the 18th or 19th century, this small scroll is written on nearly transparent parchment made from the skin of gazelles. It is called a hijab scroll, in the sense that it veils its meaning and offers protection from evil through sacred text.

Library of Congress

Along with physical media, as of 2024, the library held about 184 petabytes of digital information, from three-dimensional digitized artifacts to patents. Converted into DVDs, that would be about 39 million disks. And if those disks were stacked atop one another, they would tower 29 miles high—a span equivalent to about 106 Empire State Buildings.

Selection by the Library of Congress is meant to ensure an item will be available for researchers hundreds of years from now. But even a library this extensive can only preserve a fraction of the books published annually around the world, not to mention the scholarly articles, legal materials, international reports, newspapers, songs, television series and video games.

To learn more about how the Library of Congress makes its weighty decisions about shaping our society’s collective memory, Scientific American spoke with the library’s collection development officer Joseph Puccio, who retired last month, and director for preservation Jacob Nadal.

Atari game console and joystick with Ms. Pacman cartridge

An Atari video game console and joystick, one of many iconic toys thru the decades for the parenting special section, on August, 23, 2017, in Washington, D.C.

Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

[ An edited transcript of the interview follows .]

When people think of libraries, they think of books. Can you tell us more about the wide range of things you collect for the Library of Congress?

NADAL: We have every format people have ever used to record their knowledge and creativity: books, obviously, manuscripts, maps and even cuneiform tablets , which are probably the oldest thing we work with. We have the earliest motion picture films, which are yards of rolls of prints of every frame of the film, as well as [glass-based lacquer disks and] digital music and video games.

PUCCIO: Our fundamental collecting policy is the Canons of Selection, issued in 1940. There are three principles: The first is that we should have everything that Congress needs to do its work. The second is that we should possess the materials that cover the life and achievement of the United States. And the third is that we’re not in a vacuum, and we need stuff from the rest of the world. We are constantly taking snapshots of the world. We’re always concerned when, for budgetary reasons, we might not be able to collect in a particular area of the world—because sometimes you cannot go back and fill in those gaps. Maybe, with digital, it will be different in the future. But right now, if you miss picking up materials, you may not get a copy five years later.

Where do the materials you consider for preservation come from?

PUCCIO: We have various acquisition streams, such as copyright deposits (the library houses and oversees the U.S. Copyright Office). We have selection officers and other staff who apply our collection policies when looking at the flow of material. We also receive a lot of gift materials. Sometimes we will go out and try to convince someone to give us their collection of manuscripts or photographs. Then we have the purchase acquisition stream. Each year Congress appropriates money for the library to acquire materials, and we use most of that to acquire electronic resources and materials from outside the U.S. We give book dealers in other countries descriptions of the types of books we want, such as prizewinners. We also have six field offices of the library—in Cairo, Egypt, Islamabad, Pakistan, New Delhi, India, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

How do you choose what to keep?

PUCCIO: When we acquire something at the Library of Congress, it's with the idea that we're keeping it for forever. We try to encapsulate our hopes for how we build the collection through 75 or so policy statements, which are mostly by subject. They range from law through to children’s literature to LGBTQIA+ studies. We then have collecting levels from zero through five. Five says we want to be really, really strong in that subject; three says we want enough content so that we can answer questions on this subject from Congress. At zero, we do not collect at all.

An original draft of the first Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln.

As part of the library’s general assessment program, which looks for gaps in the collections, we found that there were a number of countries, such as Morocco, for which we have received no children’s books for several decades. The children’s literature Collections Policy Statement indicates that we aim to collect these types of books from outside the U.S. at a level three—approximately midrange between out of scope (zero) and comprehensive (five). Our collecting has been very Eurocentric, and in the next phase of this program, we will work toward filling the gaps where possible.

We have about 200 recommending officers in the library who are responsible for different subject areas. They know what researchers need now, and hopefully they can see the future to try and understand what a researcher in 100 years will need.

But with the volume of materials, they don’t have the time to take a really close look at each item. Comprehensive collecting is impossible—especially when you look at the fact that there’s like a billion websites out there. That’s why we refer to the policy statements and the zero-to-five collecting levels.

How much space do you have to store all this material?

NADAL: There are three buildings on Capitol Hill: the [Thomas] Jefferson Building, with a capacity of seven million items; the [John] Adams Building, which has a giant block of books in the middle of about 12 million volumes; and the [James] Madison [Memorial] Building, [which] has a number of our special format units, such as manuscripts, maps, prints and photographs and music. We also have a facility at Fort Meade in Maryland, with roughly 100 acres, where we’re planning for our eighth building, and the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center down in Culpeper, Va.

PUCCIO: We don’t have enough space. We never have, not since 1870, when the Copyright Office became part of the Library of Congress. Back then there were books all over the place—you can see it in the pictures—and we still have books on the floor here on Capitol Hill. On the digital side, it’s easier to buy digital storage than to build a warehouse. The major challenge is that we never have enough money to acquire everything we want. When we acquire an item, that means preserving it and finding storage for it. So, it’s not just the act of paying $75 for a book. It’s thinking about how much that’s going to cost over 100 years.

If the building was burning, what would you run out with?

NADAL: I would do nothing. We have two Preservation Emergency Response Teams that are on call 24/7. And when it comes to digital, we have the three-two-one rule: three copies in two different formats in one other geographic region. We put a great deal of effort into thinking through what materials we do have. If they were lost or damaged in some way, it would harm the human record. There are many layers of protection around those materials to put them beyond the reach of accident.

We always sort of jokingly say that we have no favorite collections, except whatever is on a conservator’s bench right at the moment. Our curation and interpretation of objects can change as we learn more about them, so preservation often becomes a different window into understanding the objects in our collection. For example, we have Ethiopic prayer scrolls: They’re charms or talismans to protect the wearer and were often the same height as the person using it. And so we have a record of the heights of people from a different time and place. That's really, I think, where the science and the conservation can become really exciting around here.

Jay-Z-themed library cards drive 'surge' in Brooklyn Library visitors, members: How to get one

One of Brooklyn's most prolific icons, Jay-Z , has driven scores of New Yorkers to their local public library.

The Brooklyn Public Library activated more than 14,000 new library memberships between July 14 and Aug. 12, since limited-edition Jay-Z cards became available, a press officer for the library confirmed to USA TODAY on Wednesday. Each card features artwork from one of Jay-Z's studio albums, from "Reasonable Doubt" to "4:44."

Also, the Central Library − where an immersive exhibition called The Book Of HOV showcases artifacts from Jay-Z's 27-year career − experienced higher traffic than usual, welcoming nearly 176,000 visitors between July 14 and Aug. 14. By comparison, the branch counted 77,000 visitors in June, BPL's Fritzi Bodenheimer told USA TODAY.

The library previously announced a "surge in visitors to Central Library" in the week after The Book of HOV opened, which resulted in "almost five times the average number of visitors" and an increase in checked-out items, according to a July 28 news release .

Born Shawn Carter and raised in Brooklyn's Marcy Projects, the rapper and entrepreneur's company, Roc Nation, teamed up with the Brooklyn Public Library last month to put on an exhibition and also offer 13 library cards that pay homage to his "iconic career, unprecedented cultural contributions and illustrious legacy."

The exhibit that opened July 14 is a "tribute to Carter's global impact as a musician, entrepreneur, philanthropist and disruptor," according to a July press release. "It was also constructed as a surprise to Carter and as a celebration for both his hometown of Brooklyn and the broader hip-hop community across the world."

How to get Jay-Z-themed library cards

The Jay-Z-themed library cards were available exclusively at the Central and Marcy libraries beginning July 14 and were opened up to all library branches across the borough on Aug. 7.

According to BPL's website , card designs are available on a rotating basis at the Central Library.

"The Black Album" will be offered Aug. 14-20, "The Blueprint" will be available Aug. 21-27 and "Vol. 2…Hard Knock Life" cards are scheduled for Aug. 28-Sept. 3.

More information about which libraries carry different designs can be found here .

What to know about the Brooklyn Public Library's Jay-Z exhibition

The Book of HOV is free and open to the public during the library's hours . It will run until October, according to BPL's website .

The exhibition includes "iconic artifacts, awards, rare photos, legendary magazine covers and more that span 27 years since Carter released his illustrious debut album, 'Reasonable Doubt,' in 1996," according to a press release.

In addition, "the goal of the entire display is to showcase an enlightening and educational look into Carter's ascension from the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, N.Y. to an international phenomenon."

As well as a replica of Baseline Studios, where Jay-Z recorded albums such as "The Blueprint" and "The Black Album," the installation also includes highlights from his entrepreneurial and philanthropic efforts.

Celebrating 50 years of hip-hop: Run-D.M.C. performs for final time, other big moments from Yankee Stadium

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Covers 300,000 books and cites over 1.5 million book reviews found in over 500 popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals, as well as the library review media (the reviews originate in a group of selected periodicals in the humanities, social sciences, and general science published in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain).
PDF The Library Card
The Library Card By Jerry Spinelli Part One Chapters 1-3 Before you read the chapter: The protagonist in most novels features the main character or "good guy". The protagonist of Part I of The Library Card is Mongoose, a rather troubled twelve-year-old boy who as the story opens, is busy shoplifting at the local Mini-Mart with his pal, Weasel.
Book Review Index Online
Library Card Required Book Review Index Online is a comprehensive source for book reviews from 1965 to the present and covers review published in nearly 500 periodicals and newspapers. Access Locations: All Branch Libraries Stephen A. Schwarzman Building The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Schomburg Center for Research in Black ...
Everything you should know about Hoopla
Hoopla is a digital borrowing service for libraries that provides access to audiobooks, ebooks, music, movies, magazines and tv shows. Borrow and enjoy all of this digital content on any of your personal devices, including iPads, iPhones, Android devices, Nooks, Kindle Fire, PC, AppleTV, Roku, FireTV and Chromecast.
Book Review Card
Book Review Bookmark Library Card Book Review Template Book Mark Gift for Book Lover Stationery for Reader Simple Book Review Template (38) Sale Price $1.36 $ 1.36 $ 1.95 Original Price $1.95 (30% off) Add to Favorites Book Review Sticker Sheet, Bullet Journal Stickers, Planner Stickers, Scrapbook Stickers, Book Journal ...
Library Card Book Review
Book Review Bookmark Library Card Book Review Template Book Mark Gift for Book Lover Stationery for Reader Simple Book Review Template (30) Sale Price $1.46 $ 1.46 $ 1.95 Original Price $1.95 (25% off) Add to Favorites Printable Book Review Bookmark, Bookmark, Book Review, Booktok, Bookish, Book Rating, Downloadable, Printable Bookmarks ...
The Library Card summary
Summarize the plot of the Library Card in one sentence. Richard Wright as a Negro boy struggles a lot to study the books by Mencken and other many books so that he understands how black people are enslaved, dominated, and exploited by the whites and becomes a successful critic and writer to fight against cruel behavior, injustice, inequality and domination exercised by whites over black people ...
Library Book Cards
Leave in Pocket Detuning Card 250/Pkg. $23.95. Qty. VIEW DETAILS. TLS™ is the leading manufacturer in high-quality Library Book Cards. Our Library Book Cards have superior strength and a smooth hardened finish that resists wear, fraying or tearing. Choose from Plain Book Cards, Color Banded Book Cards, Media Book Cards and Peel & Stick Book ...
Libraries are offering free digital library cards to ...
Since launching our Instant Digital Card (IDC) service, over 1.5 million free library cards for Libby have been created! Instant Digital Card provides access to your library's ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and more using just a valid phone number. In 2022 alone, over 326,000 digital library cards were issued to readers all over the United States.
100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Tree of Smoke. Denis Johnson 2007. Like the project of the title — an intelligence report that the newly minted C.I.A. operative William "Skip" Sands comes to find both quixotic and useless ...
Miss Morgan's book brigade : a novel
The Los Angeles Public Library serves the largest most diverse population of any library in the United States. Through its Central Library and 72 branches, the Los Angeles Public Library provides free and easy access to information, ideas, books and technology that enrich, educate and empower every individual in our city's diverse communities.
44 Places to Get a Free Non-Resident Library Card (to Use with Your
Fairfax County Public Library: Offers free library cards to non-residents who work, attend school, or own property in Fairfax County. This card provides access to an extensive array of digital and physical resources, making it an excellent asset for continuous learning and entertainment. Fairfax County Public Library.
27 Exceptional YA Books
AHMED, Samira. This Book Won't Burn. Little, Brown. Gr 10 Up-Ripped from the headlines, Ahmed's latest novel frames the fight against book banning as a hopeful endeavor in active civic engagement.A wide audience would benefit from reading it. CALLEN, Rocky. Crashing into You. Holt. Gr 10 Up-This novel should hold an important place in teen libraries.
One Key Card Review 2024
One Key Card review 2024: Book travel, and earn rewards with no annual fee ... One Key Card review. The new One Key Card, issued by Wells Fargo, is one of two new credit cards that earn rewards ...
A US appeals court will review its prior order keeping banned books on
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal appeals court in New Orleans is taking another look at its own order requiring a Texas county to keep eight books on public library shelves that deal with subjects including sex, gender identity and racism.. Llano County officials had removed 17 books from its shelves amid complaints about the subject matter. Seven library patrons claimed the books were illegally ...
Mat-Su book review committee concludes, some books returned to shelves
Tim Rockey is the producer of Alaska News Nightly and covers education for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at [email protected] or 907-550-8487. Read more about Tim here.
How Does the World's Largest Library Decide What Becomes History?
The world's oldest known library, the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, in what is today Iraq, was created in the seventh century B.C.E. to store clay tablets used for recordkeeping. Its librarians ...
Jay-Z library cards spark surge in memberships: How can I get one?
The Book of HOV is free and open to the public during the library's hours.It will run until October, according to BPL's website.. The exhibition includes "iconic artifacts, awards, rare photos ...

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