The Best Mysteries About Family Secrets
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.
8 of the Best Mysteries About Family Secrets
In families, it’s not always the big secrets that can spread chaos through its members. Even the smallest thing can set off a chain reaction of drama. The warning signs, the close calls, the hiding in plain sight: it all makes for a great story.
February is for Horror Lovers with these New Scary Books
Horror books are coming in hot this February. While many might see this month as a time to dive deep into romance, us scary kids are ready to embrace our love for all things horror for yet another month. That’s especially true with so many good new releases hitting shelves.
Life, Literature, and Psychological Richness with Professor Shigehiro Oishi
Jeff O’Neal talks to Professor Shigehiro Oishi about his new book, Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life.
Books and reading play a central role in the book, both as examples but also as avenues towards living a psychologically rich life. I really enjoyed this book and this conversation.
New Legislative Tactics to Undermine Anti-Book Ban Bills: Book Censorship News, February 7, 2025
Last year, several states across the US passed anti-book ban legislation. As explained in the linked story, those bills all look a little bit different and offer slightly different protections within them. Ultimately, though, state-level anti-book ban bills make it clear that public schools and/or public libraries cannot remove books from collections based on discriminatory factors like gender, race, or political ideology.
Nonfiction Backlist Gems
A while back, I started a project to read through some of the backlist books sitting on my shelves. There are so many gems hidden amongst my stacks and stacks of books that I don’t want to get lost in the chaos that is my library of late.
The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week
A new month has brought a new list of the most read books on Goodreads. Kind of. You see, a few of the top 5 are new compared to the last time we did a weekly roundup (January 24th), but they’re going to mostly be familiar to you if you’ve been following these roundups for awhile. Apart from two brand new releases by mega popular authors, you’ve probably seen these books make this list before.
The 2025 Libby Award Finalists
The finalists for the 2nd annual Libby Book Awards were just announced February 4th. The awards are chosen by librarians as the books that best ” captivated readers, sparked conversations, and kept us turning pages late into the night.”
What’s Scarier: Witchcraft or Being an Unwed Mother in America?
As we sink deeper into a real-life dystopian nightmare, horror continues to be the genre I’m most eager to reach for. That’s probably because current horror novels are so openly addressing the very real-life fears so many of us are experiencing right now.
