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Welcome to The Best of Book Riot, our daily round-up of what’s on offer across our site, newsletters, podcasts, and social channels. Not everything is for everyone, but there is something for everyone.
Before we jump into the day’s highlights: some exciting new changes are coming to Book Riot. Don’t miss out!
I’m not sure exactly what it takes to qualify as an Austenite, but having read all of her novels, including some of her juvenilia, I would hazard I’ve made it into the club. Hopefully I come close, anyway. From my first time reading and falling in love with Pride and Prejudice as a high schooler to discovering Persuasion in my early twenties, I’ve known that Jane Austen was a writer after my own heart. She captures dialogue and social interactions in a way that still feels genuine hundreds of years later, and her characters are unforgettable. Don’t get me wrong: I love Jane Austen’s novels, and I love them as is. Buuut as a huge fan of retellings from way back (looking at you, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and Cinder Edna), I never say no to a good twist, especially if that twist involves taking a story I love and making it gay. So you can understand why I’m so excited about these 12 LGBTQ Jane Austen retellings.
Do you want to read a mystery that takes place in an Ikea and satirizes the retail world? Do you want to dig into an eerie story by a Nobel Prize winner that takes place at a pre–World War I health resort? These books bring horror together with social commentary, historical fiction, lush fantasy, and much more, pulling on the tropes of murder mysteries, haunted houses, dangerous cults, and demon possession, but turning them all on their heads to make something experimental and refreshingly new.
One of my middle grade science teachers said something years ago that rocked my little brain. He told us how so many of science’s modern inventions first started as ideas in books. I’d been a bookworm for years by then, and I had an interest in science, so that little tidbit had me shooketh.
I’ve held on to it all these years, and have even offered it up as a topic for our contributors to write about. While I now know that there’s more to it than just scientists becoming inspired by something they see in fiction—I still marvel when I read something in fiction, then see it unfold in reality. There are a few times this has happened within the last few years that I thought to share.
Although on paper, the YA genre is catered towards readers between the ages of 12 and 18—and they, no doubt, provide safe spaces to work out complex issues for kids that fall within that age range—they’re also great to read them well into your 20s or 30s. Sure, you might relate less to the experiences of teenagers and young adults once you’re past the period of emerging adulthood—but even as mental health becomes less stigmatized with each passing year, it’s still difficult to find decent books dealing with concepts like grief written for adults. They no doubt exist, but there’s nothing like a young adult novel to remind you of what it’s like to feel too much, whether in the face of tragedy or just simply in everyday life, and those themes do not have an age range.
It’s the undeniable It Book of the season, but is it good? Jeff O’Neal and I dive in on the new episode of the Book Riot Podcast.