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.
Publishing is amping up for the gift season, so there are dozens of books coming out every week! Alas, I can’t put them all on this list, but I grabbed a fresh 20 for you (don’t get used to it, but it was hard to narrow down this month)! There are traditionally published books and independently published ones; debuts and sequels. You want rom-coms? We got ‘em. You want some darkness? Of course! We’re a little light on romantasy this month, partly because I can’t tell which ones are definitely Capital R Romances with happy endings. But! Tis the season—for some magic and witchcraft!
It’s been over a decade since I first read Mrs. Dalloway. I’ve reread it countless times, and new aspects of the novel jump out at me each time I revisit the story. My favorite copy of Mrs. Dalloway is annotated and tabbed up within an inch of its life. (I even created a read-a-long for it over on BookTube.) But writing this, I can’t help but ask myself, what draws me back? What about this story captures my imagination so thoroughly. Perhaps, the last line of the novel says it best: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”
Let’s lean all the way in and take the Halloween spirit to our bookish lives. Find here some delightful bookish Halloween goods. There are sweatshirts for horror lovers, stickers for covering your water bottle or notebook, bookmarks to keep your page when you’re too frightened to read further, and more. This is a Halloween-a-palooza of BOOkish finds you won’t be able to resist.
It’s a big month for fans of Inspector Gamache who get to finally read the 19th book in the series, and Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train, has a new slow-burn mystery! Mystery and thriller fans are also treated to a dark mystery starring a forensic photographer; a paw-tastic middle grade graphic novel following a cat detective; a dark academia murder mystery; an anthology with stories by today’s top crime writers, a PI in 1950s San Francisco in a bookstore-centered mystery; a book with 50 logic puzzles to solve; a middle grade mystery with a child honing their detective skills; and two college students on different timelines somehow coming together to solve a mystery.
With that out of the way, here are eight books you can read for tasks that are by queer authors, several of which check off multiple tasks. Most of these I personally have read for Read Harder, because most of my reading is queer — there’s a reason I write the Our Queerest Shelves newsletter. Let me know in the comments which books you’d add to this list!
And this indie-mindedness is very apparent in Bookshop.org’s bestseller list. It’s considerably more diverse (though it could be better), and there are many books that don’t turn up often in other lists. Though, I will say that, of the BIPOC authors that were on the list at the time of writing this, there weren’t many women. To combat this, I pulled a couple from the Indie Bestseller list, another great way to step outside the usual, bestseller-wise.
