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9 Unputdownable Books that Will Grip You Till the Last Page

Jeff O'Neal

CEO and co-founder

Jeff O'Neal is the executive editor of Book Riot and Panels. He also co-hosts The Book Riot Podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @thejeffoneal.

Unputdownable books, B&N makes a shocking move, Pride reads for 2024: just a few of the offerings today at Book Riot:

9 Unputdownable Books that Will Grip You Till the Last Page

We’ve all read books that we just can’t put down — the ones we stay up reading till 4 a.m. or skip plans to finish because we have to find out how it ends. A book that you can pick up and put down and digest over a longer period of time isn’t necessarily a bad book, but there’s something special about books that grab you so strongly that you need to read them as quickly as possible. Unputdownable books need a strong hook, a compelling premise, and snappy writing.

Barnes & Noble Just Bought a Beloved Indie Bookstore. Now What?

In a surprise (to me at least) move, Barnes & Noble has bought Tattered Cover, a local indie chain of bookstores in the Denver, Colorado area. Tattered Cover had been in business for more than 50-years, but a series of events, from COVID to bad PR to bad management, put the store, which regularly appears on lists of the best indie bookstores in the country, in financial distress. Barnes & Noble is only paying $1.8 million for the company, which includes current inventory, because things are pretty bad over there. Now, Tattered Cover’s fate is notable, especially to locals, but the real story to me is B&N buying an existing indie bookstore.

8 Great New Pride Reads for 2024

These books are the ones I’m personally most excited to get my hands on ASAP. It’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction. There are a few buzzy titles and several under-the-radar books I hope will surprise and delight you. I’ve included both recent releases and upcoming titles, so you’ll have some things to read now and some things to look forward to. You’ll find memoirs and essay collections, an anthology of work by queer Arab writers, magical realist short stories, novels set in Colombia and Nigeria, a sapphic romance, nonfiction about lesbian history, and more.

Why Is Midwest Tape/hoopla Creating a New Rating System for Library Purchases?

Midwest Tape and hoopla’s new system is called the Universal Content Ratings System. Per the link in the announcement, “Libraries have often struggled with the myriad of ratings available by content, by vendor, and more. To streamline this process, and to provide confidence that the content provided by Midwest Tape and hoopla is age appropriate and in alignment with local and national guidelines, we are instituting a Universal Content Ratings System (UCRS). These ratings, as described below, take into consideration restrictions and qualifiers by format, vendor, and country served.”

Celebrate Pride with These New Queer BIPOC Books!

For today’s books, I wanted to revel in Pride a bit more. The books below span a variety of genres and show a multitude of queer experiences.

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