Our Most Popular Stories of the Week
Welcome to The Best of Book Riot. Here’s your weekend highlight reel of the week’s most popular stories.
Here are the Winners of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize
Since its founding in 1917, the Pulitzer Prize has recognized excellence in journalism, arts, and literature. You can see the winners in all categories, including 15 Journalism categories, at the Pulitzer website. You can also watch the ceremony in full on YouTube below.
12 Book Club Picks For May 2025
It’s May and a bunch of great book clubs have selected their picks for the month! Whether you’re curious what everyone is reading, looking for your next solo or buddy read, or looking to join a book club—as little or as much as you’d like—this is a great selection of books. All the book clubs are different from each other, but all offer a virtual component while some meet in person, and many times, there is author interaction.
So what do we have this month? There’s a literary dystopian centering books, a graphic novel with a boy using fairy tales to figure out life, Beyoncé’s mom’s memoir, a novel with a comp to Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, a novel about redemption, a blockbuster author’s recent novel, a YA fantasy series opener, a classic mystery with an adaptation starring Denzel Washington and more!
13 New Mystery and Thrillers for May 2025
Welcome to a new round of what’s new in mystery and thrillers! Whether you’re picking your right-now-read or tossing things on your TBR for summer reading plans, there are plenty of options for different genres, subgenres, tropes, and moods, all under publishing’s crime umbrella.
There’s a YA murder mystery in an amusement park, wives plotting for their husband’s life insurance policies, a cellist forced into witness protection, cozy mysteries, a teen tarot reader with a family PI agency, a wellness cult and a serial killer (in the same book!), historical mysteries, witches, and more! So settle into your favorite sleuth-reading spot and enjoy your next criminal read!
Introducing: Reading and Resistance—And How Literature Has Always Been Tied to American Freedom
As I write this, it’s already been a few days since the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) was gutted, and a couple of days since the ALA filed a suit against Trump’s administration for it. It’s clear with this administration that the most recent war on books—which started with an increase of book banning a few years ago—is a larger war on freedom, especially when it comes to certain groups. It’s no surprise that the most commonly banned books are by and about non-white and queer people. They don’t want us reading about us, just like they didn’t want us to back then. That’s why, like back then, we should do it anyway. We should do it more.
Not only that, turning to literature—and looking back at the history of librarianship and literacy in this country—can show us how our ancestors resisted, which could teach us how to fight back now.
That’s what this new series is: by looking at the history of resistance through reading, we can become fortified in our current fight.
We’ve Staved Off State Library Closure Measures–For Now
Three states floated legislation this year that directly targeted the future of their state libraries. State libraries, as more folks have come to understand thanks to the dismantling of the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) at the federal level, help their local and regional level libraries in a variety of ways. Each state library operates differently, just as each state librarian is appointed, elected, or hired differently (in Illinois, for example, the Secretary of State is also the State Librarian). But ultimately, state libraries distribute funds to public libraries under their umbrella, provide programming and professional development, offer consulting and legal counsel, negotiate vendor contracts, and more. They are an authority accessible to smaller libraries, even if they do not oversee the day-to-day at any of these libraries.
