Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Here are the stories we covered this week:
If you follow international news (or the digest editions of this newsletter), you may have seen that youth-led protests are springing up across Asia in response to economic inequality, corruption, and police brutality. There have been demonstrations and riots in Indonesia and the Philippines, while in Nepal, Gen Z protestors toppled the national government in two days flat.
In addition to the national flags you would expect to see at protests like these, another flag has been cropping up: the straw-hat-wearing Jolly Roger from Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece.
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The categories reflect the source as a bookstore; it’s easy to see why Gift Books is one of the first categories listed. There are more nonfiction categories than we’re likely to see in other Best Books of the Year lists. The odd category out is “eBook Series.” Perhaps the original intention was “Best eBooks” to match “Best Audiobooks,” but there isn’t the same consideration of format for eBooks—while an audiobook’s quality is heavily dependent on the narrator, the reading experience for an ebook is almost indistinguishable from print. This “eBook Series” category lets Barnes & Noble show that you can buy ebooks from them, but it doesn’t make much sense from a reader perspective.
U.S. prisons remain the institutions where the most censorship occurs. This has not changed, even as school and public library book challenges have skyrocketed in numbers since 2021. Censorship thrives in prisons for several reasons, including the fact that the private, for-profit industry doesn’t need to care about the rights of those housed within them. It also thrives because the general public does not understand how bad the conditions are for those experiencing incarceration, does not understand how the prison industrial complex operates, and, frankly, the general public does not understand why they should care about those who are in prison.
There are five books on this list, but only three authors. Can you guess which writers have two titles in the top five this week? One has two new paranormal romance titles on the list, but you might be more familiar with her contemporary romance novels. The other is the current reigning queen of thrillers. She has one new title here as well a backlist book that has an upcoming movie adaptation.
Dan Brown and Kamala Harris are back on all five bestseller lists this week, and that’s just about where the similarities to last week’s bestellers end. Most of the top titles from last week have fallen off completely or topped only one or two lists, replaced by special editions of books from the Empyrean series. There is one newcomer, and it’s from an author who’s topped the charts before: the latest installment in the Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman made it to four of the bestseller lists.
In what intellectual freedom advocates have seen coming for months, a Texas school district has just shut down access to all secondary school libraries for students due to the regulations of the state’s Senate Bill 13. New Braunfels Independent School District (NBISD) voted yesterday, Monday, October 13, to shut down all but elementary school libraries in the district in order to ensure their collections are compliant with the law.
Titles included in the Reading Bowl come from the Georgia Peach Book Award nominees. These titles are selected annually through a process that has school and public librarians read widely across recently-published titles to select 20 finalists. Students then have the opportunity to read and rate those books, allowing them the power to select the Georgia Peach Book Award Winner and the Georgia Peach Book Award Honorable Mentions. The Helen Ruffian Reading Bowl helps facilitate the process by encouraging teens to read from this list of finalists.
Winners of the 2025 Harvey Awards, presented to the best of the best in comics creation, were announced on Friday, October 10, at New York Comic Con. The Harvey Awards were founded in 1998 and named after writer and artist Harvey Kurtzman. Nominees are judged by a host of comics publishing professionals, including publishers, retailers, librarians, and educators.
There are seven Harvey Award categories. This year, six creators were also inducted into the Harvey Kurtzman Hall of Fame.