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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
With a few notable exceptions, the books of 2025 have felt pretty ho-hum to me so far, but that’s all about to change. Fall is chockablock with big names and likely awards contenders. The New York Times has rounded up 25 new books to read in September, and hoooo boy, it’s good stuff. Dan Brown is back. Elizabeth Gilbert is back. Angela Flournoy is back. Arundhati Roy with a memoir about a complex mother-daughter relationship! Jill Lepore with a perfectly timed history of the US Consitution! Truly, it’s an embarrassment of riches.
New York City has a bookstore for every specialty—do not get me started on the glories of the one devoted to cookbooks and food writing—so I was surprised to learn that The Twisted Spine, opening in Brooklyn next month, will be its first horror bookshop. Founders Lauren Komer and Jason Mellow started the business with pop-up events and an online store, which led to a Kickstarter campaign that brought in more than $40k to help make their brick-and-mortar dreams come true. The 1200-square-foot space will house about 5,000 titles and it set to open September 6.
I could not love this from Austin Kleon more: Think about your home as a library. Make it “a place of learning while also making it as unlike school as possible.” Fill it with unread books, not to engage in performative consumerism but so that there is always something to read close at hand, always a book to reach for when you have a question. Kleon shares lovely examples of how he and his kids have used their home library recently, but you needn’t have kids to make this work. Curiosity will do the trick.
In 2015, here at Book Riot, we put out a series called Reading Diversely FAQ. It answered questions like “Why is reading diversely important?” and “Isn’t paying attention to the race of an author racist?” and “Why does everything have to be political?” Ten years later, we still care deeply about reading diversely, and the problem of racism in the world of books and reading is far from solved. That’s why we want to revisit this series and give it an update for 2025.
Here’s where you come in. We want to know what you’d like to see us write about on the topic of reading diversely. What questions do you have? Which misconceptions would you like to see us address? And what does reading diversely mean to you, in 2025? Click here to take the Reading Diversely Survey.
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