Best Books of the Year season has officially begun.

Barnes & Noble released its list (19 lists, actually) on Friday, and yes, we do know it’s not even November yet. Give yourself over to the existential vertigo and go a-scrolling to see if your faves made the cut.

I could talk about this for hours, so here are a few observations from the hundreds of featured titles:

• The lead title on the fiction list is new to me: Mona’s Eyes by Thomas Schlesser. Does this mean it’s B&N’s #1 pick? I’m not sure. If there’s an organizing principle, I can’t divine it. Regardless, a great day for a debut novel not getting a lot of play elsewhere.
• The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee, a collection of essays and short stories that has had a pretty quiet reception from the publishing world, gets a nod.
• Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief have emerged as my frontrunners for Book of the Year. They’re the rare novels that ring all the bells of artist quality, acclaim, sales, and zeitgeist buzz.
• Delighted to see Dan Brown lead off the mystery & thriller list. The Secret of Secrets is a return to form, and we had a blast discussing it on the Book Riot Podcast.
• My two favorite cookbooks of the year both made the list. Six Seasons of Pasta by Joshua McFadden and Good Things by Samin Nosrat would also make fantastic gifts.
• Not much romantasy to be found here, and no dedicated category for it. Maybe the genre really is past its peak.

Start placing your bets now for Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year, which is selected by booksellers around the country and typically drops mid-November. – RS

If you can’t find something to be excited about among this week’s varied new releases, we really don’t know what to do for you.

Among the highlights are a memoir in essays about the relationship between race and the internet and how online spaces shape our identities; a Sliding Doors-esque novel about marriage and infidelity; and a massive horror novel about a college student who gets maneuvered into stealing rare books from the school library 😱.

Also hitting shelves:

• Malala Yousafzai’s new memoir about coming of age and finding her purpose
• BookTok sensation Olivie Blake’s new novel in which sorority sisters take the idea of "girl dinner" a little too literally
• A call to action and " manual for keeping a democracy " from a former U.S. Attorney
• A "funny-sad" novel about a complicated mother-daughter relationship

📖 See more of the week’s most interesting releases.

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There is no question that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy and arguably his best-known work.

Hamlet has everything: betrayal, revenge, madness, heartbreak, sword-fighting, family drama, poison. It’s also the origin of an astonishing number of sayings still in use today.

All of the phrases below come from Shakespeare. Can you identify the one that’s not from Hamlet? Answer in the End Notes.

• There’s the rub
• The lady doth protest too much
• Wear my heart on my sleeve
• Brevity is the soul of wit
• Shuffled off this mortal coil

🎧 Hear our conversation about the man, the myth, the legend, William Shakespeare, and everything you need to know about Hamlet on Zero to Well-Read.

We might be in the prime of fall book season, but the publishing wheels are always turning. Here are a few recently announced book deals that caught our eye. 

1. The Midnight Train (Viking, 5/26) by Matt Haig (The Midnight Library) is “a magical, time-travelling love story, from the world of The Midnight Library.”

• Some People (Ballantine, July 2026 ) by Parini Shroff (The Bandit Queens) “paints a nuanced portrait of love, forgiveness, and our timeless quest for understanding and acceptance.”

• Country People (Random House, July 2027) by Daniel Mason (North Woods) is “a year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind.”

• Exit Party (Knopf, September 2026 by Emily St John Mandel ( Station Eleven) is described as a “mind-bending epic: a story of crimes committed and loves lost across space and time.”
• Four new books (!) by R. F. Kuang (Katabasis, Yellowface) with HarperCollins, which include “a pair of fantasy novels for the imprint Harper Voyager and a pair of ‘literary’ novels for the William Morrow imprint.”
  

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This one’s for the nerds. Digital subscription service Everand offers up an exclusive data about how recent adaptations have impacted users’ reading habits.

🧹 Reads of The Housemaid by Freida McFadden increased 125% the week the trailer came out, and saves went up 163%.

🚶🏿 Stephen King’s The Long Walk was the #6 most-read on Everand in September when the movie hit theaters. It also saw an explosion in engagement with impressions up 534%, saves up 262%, and total hours read up 126% in one week.

💅 The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han saw a steady increase as the third season of Netflix’s adaptation aired this summer. Reading hours peaked the week of August 17 (when Conrad confessed his feelings to Belly), up 357% from the week prior to the season premiere.

👀 Colleen Hoover’s Regretting You saw an eye-popping 736% in reading hours the week after the trailer dropped in August and has sustained an average 660% increase in weekly reading hours since.

Infidelity is inherently dramatic, even melodramatic. And there have been enough stories of adultery that the act itself is so familiar as to be uninteresting.

So how does Erin Somers make the modest unhappiness of the modern quasi-creative class so entertaining? By making the affair both real and imagined at the same time: twisting, morphing timelines of they-did and they-didn’t. Somers needn’t have devised this quantum boffing to write a great book; her warmly incisive (or maybe incisively warm) observations of a class of people she knows so well would have been enough.

Somers approaches the scene of cheating/not-cheating as a forensic sociologist, tracing the hidden veins of aspiration and desperation that lead to the hotel rooms, the late night texts, the parking lot trysts. These are but symptoms of an underlying, post-pandemic malaise, here located in the Hudson Valley, but recognizable far beyond.

In fact, my favorite parts of The Ten Year Affair are coiled around the central plot, when Somers lingers somewhere away from the (un)happy couple, such as a charged book club selection. As a sign of her social slippage, the main character, Cora, makes a recommendation for the group so obliviously wrong (Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita) that we, she, and they all know that something is afoot, both in the bedroom and in her soul.

The Ten Year Affair is out today from Simon & Schuster. – JO

Poetry is for everyone. That’s why the Poetry Foundation offers its online resource of thousands of poems, articles, podcasts, and more for all to freely enjoy.

Poetry is everywhere. It’s in the songs you listen to, the stories you tell, and the notebook of the person next to you on the bus.

From Chicago with love. Chicago is the pulse of poetry. The Poetry Foundation has called Chicago home since the beginning, starting with the founding of Poetry Magazine in 1912. They see poetry alive and well in the city they love, and share it gladly with the world.

If you are looking for a little more wisdom from the great Le Guin, here are more than 75 books she recommended at some point in her life.

🧳 Pack your bags to uncover the Andes, cross the surreal Salar de Uyuni, and master the tango on a 15-day journey from La Paz to Buenos Aires.**

🍿 See a first look at Netflix’s upcoming Harlan Coben adaptation, Run Away.

🎃 Read these short horror books in one sitting on Halloween night.

💗 Open your heart to 8 romance novels for romance skeptics.

🧙 Get excited: there’s a script for Hocus Pocus 3.

_{**This is a product recommendation from the Book Riot team. When you buy through these links, we may earn a commission.}

✅ Trivia answer: "Wear my heart on my sleeve" is not from Hamlet. It appears in Othello.

Written by Rebecca Schinsky and Jeff O’Neal. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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