The dog days are really here now. Crank the A/C, pour yourself something refreshing, and turn on some of the best adaptations of August, or sink into this dark, deeply romantic mystery.
August is here! It’s the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year (and I am a sucker for new school supplies!) It’s a time for new routines for busy families tackling everyone’s hectic schedules. So this week, we’re looking at two new cookbooks that give readers dozens and dozens of recipes perfect for home cooks short on time.
This week, we’ve got a guest post from Maggie Tokuda-Hall, cofounder and national team leader for Authors Against Book Bans. In addition to the call to action around next month’s annual Banned Books Week offered below, here’s your reminder of how you can fight book bans and censorship. Remember to check your voter registration or get registered to vote if you aren’t, and spend time with your down-ballot candidates. Here’s a handy list of candidates who have pledged to support the mission of groups like Moms for Liberty to help you weed out those most dangerous to intellectual freedom and individual autonomy (current as of July 25).
See also: more political & physical attacks on libraries.
What the biggest, buzziest books of the moment? There are a lot of ways to approach this question: is it the bestselling books? The ones getting the most positive reviews? Or, perhaps, the ones being read by the most people? That last definition is where the most read books on Goodreads comes in.
Of course, we can’t get an accurate picture of the books everyone on Earth is reading right now — we can’t even get an accurate snapshot of book sales! Still, Goodreads is the reading tracker with the most users, so it’s the closest thing we have. It’s always interesting to see how the books being talked about the most — the ones you might see on TikTok, in New York Times reviews, or even recommended in person frequently — are not necessarily the ones that are actually being read by the most people. It’s not even a match for the bestseller list, because as we all know, buying a book and reading it are very different things.