And so, enter Fanny Merkin’s Fifty Shades parody, Fifty Shames of Earl Grey: taking the making-fun to another level of, er, funniness. Our hero, Earl Grey (aka Edward Cullen, aka Christian Grey), is a long-fingered, Tom Cruise-obsessed, Nickelback-listening, possibly-closeted-homosexual corporate playboy. And he means to corrupt the heretofore innocent Anna Steal. What’ll happen?! RJS: Greg, I’m so glad you agreed to read this with me. After I put you through Fifty Shades of Grey, and then didn’t share your raving about The Art of Fielding, I was a little afraid we were going to have a collaborators’ break-up....

GENRE KRYPTONITE is a regular feature about genres we have an inexplicable weak spot for. Check out previous entries here. Hah, I hear you scoff. She’s not her own genre! I raspberry in your general direction, for I say she is! Agatha Christie is the perfector of the cozy mystery (along with being the best-selling author of all time), but her books aren’t just the touchstone for all things mysterious....

All good fiction should be challenging, and a great way to challenge your readers is to ask them to believe the almost-impossible. In Greg Bear’s science fiction novel Eon, the Earth has a near encounter with a very unusual asteroid – not the type that slams into our atmosphere and explodes with one of the loudest noises in history (an unsettlingly non-fictional phenomenon), but the kind that has been engineered by human hands....

If you’re one of those happy addicts who inhale novels, who fill every quiet moment with their company, and whose bedside stack of half-finished paperbacks is beginning to resemble an ambitious conceptual art installation, then you will know how certain popular conventions of the novel can become crushingly boring if you see them regularly enough. Your bugbear may vary; perhaps you’re sick of the three-act structure, infodumping narrators, or ill-defined Macguffins....

If by some miraculous occurrence, this is the first you have heard of Jessica Jones, here is the latest trailer, which offers a pretty good look at Krysten Ritter as Jessica, Mike Colter as Luke Cage, Rachael Taylor as Patsy Walker (a/k/a Hellcat), Carrie-Anne Moss as Jeri Hogarth, and David Tenant as Kilgrave (a/k/a The Purple Man). (We’re also promised Rosario Dawson will return as Claire Temple.) Now, before we move on, I should say something....

This year’s 2020 Summer Scares picks are here! Get ready to enjoy chills and thrills with excellent vetted horror novels for every type of reader. In celebration of National Library Lover’s Day, the Horror Writers Association (HWA), in partnership with United for Libraries, Book Riot, and Library Journal/School Library Journal, is delighted to announce the second annual Summer Scares Reading List, which includes titles selected by a panel of authors and librarians and is designed to promote horror as a great reading option for all ages, during any time of the year....

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder! Christmas is a mysterious, as well as magical, time of year. There’s no denying that the supposed season of goodwill is the perfect backdrop for festive detective fiction. These books, which are part of the British Library Crime Classics series, introduce the reader to some of the finest Christmas and wintertime detective stories of the past—blending merry mysteries from much-loved authors with vintage crime vignettes set in winter…including one or two stories which are likely to be unfamiliar even to diehard mystery fans....

Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang’s analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative....

Valinda Lacey’s mission in New Orleans is to help the newly emancipated community survive and flourish. But when thugs destroy the school she has set up and then target her, Valinda runs for her life—and straight into the arms of Captain Drake LeVeq. As an architect from an old New Orleans family, Drake has a personal interest in rebuilding the city. Raised by strong women, he recognizes Valinda’s determination. And he can’t stop admiring—or wanting—her....

I’m as bummed by the former as any comics nerd and as stoked for the latter as any bookish millennial, but these two announcements coming so close together got me thinking. Are the Defenders and BSC universes really that different? I mean, aside from all the violence, sociopolitical commentary, complex moral quandaries, and devastating consequences in the one franchise, and also all the stuff in the Defenders. No, I decided....

This story takes place in 1964, as a back-up feature in Green Lantern #30. The main story featured Hal preventing alien pterodactyls from helping Earth’s pterodactyls take over the planet. Any back-up feature would have a tough time measuring up to a story like that, but this one manages: it features the debut of Katma Tui, the first female Green Lantern. While it’s certainly nice that the Guardians of Oa, who are in charge of doling out the Lantern rings, are egalitarian enough to believe that women are just as capable of heroism as men, their open-mindedness has…limits....

“Mantel published the final instalment of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, to much acclaim in the spring. The previous books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both won the Booker prize and she is the bookmakers’ favourite to win again this year.It had been an all-consuming experience, she said in conversation with the Guardian’s chief culture writer, Charlotte Higgins. ‘I will frankly say that the last three, four years particularly have been hard....

As with many avid readers, my love of reading has always been coupled with a desire to weave my own tales. I carried around notebooks where I would jot down ideas and stories from a very young age. When I got sucked into the intense online communities of fans, I turned my attention to writing fan fiction, pairing up my favorite characters. I was enthralled with the idea of having people reading my writing and commenting on it, so this was an extremely gratifying form of creation....

Through this post, I am going to attempt to elucidate and explain reading levels. So scroll through to find the system that your child’s teacher uses or pour yourself a large cup of coffee and sift through all of the various ways educators, librarians, and book publishers level and categorize books for young readers. Reading Levels Are Like Starbucks Sizes I admit, I don’t visit Starbucks unless I have a gift card....

The fall is going to be brutal for schools and libraries across the country. We know this, given how last school year went and how the summer has turned into an opportunity for right-wing groups to protest and intimidate those showing up to library Drag Queen story times and those stealing or complaining about Pride displays. This summer is ample opportunity for these groups to recalibrate and set into motion their plans to implement book rating systems they’ve personally developed, which will inevitable trigger more book bans....

But when I look at them, I just balk in horror. Not because I don’t like comics anymore, but because many of them are part of ongoing series or the beginnings of ones that require a lot of settling into world-building that my brain just can’t handle right now. Sometimes I think of just taking them all to a used bookstore and slowly reacquiring the ones I still really want to read....

I know intimately how difficult it is to be a book hoarder when you live in a small space. Yes, we should borrow books instead of buying them, and yes, we should give books away when we’re done. But some of us don’t. So if you keep all your books, what now? So what are some tips for small apartment living with a ton of books and not enough space?...

This is the perfect book lover solution to finally being able to display those lovely pressed flowers you collect while also preserving them. I cover how to make one in this post, but if you’d rather just buy, check out these gorgeous ones to buy. How to Make a Pressed Flower Bookmark First, you’ll need some pressed flowers. I honestly just had pressed flowers ready to go, because I’m that sort of person, but if you’re starting from the beginning, I recommend packing a notebook with you wherever you go, so you can grab flowers you see!...

Use Small Boxes Books are heavy, we all know this from the time we tried to bring more than five books on our weekend getaway “just in case.” So, you want to make sure that you’re not trying to fill huge boxes with books. Even the “small” moving boxes can get really heavy if you’re packing them entirely with books. The best boxes for moving books are smaller boxes that are used for packing liquor bottles or food at groceries stores....

So proclaims the first flier advertising The Baby-Sitters Club to the parents of Stoneybrook, Connecticut. I read my first BSC book when I was 10, and I didn’t know it at the time but I think I was internalising everything in that series and creating a picture of what I wanted my adult life to be like. And here I am, over twenty years later, and I have that life — almost....